To call “Nights in Rodanthe” a chick-flick is an insult to chicks. And an insult to the brain – like cracking your head on the windshield in a car accident – of everyone else.
“Nights” is yet another adaptation from the literary oeuvre of Nicholas Sparks, who has become best-seller-list fodder by writing drippy novels in which two people discover each other as soulmates – and then one of them dies. “The Notebook,” “Message in a Bottle,” “A Walk to Remember”: Rumors that the books come prepackaged with pocket-sized tissue packets are unfounded.
Set on the outer banks of North Carolina, “Rodanthe” (which I believe I heard characters pronounce as “row-DAN-thee”) does raise a number of questions, the most prominent being: What the hell is a theater director of the caliber of George C. Wolfe (yes, the Tony winner who ran the Public Theater in New York and shepherded “Angels in America” to Broadway) doing within a mile of this dross? “Nights with Rodents” would probably be more interesting. (More…)
I’m willing to give Spike Lee the benefit of the doubt. Even when his reach exceeds his grasp, he’s overreaching in a good cause – or, at least, making an interesting effort to explore territory that others ignore.
But “Miracle at St. Anna” is just a mess – and an unconscionably long mess at that, clocking in at 160 minutes. There are probably three different, better and shorter movies that could be carved out of this material. Too late now. (More…)
“The Lucky Ones” is as enjoyable for the things that don’t happen as for the ones that do.
Actually, I can’t say much more about that without giving too much away about what does happen. But put it this way: You’ve seen this movie before, but you’ve never seen it done this way.
Let’s get that dreaded four-letter word out of the way right off the bat: Iraq. It’s like a cinematic curse, dooming any movie that’s tagged with that epithet, whether fiction (“In the Valley of Elah,” “Redacted,” “Stop-Loss”) or nonfiction (“Standard Operating Procedure,” “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Body of War”). (More…)
“Choke” puts us squarely back into Chuck Pahlaniuk territory: 12-step programs, excessive behavior, ridiculous jobs.
Adapted and directed by actor Clark Gregg (a David Mamet protégé who plays the ex-husband on “New Adventures of Old Christine” on CBS), “Choke” catches the momentary zeitgeist (or, at least, the David Duchovny-flavored sliver of it) because its central character, Victor Mancini (played by the underrated Sam Rockwell), suffers from sex addiction. So he attends 12-step groups to deal with it (a great place for hooking up with like-minded sufferers). (More…)
Allegory doesn’t play well at the movies because audiences tend to be literal, rather than literary. Given our post-literate society, a movie that tries to operate on more than one level is automatically at a disadvantage.
Take “Blindness,” based on the novel by the Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. Here’s a movie guaranteed to make people uncomfortable, which is the job of a good allegory. But will they be made uncomfortable by what the movie actually depicts – including a long, brutal scene of mass rape – or by what it’s trying to show us indirectly? (More…)
I like a good piece of agit-prop as much as the next guy but you hate to feel like you’re being manipulated by a movie that’s stacked the deck so obviously as “Battle in Seattle.”
Written and directed by actor Stuart Townsend, this film wants to put viewers inside the riots that broke out in 1999 when the World Trade Organization came to Seattle and was met by a mass of well-organized demonstrators (the first real Internet-fueled protest), who wanted to shut the meeting down. (More…)
I’m part of the generation that grew up with hot-and-cold-running westerns every night on every network in the days when there were only three networks to choose from.
I still know the lyrics to the theme songs of shows like “Sugarfoot” and can whistle the theme to “The Rifleman,” “Maverick” and many more. I can still name Jock Mahoney’s sidekick on “Yancy Derringer” (Pahoo, played by X Brands, one of the great stage names). I lived and died with movies like “The Magnificent Seven” and “Rio Bravo,” which I saw at Saturday matinees at the Richfield Theater in suburban Minneapolis. (More…)
Adolescent female sexuality has been a hot topic this year. I don’t want to call it pedophile chic, but, you know, if the training bra fits…
How else to explain the raging hormones and inappropriate touches that seem so popular? OK, so the heroine played by Jess Weixler in “Teeth” – the gruesomely funny horror-comedy about a girl with vagina dentata – theoretically could have been of age. The same could be said of Katherine Waterston’s title character in “The Babysitters,” though again at least part of the film’s intentionally prurient appeal was the illicit idea (and image) of all those sexually aggressive teen-age girls.
But two new films, “Hounddog” and “Towelhead,” move the line. It’s hard not to think that the filmmakers wanted to nudge – nay, shove – viewers out of their comfort zones by forcing them to consider the sexual urges and appeal of 13-year-old girls. (More…)
As much as I love the Coen brothers, their excursions into the purely antic tend to be hit and miss – more often miss.
So it is with ‘Burn After Reading,’ one of those movies whose trailer and cast inspire a huge want-to-see and leave you wondering: What were they thinking?
This is another Coen package – along the lines of “Intolerable Cruelty” and “The Ladykillers” – in which the whole is significantly less than the sum of the parts. “Burn After Reading,” unfortunately, is another movie with infinite discipline and visual imagination but dispiritingly little on its mind.
It’s hard to imagine what the Coens were after with this script. It’s meant as a deadpan spoof, cranking up the mechanism of a noir-ish spy thriller, but making it a story about nothing very much. (More…)
