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A Room with a Preview by Lonny Pugh Disappointed with the flick you saw last weekend? Don't despair. Always eternal optimists, we hope this week will be different. BLADE II There's carnage, and then there's carnage. After drowning all competition in a bath of blood, the Blade coven was bound to return to the big screen, and here it is: Blade II, this time directed by Guillermo del Toro (director of the better-than-it-should-have-been Mimic and the much-lauded festival creepfest The Devil's Backbone). Wesley Snipes, returning as Blade, and Kris Kristofferson, returning as Whistler (despite dying off with a big ol' self-inflicted gunshot wound in the first one--hey, it's a vampire movie, folks), are joined this time out by Norman Reedus, Leonor Varela and martial arts wunderkind Donnie Yen. Their mission: to fight a vicious new strain of mutants that has grown--oh, does it matter? There's both blood and style, and more people to kick more ass than last time. It should be noted that the original Blade was not just a hit with 11-year-old boys; critics nationwide, while dabbing their foreheads and fighting feelings of nausea from seeing all that red stuff, gave it high marks for style, inventiveness and, heck, even the story. E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL In the Spielbergian tradition of expanding on two initials without a colon between the abbreviation and the definition (see A.I. Artificial Intelligence), E.T.'s red finger is lighting up in 2002 much as it did 20 years ago, long before Drew Barrymore starred as Amy Fisher and married Tom Green, and also long before little Henry Thomas played young Norman Bates in Psycho IV. This 20th anniversary edition, however, does sport some widely reported changes--not just better special effects but controversial touches like substituting fed guns with walkie-talkies, etc. Take a kid and see if they recognize the house as the one a nearly naked adult Drew stumbles up to in Charlie's Angels after falling from Sam Rockwell's Space Needle-ish pad. |
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SORORITY BOYS The Sorority Boys campaign thus far resembles the best in the recycling of elements permanently embedded in motion-picture consciousness. There's the logical only-on-the-big-screen, no-other-choice-but-to-dress-in-drag plotline, calling to mind everything from Some Like It Hot to "Bosom Buddies," the American Beauty tagline ("Look Closer," blares the poster, above the "wait, those aren't girls" picture of pretty stars Barry Watson, Michael Rosenbaum and Harland Williams), and there's the fact that there's already a sequel in the works, recycling it all yet again. This is not a cynical rant--what's important is that the elements gel. This is the type of story that can be told 5,000 times and still work, and the preview shows all three actors in completely contrived, non-unique, and--oh, yeah--totally hilarious bits from the "Oops, I need a girl voice" scene to the "Hey, you're prettier in drag than me" scene to the "Knocking a girl way harder than you should" scene. STOLEN SUMMER Could there be more brouhaha over a small-budget film about a Catholic boy's summer friendship with a Jewish boy? First there was the online screenwriting contest put on by look-they-blinked! press magnets Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Writer/director Pete Jones eventually won a million-dollar budget (quickly exceeded) to direct his script for Miramax, with Damon, Affleck and Chris Moore producing. While gathering up Bonnie Hunt, Aidan Quinn, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Kevin Pollak and a couple young unknowns, Jones had the whole beginning-to-end process taped for an HBO documentary series, by which his every method and breath could be deconstructed by every last pay-cable-possessing film school geek nationwide. No pressure, right? Now all that's left is the film itself, finally in theaters, about a boy whose spiritual uncertainty grows all the more important when he develops a friendship with a boy who's A) Jewish and B) sick. The story sounds like it could be a nice, low-key slice-of-life story (let's all be thankful the winning script didn't involve a troubled twentysomething romance or a heist gone bad), and Jones has assembled a supremely winning and able cast. |
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AT THE VIDEO STORE TUESDAY, MARCH 26TH The Iron Monkey is neither iron nor a monkey...In K-PAX, a town wonders: is Kevin Spacey crazy or just an alien?...A writer finds his Colombia hometown isn't quite what he remembered, and falls in love with an innocent young boy who happens to be a dealer and killer in Our Lady of the Assassins...Life as a House makes audiences worldwide ponder if their lives more resemble a dilapidated shack, the requisite neighborhood monstrosity or a gleaming marble wonder...'N Sync's Lance Bass puts his music cred On the Line in a story about missing your window but creating another...and Angelina Jolie's clothes must be on the line, too, because they're not on her body in Original Sin. |