The Stop Button

Harry and the Hendersons has to be one of the most emotionally manipulative movies ever made. Amblin produced it (though Spielberg’s name isn’t on the credits anywhere) and it comes off as the finale part of the E.T. and Gremlins trilogy. Except in this one, it isn’t about a boy and his Bigfoot, it’s about […]

I’m trying to find a synonym for genial… excuse me a moment. I like the look of gregarious, but the definition doesn’t fit. Convivial is going to be the compromise word. Parenthood is convivial. Somehow, Howard and company manage to convince the viewer to be touched by the movie’s events, but not to give them […]

The Big Fix is a fundamentally different detective movie. While there are some elements updating it to time period, a lot of it is still a detective investigating in LA, meeting all sorts of people all around town and so on. It’s still Raymond Chandler to some degree–with Dreyfuss playing his (marginally) goofy, but caring […]

For a painfully brief period in the 1990s, Ron Howard was one of the best filmmakers working. It didn’t last. The Paper kicked off his run. Howard and the Koepp brothers (I can’t remember for sure, but I think Stephen worked at a newspaper) imbue the film with the traditional Hollywood newspaper movie idealism, but […]

Hulk had a huge box office drop-off after its opening weekend–wow, almost seventy percent. It’s actually somewhat lucky, because I’d have thought people would have gotten up and walked out of the theater. The Hulk doesn’t show up until about an hour into the movie and doesn’t do anything interesting for another half hour after […]

According to IMDb, it took Howard Franklin ten years to get his script produced. In that time, I wonder if he worked on it, because the finished product does not appear to have been considered. The Public Eye is beyond tedious. The combination of Franklin’s plotless script and Mark Isham’s nap-inducing score make the whole […]

Here’s a goofy one–the title also could be The Doctor in the Sombrero–with James Mason as a mob doctor who makes off with two hundred grand and the boss’s girl, only to end up in rural Mexico, healing horses. It’s all pretty standard stuff, down to the excursion to Mexico, but Mason and Dan Duryea […]