Reviews

This flick is a little like "Fort Apache: The Bronx" meets "Apocolypse Now". It is almost TOO gritty and too intense to be realistic. However, it is so well done and so original that it's very worthwhile. Especially enjoyable as black comic relief are Nicolas Cage's unbalanced partners Ving Rhames and Tom Sizemore. Film deals with heavy subjects like euthanasia, suicide, and drug addiction. Not for children.

Reality Bites is an example of exactly the type of shallow cliches it pretentiously tries to satirize. From the opening pot smoking graduation party right through to the predictably dull ending the lame, witless attempts to be cleverly ironic just keep on coming at you like so many "Good Morning, Grant" cue cards. Excellent cast wasted on mediocre script.

Red Planet succeeds where so many sci fi flicks have failed. It has the high concept special effects of 2001 without the tedium. It has realistic, tense action scenes without needing a contrived fantasy war with evil aliens like in Starship Troopers. It has spiritual and emotional underpinnings that don't bog it down in the mushy sentimentality of Mission to Mars. The characters are human and flawed without becoming the helplessly pathetic neurotics of Operation Ganymede. Best of all it has brains, but you don't need to be a graduate student in physics to understand it.

Without giving too much away the plot runs like this: Earth is decaying from environmental pollution. Mankind must colonize or die out. So Mars is terraformed with polar ice melting nuclear detonations and oxygen producing algae. Suddenly the algae disappear. A ship, this ship, is sent to investigate. Nothing at all goes as expected and Murphy's Law becomes the norm.

If you like Star Trek, you'll love Red Planet. This movie may not go into excruciating detail to describe the science involved, but it is based on hard science. The characters can't simply blast their way from one problem to the next. They have to think their way out. Human frailties turn out to be just as dangerous as the planet's inhospitable climate. Courage, resourcefulness, and quick thinking take precedence over laser beams.

I had a great time watching this. See it on the big screen before it's gone!

This is the most textbook demonstration of Nietzsche I've ever seen. Rob Lowe is the gifted liar prepared to go all the way to get whatever he wants and keep himself entertained. Spader is the timid, uptight yuppie who doesn't understand just how much he's in for when Lowe's "will to power" rubs off on him. What ensues would bring anybody back to good old fashioned organized religion. A morality play taken to extremes that nonetheless works as a thriller, too. Worth seeing. 8.

This movie was something you don't often get these days-- unpredictable. It borrows a lot from the Donner Party story and the scenery west of the Sierras in winter is astonishingly beautiful. Carlyle aces his performance as a diabolically deceitful vampire, but Neal McDonough steals most of the early scenes as a would be hero. Even the offbeat soundtrack is entertaining and original. Imagine what a Joel and Ethan Coen horror movie might be like and this would be it. Well worth seeing. I gave it a 9.

I can't compare this movie to anything else because it's in a class by itself. This is the zaniest, weirdest, most creative and wonderfully funny flick ever made. The sight gags are a blast. You can never tell what's going to happen next. Every character is unique, twisted, and real enough to tickle you on a lot of different levels. As a Phoenix native, it even made me homesick. If you like this but would like to see another comedy with a darker side, the Coen brothers' "Miller's Crossing" is almost as brilliant. TEN!!!

The actors in this film are first string, but they aren't given much material to work with. This is a fantasy version of the King Arthur legend in that it skips any attempt to be historically accurate to any medieval era. But, while a fantasy, it also completely avoids the notion of wizards, prophecies or magic. I got the feeling the script writers weren't given much latitude at all on what they could do with the story, and so we get a by-the-numbers generic King Arthur and Camelot plot with the only new twist being a lot more emphasis on Lancelot. The battle scenes are big but not realistic. The Camelot set is cartoonish. The plot is on a comic book level. The film is just a showcase for the three glamorous leads.

If only someone would take on the difficult task of making Bernard Cornwell's rich King Arthur trilogy into films. Cornwell has shown what you can do with a little creativity, imagination, and a flair for historical accuracy. So what if King Arthur is a legend? That doesn't mean someone like him couldn't have lived and that his exploits, friends, and enemies couldn't have had drama, depth and personality. When I read his books I was not only entertained but believed they could have actually happened. When I saw this movie I thought "fake" from beginning to end.

Silly, dumb, wannabe James Bond spoof. Gregory Peck is one of my favorite actors of all time, and it is painful to watch him try to ham it up in this lame, juvenile attempt at humor. Right about on the same level as "Green Acres", maybe a cut below "Gilligan's Island". Try "Mirage" or even "Spies Like Us" instead.

I was lured to see this movie by its starpower, but ultimately that's all it delivers. It plays much more like a Greek tragedy than a modern thriller about big city corruption. It's greatest flaw is its predictibability and utter lack of suspense. We know who the bad guys are from the beginning, and just follow along as they fall like dominoes. The film to its credit does abstain from gratuitous violence and sex, but has forgotten to substitute good, clean romance or excitement in any other way. All the flavor of a good, flat decaffeinated diet cola. "Q&A", which also takes place in New York, is a far better alternative, as is "LA Confidential".

One of the thrillers where you have to pay close attention or you'll be left behind. Tim Hutton and Armand Assante turn in their best performances as a new DA and a drug dealer with something in common you just don't see that often-- love for the same woman. To its credit Q&A is fast-paced, tense, and challenging to keep up with. One count against it: there's a LOT of violence, profanity and sex (not the romantic kind) in here. Everything the moral majority warned you about. Don't watch it with the kids.

The Siege has a problem it shares with many other big-budget Hollywood films: it cannot relate to the military. The first three quarters of this film are sharp, engrossing, and exciting. It's when martial law is imposed and Bruce Willis comes stomping in as a VERY cliche tin pot dictator that the movie disconnects from reality. It goes overboard in portraying soldiers as mindless, robotic zealots. If only more writers and directors had spent a hitch in uniform, their portrayals might not so easily slide into comic book stereotypes.

Although I had already seen and admired "Barcelona" I put off watching this film because I feared, like the era it portrays, it might be shallow. Big mistake: this is a Great Movie.

This director makes his own genres and writes some of the most intelligent dialog on celluloid. He doesn't have to exaggerate life to make it interesting. I rented "Heat" (a star-studded Michael Mann crime orgy) on the same night. LDoD is the perfect contrast to that kind of absurd Hollywood formula blockbuster. "Heat" bore no resemblance to reality, was packed with glamorous locations, hot sex, spectacularly cold-blooded violence, tragic soap opera catharsis, and famous actors posing with guns but it failed to be anything but predictable. LDoD makes the commonplace into a fresh and compelling story.

Alice and Charlotte are two pretty college graduates living it up at their favorite disco club in New York. Charlotte is confident, shallow, hypocritical, ruthless, and manipulative. Alice is decent and intelligent but not sure enough of her own natural charm to be herself. She lets Charlotte persuade her into playing psychological games with men to become more popular. Competing for their affections are Des (the male version of Charlotte and a professional night club flunky), Jimmy (a junior ad executive desperate to get his clients in past the hostile owner), and Joel (a sincere, noble, and thoughtful assistant D.A. dogged by a bad rep from a nervous breakdown in college).

The plot is supposed to be about shady dealings Joel is secretly investigating. The real STORY is about whether the basic goodness in Joel and Alice will prevail in an era that glorified everything but.

All the characters are in love with Disco's allure-- the romantic dreamworld where they can escape from their diffucult careers and find happiness with anyone on any given night. The script's best lines are not about the characters, but the times. This is not a sendup of stereotypes like "John Travolta and white polyester suits" but a lovingly crafted recreation of an era that exists only to many of us as a joke. This is "The Apartment" with music and wit.