michael's movie reviews
1999
These are the movies I reviewed in 1999.
reviewed 1999.12.28
Given that Gibson directed this one, I have to give him a bit of credit because I don't think he's that bright and I think this was his first time...
reviewed 1999.12.15
A pretty little farce about a small village in Ireland, pop. 50. The townspeople learn that one of their number has won the lottery, and a scheme is hatched to bilk the lottery corporation of their winnings when they discover that the winner has died before making the claim.It's got the pre-requisite love story, the pre-requisite local scumbag who wants more than her share, etc...
reviewed 1999.12.15
Silly, but a good flick...
reviewed 1999.12.15
This is a brilliant adaptation of Shakespear's play. I really enjoyed it's light-hearted, whimsical presentation and the great stage-like sets and costumes.This is so charming and beautifully crafted, it's one I'd actually like to buy, some time...
reviewed 1999.12.15
This is a brutal, unrelenting tale about a small-town sheriff whose alcoholism, rage, and bitterness drive him to paranoia, dementia, and violence. He (Nolte, in the best performance I've ever seen) punches his daughter, loses his job, burns a house, kills a family member, yanks one of his teeth with pliers, and generally has a miserable time.It's not an easy movie to watch, but it's very well ..
reviewed 1999.11.19
This is a movie in which a wretched puppeteer discovers a strange gateway that allows you to experience the life of John Malkovich, the actor...
reviewed 1999.11.12
Fncking godawful. I rented this - despite my general rule never to see anything with Eric Roberts, due to his singular bad taste in movies - because it was suggested by someone at the little shop where I rent flicks.It aims for zany and slick, but it achieves cheesy and insulting...
reviewed 1999.11.12
A war movie that seems real. Probably the first one I've ever imagined that depicted the real thing correctly. Stunningly awful depictions.Aside from its setting, filming (brilliantly hand-held camerawork), and acting (aside from Hank's usual dramatic overacting, the cast was superb), the tale is pretty straightforward...
reviewed 1999.11.11
This is a quiet little comedic thing about a number of characters in a small town (Omaha) high school...
reviewed 1999.11.05
Crap...
reviewed 1999.11.03
Holy Moly. Much better than I expected. A very good job by Burton, and great performances by the leads. The swordsman who played Darth Maul in the recent Star Wars flick plays the horseman in the appropriate scenes with such horrifying skill it has to be seen to be believed.Set in the late 18th century, this has a high dose of ghoulish over-the-top grey-on-black sets and eery, misty wooded backd..
reviewed 1999.11.03
Another good job by both of the leads in this one. It's about a couple that breaks up inexorably over years of child rearing, career juggling, and personality differences. Then one day in a parking lot they make up.What's good about this flick is the exacting detail of the relationship between the married couple...
reviewed 1999.10.24
This is a romantic comedy set up when the female lead saves the brother of the male lead from being crushed by a train...
reviewed 1999.10.17
Amusing but dumb...
reviewed 1999.10.10
Goddamn bizarre...
reviewed 1999.10.08
This is a somewhat odd movie...
reviewed 1999.10.05
Good by comparison with Big Daddy, a movie utterly unrelated other than I saw it on the same night, this one was nothing special. It's about a lowly editor who wants to be a reporter. She works for a Chicago newspaper that's foundering due to bad management, and is sent to high school to get the scoop on what kids are up to these days.It's a pointless assignment, and the movie offers litt..
reviewed 1999.10.05
This is a sci-fi flick about an invasion by aliens from Mars. They're weird little freaks, and they're here to kick ass. Set in various locales across the US, it depicts humans as a stupid, alcoholic race of incompetent primitives. The martians, by comparison, are an organized, sadistic race of nihilists.This is great! Very funny...
reviewed 1999.10.02
Rilly rilly good...
reviewed 1999.09.17
This is a movie with Patricia Arquette, Gabriel Byrne and Jonathan Pryce about an atheist who starts exhibiting stigmata after she's possessed by the spirit of a holy man who stole and translated the Gospel According to Jesus from the Catholic Church (and the Cardinal in charge of such dox, as played by Jonathan Pryce)...
reviewed 1999.09.12
This is a charming but flawed comedic romance by Ron Howard. It features McConaughey's role as a the 'star' of a real-life 24-hour TV show that follows him no matter where he goes. It depicts the breakup of his brother's relationship with his fiancée, his subsequent involvement with her, and the following fallout.Bonus points for including the title My Brother Pissed On Me as a movie-within-a-m..
reviewed 1999.09.03
My Gods, was this boring...
reviewed 1999.08.31
This is a very good film, and yes, it starts Bruce Willis...
reviewed 1999.08.29
This was the previous film adaption of the French novel that also spawned the entirely less worthy Cruel Intentions. The only other thing linking the two is the presence in both of Kurtz, who played a bit part in the opening scene in Intentions, and who plays Thurman's mother in this period piece set in 18th century France.The movie is about two dueling aristocrats, whose playing field is the ar..
reviewed 1999.08.28
This one was better than I expected, but I expected I'd walk out...
reviewed 1999.08.22
Silly but amusing, this is a sometimes awkward flick that dives into the world of comic book heroes without shame...
reviewed 1999.08.03
This is a miserable tale of a boy who grows up in an unnamed town in Ireland with two parents who fight bitterly, a best friend who abandons him, and a world of adults who hate him. He's a nasty, violent, brutish boy, and as the years go by and life gets worse, he matches the blows with his own ever worsening violence and psychosis.If you're up to it, this is quite a tale...
reviewed 1999.07.30
This is a Japanese movie about a cop who loses his way during a bad patch. His five-year-old child is dead, his wife is struggling, and then cops start getting shot in an investigation of the Yakusa. One young colleague dead, his partner ("Horibe") confined to a wheelchair, and his wife ailing in a hospital, our man loses his job and begins a new life.With a solemn, immobile expression, Kitano s..
reviewed 1999.07.30
When you watch some of Martin's earlier works, it's incredible how far he's come. This is a good thriller about a mathematician, believe it or not. He invents a process, and starts getting in trouble. Why? Because the process is a 'market'-related thing, which is worth so much money the mathematician has to write it down to convey the figure to his employers.Immediately, corporate thieves (Marti..
reviewed 1999.07.26
This is a surprising film, as are most of Hal Hartley's other works, with wonderful throwaway dialogue and a cast of rich, real characters.This is a rare film...
reviewed 1999.07.26
This is a beautiful movie about a violin...
reviewed 1999.07.23
First let me say that I'm not a Robin Williams fan.The first part of this movie is about the central character and his happy family of a son, a daughter, and a lovely wife...
reviewed 1999.07.23
Bloody boring...
reviewed 1999.07.19
This movie scared me, pure and simple...
reviewed 1999.07.18
Hurly Burly is about a Hollywood casting agent, his partner/roomate, and his friends. The gang thrives on cocaine, abusive sex with a string of women, and hurtling around Mulholland. Cell phones, BMWs, all the usual yuppie stereotypes are in full effect.This film is longer that it should be...
reviewed 1999.07.16
I'd wanted to see this one for ages, and wasn't disappointed...
reviewed 1999.07.16
A charmless flick about two small-town brothers (played by the respective Bills) and the loser friend of the older sibling. The three find a plane that's crashed in the woods. In the plane is a bag of cash. The three decide to keep the loot, which proves their downfall a la Shallow Grave and a dozen other flicks with similar plot and superior execution.While Bill & Billy prove their thorough act..
reviewed 1999.07.13
In a word? Vile...
reviewed 1999.07.10
This one isn't for the squeamish...
reviewed 1999.07.09
Still Crazy is a movie about a bunch of aging rockers who string together the old band for a twenty-year reunion festival. The first half of the movie is about digging up the band members. The second half is about their attempts at working together once again.It's entertaining, and endearing, but something's slightly missing...
reviewed 1999.07.05
This is a very funny little Irish film about two decent men on a gangster's errand. The cinematography, the storyline, and the characters are very entertaining, as is the introduction to each scene by an amusing summary. Its setting, characters, and violence are all very very Irish, which makes this all the more endearing (I just got back from Ireland myself).One of the would-be gangsters is a..
reviewed 1999.07.03
This movie is ably filmed, alternately in colour film (present) and black-and-white videotape and film (the past)...
reviewed 1999.06.29
Steel Magnolias is a cult movie with a vast following: the majority of the N...
reviewed 1999.06.27
This was surprisingly good, given the intense hype surrounding the film. Excellent performances from the cast and a great story line make it very worth watching. Even Robbins can't deflate this with his usual dreadful shtick, which he supresses admirably.The movie's about a mathematical genius & speed reader who was born to a broken working class home in Boston...
reviewed 1999.06.26
This is a gritty American gangster movie about four junkies and their doomed relationships...
reviewed 1999.06.25
This was Tarantino's sendup of his own genre of gangster flick...
Austin Powers - The Spy Who Shagged Me
reviewed 1999.06.24
I didn't really enjoy this one. It was a cardboard copy of the first - which hadn't really been cinematography - with rehashed jokes and a strangely stiff, almost bored performance by Meyers.It's also a pretty obnoxious film...
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
reviewed 1999.06.05
Not what I was hoping, after a decade and a half (and more build-up and speculation than anything since moon landing). In short, the sense of fun that kept the first series from getting stiff and ridiculous (e.g. like the Star Trek movies) is gone, replaced by a cutesy reliance on superchildren and godawful CG characters.More frightening is the addition of a moralistic montage on the evils of ga..
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
reviewed 1999.05.28
This is a gangster movie, in which some brash young lads get taken by the establishment and must now do the bidding of the masters of the underworld...
reviewed 1999.05.15
Ridiculously over-the-top, but pretty amusing. The lead female is little more than a stupid, empty one dimensional character, much less worth watchig than the subtitled horror of the bad guy, a very undead 3000-year-old mummy.It's an action comedy, very much along the lines of the Raiders of the Lost Ark genre...
H20 - Halloween 20 Years Later
reviewed 1999.04.27
Michael finally gets his head hacked off by his little sister, who had turned into a drunken psychotic in the twenty years following Michael's initial bouts of homicidal Halloween hell-raising...
reviewed 1999.04.26
This was one of the best movies I've seen in a while. DeNiro plays a spin doctor who must make the save of a lifetime to get the president out of a disasterous scandal (he's slept with a girl guide!) just before the elections. Hoffman is the Hollywood producer DeNiro contracts to make his scheme work.The scheme is war...
reviewed 1999.04.22
Beatty plays a burnout politician who's exhausted his ability to stay afloat in the sea of hypocrisy, compromise, and bribery that his career has become...
reviewed 1999.04.21
Cute...
reviewed 1999.04.17
This one picks up with a re-reeling of the last two thousand frames of the first film, and carries right on...
reviewed 1999.04.17
So this is the flick that started it all! Halloween is a surprising thing: it's a real movie...
reviewed 1999.04.16
Keanu Reaves played someone like himself, I think - he's got that Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise way of churning out the same character over and over. But it suits this flick to a tee. This is a sci-fi thriller set in a (somewhat) future where our boy is a coder with a sideline in some unspecified Bad Thing (software of some kind - it comes on 3.5" floppies).The world our hero knows meets a hitch when s..
reviewed 1999.04.08
This is a thinly veiled piece about segregated, racist America in the '50s...
reviewed 1999.04.02
As dreary and disheartening as In the Company of Men, the writer/director's last flick, this film is about a number of dysfunctional and largely unpleasant thirty-something characters, and the relationships that form within their small circle.Early on, Stiller's character actually gives away the plot: it's all about sex...
reviewed 1999.04.02
Very raunchy, including near-continuous nudity and some scenes many viewers will find disturbing, this flick is about three teenage losers on an unintentional killing spree in California. They pursue a manage-a-trois with bored fatalism, and wind up in a good deal of trouble.Recurring themes such as the number 666 and minor characters mistaking the lead character for former loves (or love slave..
reviewed 1999.03.21
Entertaining but a little disappointing. Aging gangsters and loser rich-kid dimwits. It can only go so far. The plot is about two kidnappings. The first is of the twentyish daughter of a wealthy figure (who never appears in the film). The second is of a reformed gangster, an associate of the father with connections to people who can fix the first kidnapping.After a few shootings, a severed ..
reviewed 1999.03.20
This was an entertaining movie...
reviewed 1999.03.14
In a word? Breasts...
reviewed 1999.03.12
This movie stinks...
reviewed 1999.03.10
I have trouble taking Ethan Hawke seriously, which detracted from what was otherwise a nice little sci-fi story...
reviewed 1999.03.10
This was a gritty little number that came and went through the theatres without much ado, but which deserves a look...
reviewed 1999.03.10
Seeing this again reminded me of just what a slick piece it really was. The scenes with Tarantino (or Travolta, for that matter) never really worked, but what a fine gangster movie indeed. It's a pity that the bullet holes were in the wall ahead of the shooting by the kid in the can, but then miracles aren't real.I've heard rumors that Marcellus Wallace sports a Band-aid in this flick because he..
reviewed 1999.03.03
This flick starts out on pretty shaky ground, with a cliched corner-store explosion, a BANG BANG BANG shootout in a lamp shop, and a couple of badly overracted bit parts. I was ready to leave in about fifteen minutes. But suddenly - about a quarter of the way through - it becomes a surprisingly decent flick.I've actually got a modicum of respect for Wahlberg's acting...
reviewed 1999.02.25
An amusing series of relationship shorts threaded together as the would-be attendees of a new year's party on the eve of that most momentous year, 1982...
reviewed 1999.02.20
Not too good...
reviewed 1999.02.07
The same as Scream, I guess...
reviewed 1999.02.03
I suspect that this was intended to be an action/comedy, but the thin humor is almost entirely based around violence...
reviewed 1999.01.26
This one has a great cast but is kind of slow. And chock full o' pregnancies, I must say. And longing looks. And a surprising English accent from our heroine.This movie hinges around the schism that forms between two paths our hero's life take when she a) catches her train and finds her live-in mooching lover in bed with another woman, and begins a new life or b) fails to catch him in the act, a..
reviewed 1999.01.25
About a jesuit priest making a miserable journey to the mission among the Hurons, all the way from Quebec...
reviewed 1999.01.23
Four or five stand-alone stories make up this slow-paced flick...
reviewed 1999.01.15
I enjoyed this...
reviewed 1999.01.14
Surprisingly good...
reviewed 1999.01.02
Crrrrrrap, and I do mean that in a tired-plot and cliché-overkill kinda way...