‘Reel Reviews’ Archives
INCEPTION PERCEPTION
“Inception.” My daughter loved it; my son-in-law walked out on it; my wife refused to see it; my son has not seen it, and may not. In themselves those attitudes are appropriate for this unusual and tightly convoluted film. For the first 20 minutes or so you might be scratching your head, trying to figure things out. Don’t bother. It [...]
MORE THAN A PINCH OF “SALT”
Please bring your seats to a full, upright, locked position and fasten your seatbelts tightly. There’s turbulence ahead. Evelyn Salt, played by the enrapturing Angelina Jolie, is part Bond, part Bourne, part Knight, and a lot Superwoman. Faster than a speeding bullet? Nearly. Able to scale a Washington, D.C. building or descend an elevator [...]
Cruise Control
From the opening bars of the background music it’s clear that “Knight and Day” is not serious. Rather, it is a spoof of just about every secret agent/thriller-diller/action movie ever made. Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) is a teaspoon of James Bond (the Sean Connery and Daniel Craig editions), a tablespoon of Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), a dash of [...]
Toy Story 3
It was 1995, and I was five years old. I played with my cowboys and Indians; I had fun building and morphing my Mr. Potato Head, and I also had a Buzz Lightyear. I played with my Buzz Lightyear day after day. I pretended that we were flying around in deep space, in a rickety old spaceship, and if we would stop moving, the evil Dr. Pepe, my dog, [...]
IRON MAN 2
At the beginning Iron Man 2 shows promise of something more than a comic strip re-run. In the opening scene Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), brilliant, physically fit, self-assured, handsome, is pitted against Senator Stern (Gary Shandling), bloated, unfit, ostensibly corrupt. It’s a senate hearing in which the evil senator is trying to bring [...]
ROBIN HOOD
Every decade or so, Hollywood is compelled to turn out at least one new version of the English Robin Hood Legend. The first silent film appeared in 1908, and has been followed down through the years by at least 18 English language versions, including classics and non-classics, starring such non-Brits as Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Errol Flynn, Sean [...]
Green Zone – Truth As A War Orphan
Green Zone is a thriller and piece of historical fiction and even more: it ignores the old injunction against mixing war and politics. Like it or not, the gloves come off and the movie questions why the United States went to war in Iraq. Was it because the Administration in 2003 seriously believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? In [...]
Crazy Heart
Jeff Bridges IS Bad Blake, a boozy, bloated, bedeviled country singer. He fits the role so perfectly that it’s not possible to separate performance from reality. Bad, at 57, lives on McClure’s (cheap) bourbon and endless cigarettes. He’s barely functional and barely ekes out an existence singing in seedy bars and bowling alleys. During [...]
Edge of Darkness
Aging, balding Mel Gibson is on the redemption trail. After a 7½-year screen absence, connected to some well-publicized personal problems, he has returned to a familiar milieu. He’s back in the revenge/thriller mode following his earlier tracks in Mad Max 1-3, Lethal Weapon 1-4, Braveheart, The Patriot, Payback, Ransom, and his abbreviated film [...]
Sherlock Holmes Rides Again
This isn’t your old edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This is 1890s London, and a 21st century Holmes and Watson as never before read or seen. Gone is Basil Rathbone, the urbane, suave Holmes and his deerstalker hat. Gone, too, is Nigel Bruce, the bumbling, fumbling, avuncular Dr. Watson. But perhaps [...]
