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The Cooler (2003): D
Like Three Card Monte, Wayne Kramer’s The Cooler is a pointless, money-depleting waste of time to be avoided at all costs. Bernie Lootz (a solid but familiar William H. Macy) is such a loser that he’s hired by a Las Vegas casino run by Shelly Kaplow (a hammy Alec Baldwin) to spread his bad luck…
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Stuck on You (2003)
(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) The Farrelly Brothers harnessed most of their scatological impulses for 2001’s sweet, mildly gross romantic comedy Shallow Hal, but they dive headfirst into aw-shucks sentimentality with Stuck on You, an inoffensive one-joke valentine to freaks and geeks. The story of conjoined twins – shy, athletic Bob (Matt Damon), and…
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Are You Not Mildly Entertained?
Diane Kruger may not be hot enough to launch a thousand ships, but in Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy, she’s not really important anyway. Most people going to see this sometimes thrilling, mostly mediocre wannabe epic are probably only interested in seeing the bodacious Mr. Jennifer Aniston and his hunky buddies Orlando Bloom and Eric Bana engage…
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Dark City (1998): B+
While The Matrix received most of the credit for bringing the sci-fi paranoia of William Gibson (“Necromancer”) to the masses, it was Alex Proyas’ Dark City – released a full year before the Wachowskis’ bullet-time, “dream is a reality” revolution – that first envisioned a dystopian nightmare lurking beneath our everyday existence. John Murdock (Rufus…
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The Day of the Triffids (1962): C+
Doctors say not to look directly at a solar eclipse, but in Steve Selky’s overgrown plant thriller The Day of the Triffids, it’s a meteor shower that screws up humanity’s delicate corneas. A U.S. naval officer (Howard Keel’s Bill Masen) undergoing eye surgery in Britain misses out on the meteor lightshow of the century, but…
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The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951): B-
Given the unnerving Cold War climate, science fiction films from the ‘50s naturally exhibited a fevered, panicky fear of atomic annihilation, and few were better than Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. An alien named Klattu (Michael Rennie) and his giant robot Gort (Lock Martin) land their flying saucer on the Washington, D.C.…
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Spellbound (1945): C
Freudian symbolism and Salvador Dali surrealism uncomfortably coexist in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychobabble classic Spellbound, which despite its pedigree – Hitch, Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, Notorious screenwriter Ben Hecht – now stands as one of the director’s most laughably dated films. Dr. Edwardes (Peck) arrives at Green Manors psychiatric hospital and, while cultivating a relationship…
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Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004): C
The Bride’s (Uma Thurman) quest for revenge comes to a close in Kill Bill Vol. 2, thus mercifully ending Quentin Tarantino’s masturbatory two-part genre mix-tape. Unlike the straightforward samurai homage of Vol. 1, this second installment moves more fluidly between kung fu kookiness – personified by Chia Jui Liu’s Pai Mei, a cackling, white-bearded chop-socky…
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Monster Mash
The summer movie season has arrived, and it’s off to a monstrous start. Van Helsing is sure to rake in the big bucks this weekend, but I fear the aftermath will be millions of Americans with severe loss of hearing. My Slant magazine review slays this strident cinematic beast….
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Mean Girls (2004)
(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) grew up as a home-schooled kid in Africa, but in Mark Waters’ Mean Girls (written by SNL head writer Tina Fey), the sheltered, fresh-faced teen discovers that there’s no jungle quite like a suburban American high school. Populated by an eclectic assortment of nerds, dweebs,…
