Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2004)

★★★½
With a title like Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, one might assume this is a downer of a movie, but in reality, it's engaging and challenging. This is a film that you shouldn't accept at face value. Doing so would result in disillusionment. Think hard about why Wilbur and Alice do what they do, and you'll see the redeeming factor in the movie's narrative.

Radio (2003)

★★
Before I discuss the plot of Radio, before I say anything about the acting or credibility, I want to talk about the score, which is among the most annoying and self-important I've ever heard. James Horner is a fine musician, but here, he employs a sickening soundtrack with female vocal overtones to highlight the noble simplicity of the movie's main character. He used music with better results in his vastly superior Titanic score.

Jurassic Park (1993)

★★★
In the summer of 1993, it was Jurassic Park vs. Last Action Hero, with the former soundly defeating the latter in a battle of big-budget motion pictures. Audiences flocked to see Steven Spielberg's dazzling showcase of jaw-dropping special effects while many avoided Arnold Schwarzenegger's underrated action film parody. Jurassic Park suffers a little because it freely omits many intriguing elements of the book in order to concentrate on the action aspect. I read the book in 1994 as part of an English 101 class that I took, yet the sense of wonder generated by its detailed scientific elements still remains. Michael Crichton's novel was loaded with scientific information. He presented his material in such a way that the book often read like a graduate student's thesis on bioengineering. Though the very idea of a prehistoric theme park is outlandish, Crichton found a way to weave all his information into a convincing story. Jules Verne accomplished the same thing with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. That story, about a self-sustaining submarine, would have appeared far-fetched when it was written in the 1800s, yet the scientific detail is enthralling.

Uptown Girls (2003)

★★½
Who would have thought that the ugly duckling of Clueless would eventually outshine the star of that film? Brittany Murphy was the socially inept high school student, and Alicia Silverstone was the popular girl who gave her a makeover. Now, Silverstone has taken a backseat to Murphy in popularity. No wonder too, since Murphy has a sweet demeanor that makes her irresistible. In Uptown Girls, she stars as a pampered rich girl named Molly, who gets thrown out of her apartment when her source of funds leaves town.

The Avengers (1998)

zero stars
This review is for the 1998 film based on the British T.V. show and not for the Marvel series.

If I were to come up with a new way to market The Avengers, I'd say put copies of the movie in the pharmacy next to the sleeping pills. This disastrous film would probably make more money that way than it did in the theaters. I woke up on a Friday morning after a good night's sleep, and a trip to the movies sounded like a great idea. After halfway through The Avengers, I was ready for a nap.

Game Night (2018)

★★★
Jason Bateman has always been a good comedic actor. I remember watching him on the sitcom The Hogan Family, where his comic timing and delivery were put to good use. He also appeared on Arrested Development, but would his knack for comedy translate to the big screen? Early on he seemed like an actor who would work primarily and prolifically on television. In the mid-2000s he sneaked up on movie audiences and displayed his strengths to a wider viewership. His bit role in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story paved the way, and supporting roles in Juno and Hancock showed that he could make the transition to theaters (notwithstanding his early failed appearance in 1987’s Teen Wolf Too).

All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records (2015)

★★★
I lived in Hawaii in the mid-‘90s and there was a Tower Records store in Pearl City. I only went there a few times. I remember the wide selection of music. There was even a section for video rentals, where I rented and watched Last House on the Left for the first time. (I saw a copy of Edward Penishands on the shelf, though I declined to watch it.) I never purchased any music and the store never became a hangout spot for me. I was a budding film buff, and music held nowhere near the interest I had for movies. Indeed, my musical tastes are still stuck in the early ‘90s when I was in high school in Pennsylvania, in a rural area with no Tower Records stores nearby (the local mall had a National Record Mart). I would have had to travel to Pittsburgh to visit one, but that was too far out of my reach and video games held my attention anyway. My brief stop in Hawaii was the only time Tower Records and I crossed paths.

Touching the Void (2004)

★★★½
A camera crew did not follow Joe Simpson and Simon Yates up and down the west face of the Siula Grande (in the Peruvian Andes) in 1985, yet Touching the Void is every bit as compelling as the real thing. Their story has become legendary in the sport of mountain climbing, or so the opening caption tells us. During that extraordinary week in 1985, the two men scaled the enormous mountain. That was a difficult feat alone, since the mountain has many vertical planes and the wind chill factor goes well below zero degrees. Going back down proved even more difficult.

Payback (1999)

★★★
Payback is a movie with many twists, intersecting plot threads, characters that exit unexpectedly and a protagonist who lives up to the tagline “Get Read to Root for the Bad Guy.” Mel Gibson bulldozes through all of this with a fierce determination, motivated by a relatively small amount of cash that baffles his enemies. A more recent movie character, John Wick, went to war over the killing of his dog. That Mel Gibson’s Porter would take on the city’s Outfit over what began as a personal matter is perfectly in line with that kind of story. Take a character and show him commit a disproportionate amount of vengeance against his offenders, and you’re in for a wild ride. Payback would make for a good triple feature along with John Wick and Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer.

The Incredibles (2004)

★★★★
Established nearly ten years ago [ed: This review was written in 2004] as the pinnacle of modern animation, Pixar keeps reaffirming its lofty status with every new release, and The Incredibles is no exception. This remarkably entertaining and meaty motion picture is all eye candy and goofy entertainment for children, but underneath lies a biting denunciation on a number of contemporary topics, such as frivolous lawsuits. Writer/director Brad Bird tackled Cold War fears with his amazing The Iron Giant, and he proves here that he's a sly commentator as well as animator and storyteller.

Day of the Dead: Bloodline (2018)

zero stars
I can only speculate what motived the people behind Day of the Dead: Bloodline into making this ridiculous movie, but I suspect it has a lot to do with the success of the television series The Walking Dead. The T.V. show takes the zombie apocalypse concept and stretches it out over a long period of time with recurring characters, offering viewers a unique and often tense narrative about the end of civilization. George Romero popularized this concept in 1968. His imitators are legion. Whether they are from Italy or Bulgaria, the pretenders never run out of steam. In the case of Day of the Dead (1985), there have been two remakes, neither of which captured the Romero magic while lumbering over the material in a braindead manner. This movie has no business existing. There’s nothing about it to justify its commitment to film (or digital, whatever the case may be). It’s badly acted and plotted.

House of Wax (2005)

★★★
House of Wax follows the conventions of the slasher genre so precisely that it’s almost a waste of time to criticize it on that level. Like a James Bond movie or another retelling of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the latest slasher movie adheres to rigid guidelines with a little tweaking to differentiate it from its predecessors. House of Wax turns out to be a lot better than it might at first appear, mainly due to said tweaking, a sly sense of humor, old-fashioned movie gore and a virtuoso finale.

Angus (1995)

★★★
Angus is much more serious than it appears. This film could easily be mistaken for a high school comedy about a social misfit. The director is Patrick Read Johnson, who helmed one of the worst movies ever made: Baby's Day Out. He rebounded nicely after that failed experiment to deliver a genuinely moving comedy/drama about an outsider who has difficulty fitting in. Angus is an overweight freshman, a talented football player and a smart student, and he's hopelessly in love with a girl out of his reach.

Varsity Blues (1999)

★★★½
Varsity Blues rode a wave of predictable kiddie/teen sports movies that arrived in abundance during the ‘90s, and I think it unfairly gets lumped into that group. Reviews at the time labeled it as another entry in that genre, but look closely and you’ll see that Varsity Blues injected plenty of unorthodox and surprising plot points that not only differentiated it from the likes of Little Giants, but showed that with the right cast and crew, a movie with a traditional and derivative core can rise above them. All that is needed is to recognize that a movie can be predictable and use a little imagination to take the plot into unexpected places.

Super Troopers (2002)

★★½
It's like Police Academy déja vu. Super Troopers is a comedy about ornery state troopers squaring off against the local police. There are jokes about how the troopers mess up their assignments, get in trouble and employ unorthodox tactics to solve the case. This sounds like one of the entries in the infamous '80s comedy film series, but it is not. The writers of Super Troopers, five men known as Broken Lizard, were no doubt inspired by that series, but their sense of humor helps the material rise to a level far above that series’ worst entries. The first few Police Academy movies were fine, but as more sequels came out, it was like a disease that infested theaters across the country. Even the jokes about The Blue Oyster Bar became tired.

Fun (1995)

★
Fun is neither revealing nor intellectual. Rather, it is poorly executed and mostly irritating. How in the world can a movie survive when the two lead characters are rude, hopeless, psychotic and irredeemable, and are presented as such without any method of humanizing? I've seen good movies about bad people before, but Fun makes no attempt to analyze them, or even show us that they got the punishment they deserve.

Miss Congeniality (2000)

★★½

Miss Congeniality is proof that a single actor can salvage a movie from total failure. There is really nothing about this movie that hasn’t been done before. It's about a beauty pageant under possible attack from a mad bomber, and someone has to go in undercover. Comic mayhem ensues when the agent doesn't fit in well with the other competitors. It's a run-of-the-mill plot, yet it's enjoyable because of the humor Sandra Bullock brings to the role. I would have preferred something with more substance and originality, but sometimes you just have to make do with what you're given. This isn't a movie with staying power, but it'll entertain while it lasts.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2004)

★★★★

After Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring concluded, I walked out searching for words to describe the experience. A helpful guy walking behind me uttered "that was amazing, that was amazing." (To his wife, I assume.) That fits the bill perfectly. Ki-duk Kim's film, the first of his work that I've encountered, is a powerful and, yes, amazing piece of cinema. On a purely emotional level, this is one of the most powerful films I've seen.

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

★½
When the Italian rip-offs of Dawn of the Dead littered the marketplace in the late '70s and early '80s, they took the basic premise of George Romero's masterpiece and added more gore while stripping away any sense of cohesion from the story; their plots often collapsed like a demolished building. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have done the same thing. Shaun of the Dead is a parody of Romero's zombie films, and it's an ineffective one. The movie tries to be funny by telegraphing most of its funny scenes, without letting the humor come naturally. It's like the guy in high school who came up to you and announced that he had a joke to tell, and he's going to tell you whether you want to hear it or not.

Virus (1999)

★★

For a long time, Jamie Lee Curtis had apparently given up on indie horror to work in the mainstream. After her debut in Halloween in 1978, she starred in four more horror films: The Fog (1980), Prom Night (1980), Terror Train (1980) and Halloween 2 (1981). She returned to the genre in 1998 for Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. It's strange that Curtis would snub all horror appearances for so long, then suddenly appear in two in a row. Virus is the latest film about a team that finds itself trapped by a monster. It's not an original idea, but films like this are usually fast-paced and offer impressive special effects. Of course, special effects alone can't save a movie (with a few exceptions), and that's why this movie ultimately fails as a satisfying trip to the movies.

The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018)

½ star
Despicably pointless and stupid, The Strangers: Prey at Night is not only a complete rehash of the first movie, but it is a maddening decent into the absolute pits of horror screenwriting. The script features everything from moody teens to poor decision-making to ridiculous exhibitions of pop music, which are presented to us in a manner that suggests a complete ignorance of basic human behavior, both in front of and behind the camera. That this mess was directed by Johannes Roberts, who made the superior 47 Meters Down, is mystifying. Perhaps the real culprit here is co-writer Bryan Bertino, the writer and director of the original. His narrative structure and idiotic plotting indicate that he simply had no more good or creative ideas for telling this story yet proceeded anyway due to the low budget and high likelihood for profit.

Rebound (2005)

★½

Rebound looks every bit like a way to receive a fast influx of cash. If you're a screenwriter and need to pay your debts right now, lest the loan sharks break your legs, then all you have to do is write a kiddie sports movie about a weak underdog team that improves under the leadership of a new coach, preferably one that doesn't really want to be there. Just about any studio is willing to give this kind of story the green light, because it features a flawed hero who can do a quick turnaround and give the false impression that he grew up. Hire a name actor to play him, and then populate the rest of the cast with unknowns.

Days of Being Wild (1991)

★★★

Wong Kar-Wai loves his characters, so much so that he would rather watch them grow and develop rather than insert them into actions scenes or other fantastical situations. He writes his characters with a complex set of emotions and sees where that leads them. He doesn’t betray them. He charts their course, and the destination may or may not be desirable. We can see this in Chungking Express, or his American production My Blueberry Nights. They can be deeply flawed, passionate, lonely, funny, optimistic and/or cruel. In Days of Being Wild, one of Wong’s breakout films, his characters possess the less desirable of these traits. Even with characters who are disagreeable or contemptible, there is something about them that yearns for goodness, a recognition of these flaws and an attempt to purge them, or at least tame them. Success is not guaranteed in a Wong Kar-Wai film.

The Dark Crystal (1982)

★★★

The Dark Crystal is such a triumph of special effects and puppetry that it’s easy to ignore some of the weaknesses in its plot. Jim Henson dazzles with his creations and his imagination, but the bigger task of leading a large crew to bring his characters to life must have been exhausting. He exceeds all expectations. There is such a wide variety of creatures present here that he surpasses every other production in which has been involved. The worlds of the Muppets and Fraggles don’t compare to The Dark Crystal in terms of puppet execution.

Death Wish (2018)

★★

I don’t care if someone wants to remake a movie, just as long as the writers and directors can give me a reason why the movie was made other than to extract money from my wallet. It’s a waste of time when a remake uses the title and notoriety of an earlier movie while adding nothing new to the story. Case in point: Death Wish, a remake of the Charles Bronson original from 1974. That director Eli Roth is involved in this update isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that, given his devotion to horror and b-movies, he doesn’t generate much interest in the story. Whether it’s Hostel or The Green Inferno, we can look at an Eli Roth movie and know that it’s his. Not so with Death Wish, which has a predictable plot and contains laughable plot developments.

Annihilation (2018)

★★★½

There’s a moment towards the end of Annihilation when biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) enters unknown territory to face whatever lies ahead. Everything up to that point has defied everything she had known to be true. Reality has been altered in ways that should be impossible, but nevertheless her senses don’t lie to her. Slowly but surely, we understand just as she does what is happening around her. It’s frightening, yet that urge to know the truth is too strong to overcome. She takes those steps into the unknown because the stakes are too high. To turn away would leave questions unanswered in the short term, and certain extinction in the long term. Great science fiction movies reveal themselves subtly in this way. They build up the story, introduce the possibilities of where it can go, then leave us to discover how it all comes together. If the movie does not betray its internal logic, then that journey is fulfilled.

The 15:17 to Paris (2018)

★★★½

The arrival of The 15:17 to Paris couldn’t be any timelier. Pessimism flows out of Hollywood like a river of spoiled molasses. It’s gotten so thick that seeing a trailer featuring any number of arrogant stars induces a gag reflex. I will not discuss the larger issue of celebrity discontent in this space; that can be better discussed elsewhere. I will discuss how Clint Eastwood’s latest movie eschews casting conventions to deliver a product without the dead weight of superstardom dragging it down like an anchor. There is rage everywhere in the 24-hour news cycle, most of it delivered from C.N.N., M.S.N.B.C. and soapboxes being crushed by the pompous grandstanding of the likes of Madonna and Mark Ruffalo. Now comes Eastwood, to remind us that we don’t need to listen to them. There are better people out there with worthier things to say.

I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

zero stars

The fire started slowly and grew hotter and more intense as I Spit on Your Grave played out. It was an endurance test, orchestrated by filmmakers with questionable motives. Here is a remake that is every bit the movie its superior inspiration was accused of being, serving up improbabilities and clichés without any sort of noble purpose in mind. By the end of the movie, the fire had grown out of control, my blood boiling, putting to test all my efforts to continue watching. If I had stopped watching, I could not declare this the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I did finish and can therefore declare it so. I Spit on Your Grave is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.