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A big man in a mid-market town, Will Ferrell's character in Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy is a local newscaster made giddy by the rarefied air of semi-stardom. The face of San Diego TV news in the pre-cable 1970s, he's long since settled into a comfortable routine of scotch, the manly companionship of his coworkers, and the romantic attentions of each year's crop of young women who have watched him since they were in diapers. Less a journalist than what the British more aptly call a newsreader, Ferrell abounds with unchecked, but essentially benevolent, pomposity. He has both feet stuck in an era that's slipping away, but he's heading for a fall when he becomes smitten with (and confused by) Christina Applegate, a hyper-competent, liberated reporter hired by boss Fred Willard for the sake of "diversity"—a word Ferrell for some reason believes refers to a wooden Civil War ship. Ferrell, as usual, commits to his part with almost Method abandon. He co-wrote Anchorman with … [Read more...] about Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy

Of Gone In 60 Seconds' many flaws, unfaithfulness to its source material was hardly the least. A remake of a 1974 B-movie that piled every motorhead fantasy of cars and collision into one film, 60 Seconds played as though director Dominic Sena was ashamed of its origins. By slicking up the action and story, he lost any sense of danger or excitement. For a car crash to look like a car crash, it can't appear to have been choreographed by a computer months in advance. Though far from an unqualified success, The Fast And The Furious gets this and enough other details right to make it a welcome return to B-movie values. Set in the world of underground L.A. drag-racing, The Fast And The Furious stars the inscrutable Paul Walker as an aspiring racer eager to move up in the world by getting close to the scene's king, the volatile but charismatic Vin Diesel. Walker loses his first race, presented as an activity only slightly less reality-bending than Keir Dullea's final trip in 2001, but wins … [Read more...] about The Fast And The Furious

Irony hangs like a lead weight over But I'm A Cheerleader, a send-up of homosexual rehab camps that affects a hysterical tone which couldn't be further from the deadpan sting of good satire. For starters, there's the sweeping irony that such camps are an ideal setting for budding young homosexuals to come into their own and flourish. But around that obvious point dangle many smaller, clunkier ironies, beginning with a cast that includes John Waters regular Mink Stole as a prudish Christian housewife, Night Court's Richard "Bull" Moll as a flaming militant, and an out-of-drag RuPaul as an "ex-gay" counselor. The camp, called True Directions, is run by a domineering shrew (Cathy Moriarty, in a performance better suited to a women-in-prison picture) who, in yet another irony, is oblivious to her strapping son's own homoerotic tendencies. At the center of this calamity is poor Natasha Lyonne, who tries a variation on her winning performance as a baffled teenager in Slums Of Beverly Hills, … [Read more...] about But I’m A Cheerleader

Less a movie than a cynical, market-dictated merger of profitable brands, the aggressively charmless How The Grinch Stole Christmas seems poised to replace Santa Claus: The Movie and Return To Oz as Hollywood's foremost desecration of a beloved childhood icon. In a career-worst performance, Jim Carrey mugs, screams, and flails his way though his title role as the legendary Yuletide misanthrope, a nightmarish ghoul who looks like a pot-bellied, feral Muppet and talks like a speed-addled Edward G. Robinson. Director Ron Howard aims for the beautifully stylized mayhem of Frank Tashlin and Tim Burton, but he comes closer to the clamorous, headache-inducing visual overkill of Joel Schumacher's Batman movies, as he pits Carrey against the horrifyingly ugly, rat-faced mole-people of Whoville. Seuss' justly revered book contains only the slightest wisp of a plot, so Howard and company inject a new second act in which Carrey is disastrously named Cheermeister Of Whoville, allowing for such … [Read more...] about How The Grinch Stole Christmas

The objections that greeted Steven Spielberg's 1985 movie adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple still apply, to a large extent. Walker's book is told from the perspective of an abused, neglected black farmer's wife in the early 20th century, and Spielberg's decision to understand her plight as one of "yearning for escape" cheapens the character, making her just another E.T. (or suburban white kid). Worse, Spielberg's specific sensibilities remain rooted in the color and clamor of old Hollywood, and given a choice between entertaining the audience and rubbing its faces in dirt, he almost always goes for the polish. His movie-addled worldview prompted the broad, retro ethnic stereotypes of 1941 and Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and even though the tin-eared cornpone dialect of The Color Purple comes primarily from Walker, Spielberg earns ire for the way he zeroes in on the story's light comic elements. He gives the slapstick choreography of juke-joint brawls and marital disagreements … [Read more...] about The Color Purple: Collector’s Edition (DVD)

As Naqoyqatsi, the third installment in the "qatsi" trilogy, makes its way into select theaters, director Godfrey Reggio's first two films—1983's Koyaanisqatsi and 1988's Powaqqatsi, the release of which has been held up for years for legal reasons—are finally being released to DVD. The three films are anomalies in world cinema: They're slick, expensive, avant-garde essay-poems, seen by far more people than would ordinarily queue up for such arty abstraction. Their popularity, due in no small measure to the catchy Philip Glass scores and plenty of eye-popping camera tricks, leads some viewers to regard Reggio's achievement with the same wary eye cast upon The Three Tenors, or Kokopelli figurines. Reggio invites suspicion with his titles alone. Derived from the Hopi language, Koyaanisqatsi roughly translates as "life out of balance," and Powaqqatsi as "life in transition," which makes the films' cockeyed images of the natural and man-made world into an unambiguous indictment … [Read more...] about Koyaanisqatsi

When Tyler Perry's Diary Of A Mad Black Woman opened to more than $20 million in box-office receipts, it was not merely a movie to be considered, but a phenomenon to be grappled with. Just ask Roger Ebert, whose dismissive review provoked an avalanche of hate mail from Perry's enormous fan base, which he had spent years accumulating through his stage productions and DVDs. His name had barely been whispered in mainstream circles prior to Diary's success, which says a lot about how unresponsive Hollywood has been to the large numbers of black Christian viewers seeking family entertainment. And though Perry's films are hard to defend on aesthetic grounds—the crazy shifts in tone from operatic melodrama to broad comedy could cause seizures—it's equally hard to begrudge the underserved audiences who embrace them so passionately. Essentially a smoother-running redux of Diary, Perry's new Madea's Family Reunion follows the same basic formula: The serious side concerns a sheepish … [Read more...] about Madea’s Family Reunion

When Massive Attack released its first album Blue Lines in 1991, the powers-that-be requested that the Bristol trio drop the "Attack" surname in light of the Gulf War. The action was fitting artistically as well, as "attack" isn't the word that best describes the pioneering trip-hop band's approach. "Massive" is more like it, especially considering the long list of musicians influenced or aided by Massive Attack: Portishead's Geoff Barrow, Tricky, producer Nellee Hooper (of Björk, Madonna, U2, and Soul II Soul fame), Neneh Cherry, and an uncountable number of new groups owe a large debt to Massive Attack's revolutionary merging of dub, reggae, hip-hop, soul, and ambient music. It's been four years since the band's Protection, and the stakes are high for the new Mezzanine: After all, as the progenitor of a genre, Massive Attack must hold its own against a legion of imitators just to save face. Fortunately, Mezzanine does just that. Enlisting the vocal support of Cocteau Twins' … [Read more...] about Massive Attack:

There are dopey lowbrow comedies, and then there are transcendently dopey lowbrow comedies, the kind in which barnyard animals get intoxicated, authority figures are thrown in pools, and slobs invariably win their eternal struggle with the ascot-wearing forces of snobdom. This year has seen too many of the first sort: dim, joyless exercises in Farrelly worship like Bubble Boy, Tomcats, Not Another Teen Movie, and Say It Isn't So. Thankfully, How High, the starring debut of the hip-hop and comedy team Method Man and Redman, falls squarely into the latter category. A delightfully silly college stoner comedy, How High casts America's Most Blunted as a pair of underachieving marijuana enthusiasts whose lives take a drastic turn for the better when they begin smoking pot that renders them capable of acing tests. Courted by top colleges, the pair enrolls in Harvard, where they run afoul of the school's stuffy dean (Obba Babatundé) due to their madcap antics, constant weed-smoking, and … [Read more...] about How High

The words "high expectations" and "Adam Sandler" are as foreign to each other as snow to the Sahara. The comedian's brand of broad humor boils down to bad taste and low class at their most extreme, but, as is the case with the work of most of his fellow Saturday Night Live alums, even Sandler's dumbest movies offer at least a couple of guilty chuckles. His golf comedy Happy Gilmore is a bona fide hoot. But woe be to anyone who watches The Waterboy in hopes of even the most desperate snicker. Sandler plays a water-obsessed, socially inept backwoods swamp rat in Louisiana whose repressed rage makes him the perfect remedy for an ailing university football team. While his possessive mother (a slumming Kathy Bates) doesn't want him playing "fusball" or hanging out with local skank Fairuza Balk, effete coach Henry Winkler convinces him that playing football will be the doorway to the education he's always desired. Essentially an extended cross between Sandler's "canteen boy" and "Cajun man" … [Read more...] about The Waterboy

If you like to hunt campers with bows and arrows, chop them up on the dining-room table, eat their boiled meat, and keep their possessions as souvenirs, you might be a redneck. Or so it would seem in Wrong Turn, a horror film predicated on the notion that the wilderness of West Virginia is home to horrors much worse than the country roads and mountain mamas John Denver used to sing about. So medical student Desmond Harrington discovers when, after encountering a traffic jam on the way to a job interview, he decides to take a shortcut through the woods. There, he bumps into five stranded hikers on a vacation designed to cheer up heartbroken Eliza Dushku, whose mind shifts from her loutish ex-boyfriend to more immediate concerns when a trio of cackling, overalls-clad, misshapen mountain men begin picking off the group one at a time. Like House Of 1000 Corpses, Wrong Turn is a throwback to the friends-get-terrorized-in-the-middle-of-nowhere subgenre of horror films that thrived in the … [Read more...] about Wrong Turn

For young people hitting the heart of adolescence between 1984 and 1987, John Hughes was the name-brand self-appointed voice of a generation, churning out teen comedies and romances as quickly as the money rolled in. He found a winning formula and stuck with it: the star-crossed love of two characters from opposite cliques, the popular and the unpopular, which usually translated into the rich and the poor. Hughes always identified with the underdog, but his films are often fantasies of upward mobility, ending with the Cinderella hero realizing that it's okay to keep the glass slippers. If Hughes wanted teens to transcend the dollar, then today's teen comedies have honored his legacy, by accepting his vision of high school as a brutal caste system while throwing out the class issues altogether. In a way, it's actually refreshing to revisit Hughes' carbon-copy romantic comedies Pretty In Pink and Some Kind Of Wonderful, because it's become so rare for screen teens to fret about not … [Read more...] about Pretty In Pink

Bryan Singer's first two X-Men movies are pop-culture anomalies: big-budget, special-effects-driven superhero blockbusters that get just about everything right. But after Singer exited the franchise to helm Superman Returns, the producers did something egregiously wrong: They handed over the reins to Brett Ratner, whose handling of Rush Hour 2 and Red Dragon proves he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a successful franchise, even one he helped create. The X-Men have survived mutation, persecution, and supervillainous foes hell-bent on their destruction. But can they survive Ratner? Well, no. The always-welcome Ian McKellen leads an overstuffed cast as a villainous mutant intent on destroying a mutation "cure" and its source, a spooky little boy (Cameron Bright) who isn't a character so much as a sentient plot point with unnerving blue eyes. To defeat McKellen and his band of punky new recruits—most of whom appear to be on loan from a Stranglers concert circa 1981—the … [Read more...] about X-Men: The Last Stand

One of the persistent clichés in profiles on celebrities is the writer's self-indulgent attempt to set the scene, opening an article with trivial details about staring wistfully out a hotel window with John Cusack or sharing a pillow with Jewel. Anything, it seems, to avoid simply talking about the subject's work and what might make it exciting. As a young journalist for Rolling Stone, Cameron Crowe profiled many rock icons from the '70s, and his ambitious, semi-autobiographical Almost Famous isn't immune to some of the same pitfalls. While vivid, deeply felt, and fitfully exhilarating, it unfolds like a misshapen magazine piece, swirling with interesting peripheral details that never quite snap into hard focus. Part of the problem is that Crowe's loose, episodic style works best when he has a strong personality to drive the story, as he did with Cusack in Say Anything… or Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. His ensemble piece Singles, for all its intermittent charms, seems … [Read more...] about Almost Famous

American anime connoisseurs were hip to Hayao Miyazaki even when his imaginative, epic adventures were only available on the bootleg market. But average moviegoers (or, more accurately, video renters) first encountered Miyazaki via My Neighbor Totoro, an atypical and arguably non-ideal way to meet the master. Compared to the breathtaking action sequences and elaborate fantasy landscapes of Miyazaki's early features (not to mention subsequent films like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away), the genteel, languid Totoro seems at first slight, and even soporific. The sliver of a story—about two girls who move to a small village with their father while their mother recovers from a life-threatening illness—never gets past first gear, and the heroines' few encounters with the mystical forest spirit Totoro hardly justify the movie's title. Yet My Neighbor Totoro may be the most enduring entry in Miyazaki's impressive filmography, because it's so particular about the nuances of … [Read more...] about My Neighbor Totoro/Whisper Of The Heart

In the animation world, Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki has staked out his own inimitable territory, away from both the unsavory excesses of his anime counterparts and the crass commercial machinery seizing Disney and its imitators. A box-office phenomenon in its native country, Miyazaki's epic, visually sumptuous Princess Mononoke may come as a shock to fans used to the quirky, idiosyncratic comic touches abundant in his My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. While the change in scale allows him to expand his vision to include capital-letter themes and strikingly graphic panoramas, he loses much of the coherency and offbeat charm that set him apart in the first place. Featuring a surprisingly conservative translation by Neil Gaiman and a merely passable cast of celebrity voice talent, this version does little to clear up Miyazaki's muddled eco-allegory, but it should still deliver American neophytes to his lush, meticulously rendered drawing style. A hero's mythical journey … [Read more...] about Princess Mononoke

Charlie Kaufman's screenplay titles—Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, and the new Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind—each have either a metaphysical or an anthropological ring, either of which amounts to a detached sense of looking in from the outside. Not that his films are clinical or devoid of feeling; quite the opposite. One stop removed from the human psyche, Kaufman can examine its most rudimentary needs and desires, the sensory impulses that light up in response to love, loss, and the hope for transcendence. Perhaps his least accessible work to date, and arguably his most audacious and deeply felt, Eternal Sunshine spends much of its run time in a constant state of disorientation, rattling around inside the human conscience like a rat in a maze. As directed by music-video wizard Michel Gondry, whose gift for plasticity gets more of a workout than it did in his underrated but less-inspired Human Nature, Eternal … [Read more...] about Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

Jack Black's priest-turned-Mexican-wrestler in Nacho Libre is well on his way to middle age, but he's ultimately no more of an adult than Jon Heder's iconic spaz from Napoleon Dynamite. Though still only in his 20s, Nacho Libre and Napoleon Dynamite co-writer/director Jared Hess never seems to have evolved beyond a middle-school mentality, and his films resemble meticulously assembled scrapbooks of his pet obsessions. In Napoleon Dynamite, he lingered lovingly over the geekiest recesses of high-school loserdom. In Nacho Libre, he sticks Jack Black in ill-fitting tights and juxtaposes Catholic iconography with the gaudy spectacle of Mexican wrestling. But by making Black a humble, abashed servant of the Lord, he's tamed his anarchic, wild-man energy. Hess' family-friendly, God-fearing, Nickelodeon-sponsored Libre leaves Hess' reputation as a nice Mormon fellow intact, but Nacho could definitely benefit from less godliness and more demonic power. Black, who also produced the film … [Read more...] about Nacho Libre