Search for 2008

Recently, Spike Lee was in the news feuding with Clint Eastwood about the absence of black servicemen in Eastwood's recent Iwo Jima duology. According to Lee, Eastwood ignored history in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima by not making...

When it comes to horror films, there's one basic principal to consider: consistency means everything. A movie can deviate as much as the filmmakers like from the laws of the real world as long as they establish and adhere to an alternate set of ru...

Amy Adams must enjoy fairy tales - this is the second one in which she has appeared during the last six months. Although Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day differs substantially in many key areas from Enchanted, both movies are anchored by Adams, whos...

Moscow, Belgium is a romantic comedy with a different flavor. Although it follows many of the familiar patterns that characterize movies of this genre, it does enough things differently to allow it to step outside of the norm. While some elements...

It has been a bad year for Indiana Jones and his knock-offs. In the wake of the lackluster Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we now have the second sequel to The Mummy, called Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. It is easily the worst o...

Romantic comedies are fantasies. They invite us to fall in love with the main characters as they fall in love with each other. That's difficult to accomplish when viewers find themselves actively disliking those characters. How is it possible to...

Strictly speaking, Never Back Down is not a remake, but it might as well be. The premise is familiar: underdog achieves self respect through training with a master then puts it all together for the big fight. Like a pop song suffering from overpl...

It's strange how the concept of two people wandering around a city at night falling in love has come of age in 2008. First, there was In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Now there's Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist. Of course, Richard Linklater can c...

I can kind-of, sort-of see how this story might work as a novel. Bad dialogue doesn't sound as howlingly awful when not spoken aloud. Idiotic plot contrivances don't seem as painful and obvious. A love affair depends only on the spell woven by t...

Whenever a movie addresses the subject of a girl living alone on a desert island, the soft porn warning lights go on. So it may come as a bit of a surprise that Nim's Island is a family film in which no one considers skinny-dipping. What's more, i...