Film Articles

The B-movie doesn’t get much respect these days, although movie-going audiences seem far more willing to surrender to their charm than surly film critics. This latest installment in “The Mummy” series – “franchise” seems like such a horrible word – is a good example. With an aggregate score of 10 percent at rottentomatoes.com, critics clearly aren’t digging it. At yahoo, the average critics’ score is a C-. Tellingly, the average yahoo user score is B-.

The bane of a film critic’s work is the middle of the road movie. Not bad, not great; good in a “it’s nice, but…” kind of way. And in the ellipsis is the struggle to find some egregious flaw or outstanding quality around which to write a review. Something. Anything. On the upside, “Only For You” can boast of emotional authenticity. Writer/director Donna Persico keeps it real and away from melodramatic contrivances, even if the obligatory romantic obstacles are all but air-lifted into the plot at just the right time. With scenarios drawn from the universal human experience, we have a case of boy and girl meet, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl are kept apart by circumstance and self-inflicted indecision.

Despite its undeniable status as a cultural icon and avatar of the ‘90s uneasy zeitgeist, “The X-Files” always struck me more for its nudity – as in, the emperor’s nudity – than for its rating as a speculative sci-fi heavyweight. Pairing a skeptic and a believer in the investigation of so-called paranormal events was an excellent formula, but the show’s insistent and self-indulgent mystery-mongering, while forming the backbone of the show’s complexity, reeked of intellectual dishonesty. Science was pitted against faith in the ideological opposition of Scully and Mulder, with the scientific method little more than a space cadet cast helplessly adrift in the vast space that is the desire, the need, to believe.

Russian director Timur Bekmambetov made a decisive impression with fantasy films “Night Watch” and “Day Watch.” His compositionally sophisticated and distinctive vision of a gritty Moscow overlaying an omnipresent occult world showcased a noteworthy FX-driven panache, and it’s no surprise Hollywood took notice. Though fresh on the scene, he already ranks up there with Del Toro and the Wachowskis as a director able to push cinematic technology to the edge. But like the Wachowskis, who hit it big with “The Matrix” but went downhill from there, his films after “Night Watch” (yes, including “Day Watch”) demonstrate an instinct for quality storytelling that is as questionable as his eye for cinematic wizardry is strong. Quite simply, Bekmambetov provides the distinction between stylish trash and mere trash.

“The Dark Knight” comes with very bright and shiny hype. Talk of a golden statue for Heath Ledger’s brilliant turn as the Joker. Stunts to drop jaws and pop eyes – and equally awe-inspiring gadgets. Hallelujahs for Chris Nolan’s success at not only resurrecting Batman from the ashes of the Schumacher inferno, but achieving the feat of crafting a film rooted in comic books that can be called great without the usual “comic book” qualifier. The hype, for once, is mostly warranted.

I’ve always been puzzled by descriptions of Guillermo Del Toro’s breakout hit, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” as a fantasy movie. Despite questionable metaphysics and short-lived glimpses into a world of fauns, fairies, and “Silent Hill”-type monsters, the film is, at heart, a fairly straightforward wartime drama. But there’s no questioning the fantasy pedigree of “Hellboy II.” Epic machinery and a formidable menagerie of imaginary creatures – from humanoids with architecture growing from their heads to stone giants that double as the secret entrance to long-lost cities – makes “Hellboy II” the dizzying phantasmagoria people believed “Pan’s Labyrinth” to be. Think of the cantina scene from Star Wars, filtered and magnified through Del Toro’s own unique imagination.

The field’s already a tad crowded with commentaries on the peculiar nature of office life and its inhabitants, homo cubicularis. We’ve seen the absurd, the soul-crushing, the banal, the political, the bureaucratic, the conformist, the rebellious – all expertly skewered by the likes of the venerable “Office Space” and “The Office.” Enter “Cubes,” a film that starts out hinting at a limp retread of familiar terrain only to deliver a surprisingly attentive character piece. Structured as a series of interlocking, vignetted conversations between character pairs, this isn’t a film about the office drone’s relationship to the corporate environment, but about the relationship between workers in the context of corporate culture. “Cubes” looks beyond cubicle partitions to the barriers created by assumptions and expectations – and what happens when these break down.

Not based on any existing comic book, “Hancock” aims to leap beyond the bar described by the dreaded moniker of “comic book movie.” Gone is the origin formula rooted in traumatic events and scientific accidents, along with secret identities and the subsequent assumption of world-saving heroism. Instead: an alcoholic, amnesiac superhero with an abrasive personality and a destructive disregard, not to mention contempt, for the people around him — more Bad Santa than Superman.

“I don’t mean to say that storytelling is overrated (then again, maybe that’s exactly what I mean), but we know it's not necessarily the most important thing in a movie — even a mainstream studio picture. How it feels will always be more significant than the tale it spins. Because it's a movie.” And thus Jim Emerson takes a waffling shot (http://blogs.suntimes.com/) at cinematic storytelling, the view that everything in a movie is meant to serve the “story.” Quoting Roger Ebert, “A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it,” and pointing to the formulaic nature of many movies, he piles it on:

As the title, “The Happening,” says, something does happen in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest offering: we reach the end of the road for Shymalan’s aspirations of being a latter-day Hitchcock by way of Rod Serling. The cross-pollination of “The Birds” with “28 Weeks Later” and “The Twilight Zone” results in, arguably, the worst film in Shymalan’s portfolio to date and, perhaps, the death of his cachet. The Shymalan brand has lost its luster. A shame.