Suburban Girl
January 28, 2008
How does an adaptation of best-selling book The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin, go direct-to-video? The obvious answer is that the film isn’t that good and that it was rightly relegated to obscurity....
The Good Shepherd
April 3, 2007
The Good Shepherd (2006) has been a long-gestating project for screenwriter Eric Roth but then again pitching an epic biopic about the creation of the CIA must’ve been a tough sell for studios interested in making crowd-pleasing blockbusters and not...
Running with Scissors
February 2, 2007
Running with Scissors (2006) is the latest entry in the dysfunctional, eccentric family genre alongside the likes of recent additions, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Family Stone (2005). It’s a genre that allows actors to grunge themselves down,...
Elizabethtown
March 7, 2006
Cameron Crowe is something of a rarity in that he’s a filmmaker who makes deeply personal films within the Hollywood system. From his debut with Say Anything (1989) to his best film to date, Almost Famous (2000), he effortlessly blends comedy and drama...
The Aviator
November 18, 2005
For years, Martin Scorsese has been unfairly overlooked by the Academy Awards (GoodFellas losing out to Dances with Wolves?!). He is the perennial Hollywood outsider. In recent years, the veteran filmmaker seems to become aware of this slight and, like...
The Last Shot
November 12, 2005
Actors love doing satires of Hollywood. Case in point: the movie star-packed cast of Robert Altman’s movie The Player (1992) and David Mamet’s State and Main (2000). The Last Shot (2004) follows in this tradition but as you’re watching this clumsy...
Along Came Polly
March 1, 2004
Risk-assessor Ben Stiller falls for unpredictable Jennifer Aniston in this weak romantic comedy. To the casual DVD renter (and yes, there are such people, believe it or not) looking at the back cover of Along Came Polly they would be forgiven for thinking,...
The Royal Tenenbaums
November 2, 2003
Set to the same wistful, sentimental tone as A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), The Royal Tenenbaums begins with a hilariously edited montage (narrated dryly by Alec Baldwin) that introduces the Tenenbaum children at an early age. Chas (Stiller) is a financial...
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
August 22, 2003
There are those films in cinematic history that have redefined the way other films are made. The first talkie had silent film stars running for the hills. Snow White proved that a feature length animation can work. Jurassic Park spelt the end for the...
