michael's movie reviews
2004
These are the movies I reviewed in 2004.
reviewed 2004.12.28
Product placement. That's what they did with this classic collection of works by Isaac Asimov. One of the principal works of science fiction in the 20th century reduced to a vehicle for converse shoes and suped-up vehicles.How bad was it? At two points in this movie, characters make sudden references to the hero's footwear...
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
reviewed 2004.12.27
When I was leaving the cinema at the end of the third volume of the Lord of the Rings movie, I realized that I'd just witnessed the high point of my movie-going career, and that it would be mostly downhill from there.I had no idea how quickly and how far that downward ride would go, until the 1/4 mark of Anchorman...
reviewed 2004.12.25
Hee hee! Exactly what I was expecting...
reviewed 2004.12.21
This is the third in the Blade movies...
reviewed 2004.12.20
This charming flick is about a cabbie and the freelance hitman that has him do his driving while on a job. The cabbie learns of the killer's intentions through the unfortunate means of the first victim on the list landing on his cab. From there, things only get worse, until at last one of them is left to ride around on the unmanned LRT system, dead.It's a well made film, with no spare bits to ..
reviewed 2004.12.19
This movie left me flat. Aside from the unfortunate failings of the character story to engage, the pace throughout the first half is slow enough that the movie doesn't really engage until the second half. And that's a lot of waiting around.It is essentially a tale of two men...
reviewed 2004.12.14
This is the story of a Frechman who's on the lam. He's fleeing the authorities because of his past as a collaborater with the puppet Vichy regime of southern France, at which point he played a minor role in the war-time execution of seven Jews in a small village. The plot hinges on the support he's received from the Church, who provide shelter and money to keep him in a minimal existence.Though ..
reviewed 2004.12.06
This is a mockumentary about parking attendants. It is low budget, and it is Canadian. And it is everything that you hope for from a low-budget mockumentary, and few of the things you fear of low-budget Canadian movies.Rather than obsessive or pretentious or cutesy, it's well paced, filled with cringe-factor-ten characters, and original...
reviewed 2004.12.02
This is a tale about a fellow who gets trapped in an airport terminal when his passport is stripped from him due to a coup in his homeland...
reviewed 2004.11.18
This is a telling of an unpleasant and unfortunately true incident in the early 80's, in which the former porn star John Holmes (played by Val Kilmer) attempted to play two criminal gangs off of one another...
reviewed 2004.11.14
I never saw the first part of this story, the early-90's "before sunrise"...
reviewed 2004.11.13
This is the nasty original version of the recent American movie The Grudge. It's a much more confused version of the same story, with a plot that's pieced together in a manner that is often hard to follow. In fact, it was hard to figure out exactly who some of the characters were, until you work out clues from the sets (I won't get into it).Whereas the U...
reviewed 2004.11.12
This is an animated movie from the brilliant folks at Pixar. It's about an aging pair of superheroes, a husband and wife relegated to a drab life in the suburbs following the banishment of superheroes by the government.Featuring some of the most consistent characters, animation, and dialogue yet seen in a Pixar flick, it's clear that the genre is developing on the right track...
reviewed 2004.11.08
Somewhere in this movie lurked the remains of a more intelligent, better-written movie...
reviewed 2004.10.30
This is a solid job at a horror/zombie movie...
reviewed 2004.10.29
This movie is actually pretty terrifying...
reviewed 2004.10.29
This is the movie that Hayden Christensen needed to redeem himself from his prominent participation in the loathsome Star Wars prequels. Having watched him stiffly make the best of the terrible writing in those movies, it was hard to see the actor. Here, he's still hard to see, but it's because he's disappeared into his role.He plays disgraced 'journalist' (or fictionalist) Stephen ..
reviewed 2004.10.25
This movie was one of the greatest disappointments I've had at the cinema since... well, since the first Star Wars prequel, I guess.This movie had a lot of irritating bits, but one of them was really inexcusable...
reviewed 2004.10.24
This is a priceless zombie semi-spoof featuring a cast of everyday folk whose quiet, dismal existences are interrupted by an outbreak of zombievirus in their neighbourhood.The sense of humour - both grisly and quirky, perhaps a movie first - is just right for the subject...
reviewed 2004.10.10
OK, OK, I get it...
reviewed 2004.07.03
The strongest "comic book" movie ever...
reviewed 2004.06.18
This is an outstanding flick featuring in the incomperable Bruce Campbell. It's about Elvis, set in the current time. He's an aged, bitter, and incapacitated man, living in a retirement home that is also home to JFK (played, perhaps surprisingly, by Ossie Davis) and the Lone Ranger.At the outset of the movie, he's a delipidated shell of his former self, fighting a cancerous node on his penis a..
reviewed 2004.06.11
This is a sequel of sorts to the excellent "Pitch Black"...
reviewed 2004.05.29
I ran a horrible risk after seeing this movie. I told my brother that I'd been to see it. This was a risk because he holds a Masters degree in Classics, which means he studied stuff like Homer's work in quite some details. And he was quite prepared to go to some length to point out where Hollywood had taken liberties with the real story.And apparently, those liberties were vast...
reviewed 2004.05.22
I wasn't a fan of the first Shrek movie. It lived 'up' to my expectations that Myers would be rehashing his old shtick. I mean, why does the Ogre have the same accent as his characters from So I married an Ax Murderer and Austin Powers...?But the sequel actually wasn't as dull and uninspired as I was expecting...
reviewed 2004.04.15
This is a movie about a woman who is beaten, shot, and left for dead by a bizarre international gang. Style always plays a big part in Tarantino movies, but here it seems to be in the driver's seat. Anything more than the most cursory plot comes second in this film, while comic-book violence and drama run wild.It's amusing and it's slick and what the hell it's a Tarantino film...
reviewed 2004.04.11
This is a bizarre Japanese/Polish collaboration directed by the fellow who directed Ghost in the Shell...
reviewed 2004.04.10
I believe that this was an animated TV series. It involves a robot created by a wise old inventor. The robot has an incomplete ethical unit (his "Gemini" heart), and this four-part, incomplete story follows his attempt at making his way in the world.With a plot involving his "evil" (oooo) brethren (other robots made by the same genius but twisted by the strangely malicious Professor Gil) and h..
reviewed 2004.04.09
This is a Quebecois film about a number of 20- and 30-somethings, all trekking south-west from Quebec to Montreal on the same highway on the same day. It's got a domestic dispute, a hopeless office crush, a friendship entangled in problems regarding a woman, and some letches on the prowl.There are a number of clever bits in this 'relationship comedy' (if that's a genre) and the characters are fo..
reviewed 2004.03.07
This is an amusing/ghoulish and surreal French animated flick about a grandmother who sets off to rescue her cyclist grandson when he is kidnapped by the wine mafia. There isn't a lot of dialogue, but there are plenty of scenes of seniors snapping off musical comedy as they dodge bullets. And frogs, there are plenty of frogs. Most of which wind up as food by way of granade-propulsion.I recomm..
reviewed 2004.03.03
This is a delightful little romp about two sibling Japanese children who starve to death in the aftermath of world war two. As if the burning death of the mother, the death at sea of the father, and the episode where the kids are cheated by their aunt weren't bad enough, you get to watch a four year old die of starvation as this movie comes to a close. Yep.Probably very accurate, too, I imagine...
reviewed 2004.01.18
This is a Tim Burton flick...