The Stop Button

According to IMDb, Rambo III was the most expensive movie ever made at the time of its release. It shows. Enormous sets, lots of vehicles–Rambo versus a helicopter, Rambo versus a tank, Rambo in a tank versus a helicopter. For all the money, it ought to look fantastic–except director Peter MacDonald, a camera operator and […]

Richard Curtis–I think–said he wrote Love Actually from all his unused ideas. Just threw them into the oven and baked them together. To some degree, it shows. Unlike the usual big cast films, with lots of incidental meetings and relationships (as P.T. Anderson wrote, these things “happen all the time”), Love Actually is very loose. […]

The Natural is a strange one. It’s a cheap success. The story is incredibly simple–you have the golden-haired hero and the evil monster who lives in the dark–and looking for anything more will leave one wanting. Even though the film taps into the baseball mythos, it’s superficial. The Natural is the superhero movie Robert Redford […]

Fun. I’m trying to think–besides the Ocean series–of fun Hollywood blockbusters these days. It seems like fun is out. Certainly with James Bond. Die Another Day is a lot of fun. In fact, unlike some of the other Bond movies–the ones I can remember well–it seems to be more concentrated on being fun than anything […]

Black Sheep plays like a more discreet, larger budgeted young Peter Jackson. Less ambitious too (I’m thinking of Braindead as the comparison). Both Jackson and King are New Zealanders and so on. Weta, who works with Hollywood Peter Jackson, did the effects for Black Sheep, turning in–besides the gore–were-sheep transformations with heavy American Werewolf in […]

Rambo’s pretty awful. It’s not terrible–not too terrible to watch anyway (at least once, though New York Times critic A.O. Scott should probably be fired for supporting it to any degree). The main technical fault lies with George P. Cosmatos, who somehow managed to stock the crew with capable people (editor Mark Goldblatt is no […]

I thought there were no anti-conservative Hollywood films for a long while after 9/11, so I guess Runaway Jury went under the radar. It appears to have been a significant bomb and, watching it, it seemed strange to see John Grisham’s name on screen. It’s been a long time since adaptations of his novels have […]