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.