michael's movie reviews
2003
These are the movies I reviewed in 2003.
reviewed 2003.12.28
This is one of my favourite silly comedies, and it's French. It's about two men who are about as different as it's possible to be. One is suave, sophisticated, vicious, dishonest and arrogant. The other is sincere, bumbling, and heartbroken.The former invites the latter to a dinner party in which each guest brings an idiot to compete in an undeclared battle of idiocy...
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
reviewed 2003.12.18
Holy...
reviewed 2003.11.15
This is a caper flick starring Nick Nolte. I understand that the man actually took to using heroin to prepare for the roll he had in this movie. I'm not impressed, and I wasn't terribly impressed with this movie either.It suffered from a bit of the same 'overly clever' writing that all movies in this genre do (see 'Heist' by David Mamet)...
reviewed 2003.11.12
Wow. This is a 'horror/thriller' about a bunch of sexy young people fighting against the mountain men who rule the woods of a remote patch of West Virginia. The movie starts out reasonably well, but slips into a paint-by-numbers formula at some point in the middle, and it never emerges.There were some original bits of gore and dismemberment in this film (which is saying something), and the pre..
reviewed 2003.11.11
This is a beautifully-shot, minimally-written telling of the escape by three 'half-caste' aborigine girls from a camp in Western Australia...
reviewed 2003.11.06
There aren't too many movies circulating with two endings on one rental VHS tape. This is one of them, and I think that the inclusion of a less-bullshitty second ending on this one speaks to the lack of direction that pervades the entire film.It's about a plague that erupts in the UK...
reviewed 2003.10.28
This is an odd film that makes me wonder if there's not a better book out there that tells the same tale. It's about a wreck of a man (played, in usual fashion, by Ralph Fiennes) who arrives at a half-way house plagued by the memories of his childhood.Unfortunately, the retelling of that childhood is a bit uneven...
reviewed 2003.10.14
This is an interesting little number set during the closing days of the first Gulf War...
reviewed 2003.10.13
This is an interesting film about a small family in a tiny fishing village in New England. The mother and father are stuck in an uncommunicative rut in which the tension is heightened when the son starts dating a woman five+ years older than he his. When the girlfriend's jealous ex-husband turns up to reclaim his position in the family he abandoned, things explode.And then the movie begins...
reviewed 2003.09.29
I really can't see what all of the fuss was about with this movie. Jack Nicholson plays a cranky retiree who doesn't appreciate his wife or communicate with his daughter. He misses the routine of work, and loathes his daughter's fiance's family. A good start.Except things don't really go anywhere from there...
reviewed 2003.09.27
There was nothing really wrong with this movie, but it somehow didn't work. Bill Murray plays a gangster. Robert DeNiro plays a cop. Uma Thurman plays a woman beholden to Murray. David Caruso plays Murray's brawling buddy. And everything progresses without anything unexpected popping up.This movie contains the idea of the mobster in therapy that became one of the corner stones of 'The Sopra..
reviewed 2003.09.26
I rented this one with my mum and my new girlfriend after the g/f and I had gone on at some length to rave about Bill Murray's performance in 'Lost in Translation'. I'd first seen 'Groundhog Day' years ago when it first came out, and thought that it would be worth another look.It was...
reviewed 2003.09.23
This is one of the best movies I've seen in quite some time...
reviewed 2003.09.20
This is a caper movie with an all-star cast...
reviewed 2003.09.10
This is a movie about migrating birds. It's a documentary, of sorts, though its focus is the imagery of the flying birds, the scenery through which they're flying, and a few simple themes (endurance, hardship, instinct).It may not tell you much about the birds your looking at (many aren't even named, and quite a few are in it for maybe only 90 seconds or so), and there isn't a hell of a lot of v..
reviewed 2003.08.28
At the end of the previous Hallowe'en movie, "H20", Michael's head is convincingly cut off with an axe. Needless to say, the first minutes of this one are spent explaining that away.Then the next are spent killing off, after at least ten Hallowe'en movies, the heroine. There. I said it. She dies.After that, it's really just an exercise in post-Scream slashing...
reviewed 2003.08.22
This is an action movie featuring a member of the elite SWAT unit who is demoted after his partner injures a hostage during the resolution of a bank robbery...
reviewed 2003.08.10
I'd heard that this was an American take on the Akira Kurosawa flick "Rashomon". I rather liked Rashomon, and thought, "They might have pulled it off despite the dreadful trailers..."Wrong. So wrong.I'm a reasonably bright person, and I've rarely come away with a movie thinking 'What the hell?' And when I have, the answers have usually sunk in during the next few hours, or during conversation..
reviewed 2003.07.10
Before I get into the movie itself, I want to talk about where I saw it...
reviewed 2003.07.05
This is a movie about a Pianist in Poland named "Spielman" who escapes a Nazi round-up as the Jewish Warsaw ghetto is being dismantled...
reviewed 2003.06.25
This movie has surprising depth, and has a pacing that strikes an excellent note. Don't go if you're expecting a 2.5-hour "Hulk smash!" Go if you're expecting what I found: the finest treatments of a comic-book character that I can remember.Ang Lee is really as versatile and skilled as everyone seems to think he is...
reviewed 2003.06.04
This movie is spellbinding in its crapulence...
reviewed 2003.06.04
I downloaded this, thinking I was getting the new version. I like Michael Caine, generally, but I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw that Benny Hill was in this version.This movie was just plain bad...
reviewed 2003.05.31
This is a fine flick. I've found that animated movies are becoming more popular, and as they've been doing so, their quality has been in free-fall. This one is a break from the trend, being at once beautifully crafted, amusing, and original (sort of).It loses points for some of the too-well-trod Disney paths that it follows (you can just see the mother's death coming) and perhaps lays it on a ..
reviewed 2003.05.19
Forget what it's about. What the hell was Eddie Murphy thinking? Getting into a movie with Owen Wilson!While occasionally funny, this duo doesn't really work...
reviewed 2003.05.12
This is the second X-men movie...
reviewed 2003.05.10
I didn't really know what to expect from this one...
reviewed 2003.04.14
I was a bit leery about this one, but it turned out to be quite worthwhile...
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
reviewed 2003.04.02
This is a supposedly autobiographic story about Chuck Barris, the inventor of the "Dating Game" and the "Gong Show"...
reviewed 2003.03.29
This is a movie about a quiet Englishman who - after years in a mind-numbing job at a bank, and years of loneliness - decides to send away for a mail-order bride from Russia. What he gets instead, is a scam. He soon finds himself stripped and tied up to a toilet in a hotel bathroom, having just robbed his own bank.The strange thing is, that's when the movie gets uninteresting...
reviewed 2003.03.28
This is a flick based upon a Stephen King story, and it shows. How? By being in equal measures creepy, quite clever, and the details of characters and setting.It starts with four life-long friends...
reviewed 2003.03.12
This is a British movie about an Indian-British girl who wants to be a soccer player...
reviewed 2003.02.13
Let's see how short I can make this review: here goes.Daredevil: predictable crap.There, done in three words...
reviewed 2003.01.13
This is a movie that I wanted to like. It's got Denis Leary playing a cop, Steve Buscemi playing his partner, and Elizabeth Hurley playing the love interest. And it has a supporting cast that includes Luis Guzman and Chris Noth. Noth even plays a cop. What's more, it's a somewhat goofy comedy with at least two subplots and characters that seem all set to go places.But t..
reviewed 2003.01.05
This is a grim story about a young veteran searching for meaning while struggling with slowly worsening mental health issues...