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The Rundown (2003): C+
So this is what Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia would have been like had it been made with a Hollywood budget and starred a wrestler-turned-actor. The Rundown, Peter Berg’s jokey action/adventure film about a buff bounty hunter (The Rock) sent to a rundown Latin American town called El Dorado to retrieve…
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13 Going on 30 (2004)
(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) Consider 13 Going on 30 as less a movie than a demo reel for Jennifer Garner, the energetic brunette beauty of TV’s Alias. In Gary Winick’s photocopy of Big and (to a lesser extent) Freaky Friday, Garner is Jenna Rink, a thirteen-year-old girl in 1987 suburban New Jersey who,…
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Fiyah!
Is Dakota Fanning’s popularity a sign of the apocalypse? The jury is still out, but there’s no doubt that she’s the most annoying child actor since Eight is Enough‘s Adam Rich. Ms. Fanning has a new film out – Tony Scott’s revenge drama Man on Fire, starring Denzel Washington – and at least she’s mostly…
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School Faze
With one month to go before graduation from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, I’m absolutely swamped with final papers/articles. Thus, I’ve had almost no time to watch any films (save for The Rundown, which I’ll eventually get to reviewing) for fun. Nonetheless, I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing for Northern Colorado’s premiere…
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Prepare for Punishment
I enjoyed Spider-Man, and I know I’m the only person in the country who really liked The Hulk, but man, what is Marvel doing? Daredevil was a joke, and the new version of The Punisher is so disastrous, it makes the 1989 Dolph Lundgren version look good. My review at Slant magazine details the wreckage.
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The Alamo (2004)
(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) It would be too easy to just say “Forget The Alamo,” Disney’s new block-blunder about the 1836 battle for the Texas fort between Mexican conqueror Santa Ana’s army and an outnumbered group of American soldiers. But avoiding the film might not be a bad idea. Were The Alamo’s outcome…
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Blowup (1966)
(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) A shallow fashion photographer (David Hemmings) in swinging‘60s London unwittingly captures a murder on film – or does he? – in Michelangelo Antonioni’s acclaimed Blowup. Hemmings’ Thomas is beset by ennui, and is only awakened from his hollow lifestyle of casual sex, materialistic excess, and inactivity after discovering –…
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Hellboy (2004)
(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) The quest for inclusion has, since the introduction of The X-Men in the ‘60s, been the predominant theme in superhero comics, and it’s certainly at the forefront of Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy, a humanistic action extravaganza (based on Mike Mignola’s cult comic book) about misfit creatures fighting on the…
