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It was one minute past midnight again, exactly 364 days after the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of The Lord of the Rings movies, and I was back for the opening of The Two Towers. I loved the first movie so much that I was fully expecting to be disappointed. There’s nowhere to go from here but down, I thought. So I was moved to tears of absolute delight that The Two Towers is even better than The Fellowship of the Ring.
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At one minute past midnight on Wednesday, December 19th, 2001, I was one of hundreds of people assembled in several sold-out theaters to see the Atlanta opening of Lord of the Rings. I was astonished that hundreds of people had gathered to watch a three-hour movie starting after midnight. (more…)
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March 30, 2003
I finally saw Gangs of New York, and I wish that I had gone much sooner. Gangs is an absolutely magnificent movie, the best movie I have seen since The Two Towers. It is Martin Scorsese’s best movie — ever. (more…)
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David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (New Line Cinema, 2005) is truly a superb movie, with a tight and economical script (the whole story is told in 96 minutes), a remarkably subtle and gripping performance by Viggo Mortensen (his best ever, in my opinion), excellent performances from the rest of the cast, and an unostentatiously elegant directorial style (unmarred by the middlebrow pretentiousness and penchant for the juvenile and repulsive that ruin most of Cronenberg’s movies).
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Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [sic, sic] has been hyped as World War II action movie-cum-sadistic gorefest. In reality, it is a self-indulgent snorefest. I thought I would need a gin and tonic before I went in, but it turns out what I needed was a cup of coffee. Yes, there is some gore and sadism, but frankly I found myself hoping for more of it. Anything, really, to relieve the sheer boredom.
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Editor’s Note:
The reviewer discusses the ending of the film in very general terms. While not technically a spoiler, I thought that readers should nevertheless be warned.
The Road makes The Road Warrior look like a utopia. (more…)
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Catherine Hardwicke’s movie Twilight is based on the first novel of a series by Stephenie Meyer. The books mostly appeal to young women, and the advertisements for the movie screamed “chick flick,” so I gave it a pass when it was released in theaters. But I admire Joss Whedon’s series Angel, about a vampire with a soul, and when I heard that Twilight centers around a similar character, I was intrigued enough to order it on DVD.
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The news is: the movie of New Moon, the second installment of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, doesn’t suck—in the vulgar, colloquial, non-vampire sense of the word—although all the signs were certainly there.
First, the book of New Moon is terrible: nearly 600 pages of pedestrian prose, glacially paced, padded to excruciating lengths not with fluff, but with damp, insipid, indigestible literary sawdust. (more…)
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Oliver Stone’s Alexander is, well, great. It isn’t perfect, but neither was Alexander. It is definitely worth seeing. But there is a subtle and sinister thread of anti-White propaganda running through the movie, and I would not recommend it to anyone without warning him first.
There are many reasons why I enjoyed Alexander. Chief among them is Alexander himself. Alexander the Great was surely one of the most gifted men in history. (more…)
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August 3, 2002
I loved M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. And I love his new movie Signs. Signs does not have the amazing twist ending of The Sixth Sense, but it has a twist of its own. Ostensibly a suspenseful, scary sci-fi thriller with many wonderful comic scenes, Signs turns into something far more serious and profound. It is a meditation on the nature of manliness and its connection to religious faith.
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The Interpreter is a new thriller starring Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman, directed by Sydney Pollack. It is a well-crafted, well-acted, but ultimately mediocre film. Left to my own devices, I would probably not have seen it at all. But I wanted to spend some time with a friend, and he suggested the film. (more…)
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Secretary was directed by Steven Shainberg and stars James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. I watched this movie for three reasons. First, because it has James Spader in it, who is one of my favorite male actors. (Although Spader is very handsome, for most of the film he has a creepy, waxen, reptilian look about him.) Second, because it was supposed to be funny. Third, because humorless, hysterical feminists hated it for being “misogynistic,” thus I’d hoped there would be something true in it. Maybe it would be another Belle du Jour or Mademoiselle or Lost Highway.