by Ethan Johnson
July 11, 2004
Good gravy, the flicks are chest-high. Gotta get through the backlog before everyone sees them all..!
Spider-Man 2: I'm on the record, officially: Better than the first one. Then again, it doesn't have to re-tell the whole "origin" thing, so that helps grease the skids a bit. It gets draggy at times, but overall, hell yeah, baby.
We're owning it (duh), next. (Sorry, lots of flicks)
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story: We had free passes, so it was the best movie ever! Ok, maybe of today (we saw it this afternoon). I suspect it will look great on HBO, which is where we probably would have seen it had we not had free passes. Vince Vaughn totally is trying to sound like The Family Guy (as in, the Seth MacFarlane voice). I was waiting for him to say "aw jeez, Lois". He doesn't. Ben Stiller is still back at Zoolander somewhere. Next.
Shrek 2: I think it was about as good as the first. We saw it in DLP, so naturally, come on, it's gonna get a winning review. I found some of it to be re-hash from the first one, but not much. We'll own it (duh again), and we are wallowing in smugness because we didn't leave the theatre until all of the credits rolled. If you left early, I'm not telling you what you missed. Nyah.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: The thing that bugs me about this movie is that unlike the other 2, the studio really didn't hype this movie all that much. Not that I want a non-stop barrage of hype and fast-food tie-ins, but jeez, how about not finding out about the movie until 2 weeks before it opened? It made for a kind of weird anti-climacticness when I saw the movie. But we saw it in DLP, within the 5 days that we had that option. We're still owning it (duh, 3 for 3), so onward.
The Day After Tomorrow: It was OK, obviously it was all special effects with acting option. IMDB has a great message board post about this movie, which nails it far better that I can. I don't foresee this on the ole DVD shelf, which is fine. Another DLP flick, so 3 stars for the effects.
The Stepford Wives (1975): OK, now on to the videos and DVDs. I thought the movie was a bit long but overall the kind of creepy 70's movie that I expected. I suspect that the remake (in theatres now) leans more towards high camp than creepiness.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962): Wow. I can't believe that a) this movie got made at all, and b) in the early 60's, at that. I have zero interest in seeing the remake, after all, the original was pretty stinking powerful. If at all possible, see the original and pass on the remake.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: I finally got around to seeing it, and it's brilliant on many levels. It asks, and answers, the age old question of "left to our own devices, are we intrinsically good, or evil?" I thought Bogey overplayed his role most of the way through the movie until the punchine, when it became somewhat more understandable, if not forgivable.
Levity: This got missed during previous reviews. Basically, Billy Bob Thornton is your go-to guy if you need a convincing loser. Other than that, Morgan Freeman doesn't keep the ship afloat (it pains me to say that) and the movie is essentially disposable. As evidenced by my omission from previous review pages.
21 Grams: Another omission. Benicio Del Toro deserved his nomination for the Oscar™, even if he was doomed to not win it. Otherwise, the jerky time-jumping storyline drove me completely insane. Enough so that I asked the critical question 30 minutes into it: do we press eject, or press on? We pressed on. Shoulda ejected.
Clash of the Titans: I am throwing this in here for sheer silliness, as it was on cable yesterday. Holy cow, special effects are millions of years ahead of this cheese-fest. But when I was a kid, and this movie was "first run", it was the shiz-night! No wonder Dad cringed whenever I said I wanted to go to the movies. Unless I am dead wrong, I believe this was the last we saw of Ray Harryhausen. For the best, perhaps.
That's them, on to the next wave! <EM>
