Long before it opened nationwide in the United States, The Quiet American premiered in Vietnam to great fanfare. I saw it in Saigon last December, when the Vietnamese government literally rolled out the red carpet for director Phillip Noyce, actor Brendan Fraser, and the press. The reason? As one of the Vietnamese representatives put it […]
Film
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Movie Reviews – X2: X-Men United, The Lizzie McGuire Movie
X2: X-Men United Director Bryan Singer delivers the first subtle superhero movie. Yes, there are great stunts and flexing muscles. Heroes slice and dice their foes, shoot fire and ice, transport across time and space, and perform many other tricks. But it’s obvious Singer and screenwriters Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris are far less interested […]
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Movie Review – Williard, The Hunted
Willard While sitting through Glen Morgan’s update of the cult horror film Willard, I couldn’t help but wonder whether there must be other practical purposes for being able to communicate with rats than having them tear your boss to shreds. They could put those German Shepherds to shame searching out earthquake victims. Or say you’ve […]
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Movie Review – Confidence, The Real Cancun, It Runs in the Family, Identity
Confidence There’s no question that screenwriter Doug Jung is a student of film noir. His script for Confidence touches on nearly every convention of the genre and straddles the line between homage and rip-off. We have a doomed protagonist, a sultry femme fatale, a sure-fire heist that’s bound to become complicated, and more double crosses […]
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Movie Review – View From the Top, Boat Trip
View From the Top That Donna Jensen (Gwyneth Paltrow), you’ve got to admit, she sure knows how to aim high. She longs to see the world and thinks that the only way to do it is to become a stewardess. Of course, anything would be an improvement after growing up in a trailer in Arizona […]
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“Kandahar”
Strange things happen in this world, and the fact that the film Kandahar, by the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, found a substantial international audience after it was released in late 2001 is a small but genuinely strange byproduct of recent history. A few years ago Kandahar would have been a footnote on the movie-release calendar, […]
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Movie Review – Holes, Bulletproof Monk
Holes For adults with children who are either past or awaiting tweenhood, Louis Sacher’s novel Holes is probably unfamiliar. But for tweens it’s revered, a story with irresistible, high-interest hooks (an ancient curse, lost treasure, an intriguing mystery, and a happy ending) and a resonate message (put-upon kids find justice and redemption among cruel adults […]
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Movie Review- City of God
City of God Although overlooked by the Academy for a Best Foreign Picture nomination, Director Fernando Meirelles’ Brazilian slum epic City of God is a profound, stylistically expansive depiction of three decades of child gang warfare on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro with non-actors playing their poverty-ridden lives for the camera. The only other […]
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Overlooked and underappreciated
In a festival that celebrates recorded moments, the highlight may be a live performance. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert’s fifth Overlooked Film Festival in Urbana-Champaign will feature a special benshi performance next week to accompany the Japanese silent film, I Was Born, But. . . A benshi, Ebert explains, was a performer who stood […]
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Movie Reviews- What a Girl Wants, Head of State
What a Girl Wants What seventeen-year-old Daphne Reynolds (Amanda Bynes) wants is to meet her long lost father, an English aristocrat named Lord Henry Dashwood (Colin Firth). Seems a freak accident threw him and pop singer Libby Reynolds (Kelly Preston) together. A whirlwind romance ensued and Daphne was the result. Evil machinations of a family […]
