Movie Review: The Eye

The Eye achieves a kind of Hollywood miracle you don’t see much of these days. It’s so stupendously awful the English language cannot contain it. Breaking free of the confines of human thought patterns, it prohibits mere mortals such as myself from crafting the similes and metaphors needed to communicate its utter stupidity. Perhaps one day a race of immortal aliens will develop the symbolic logic needed to probe the depths of this film’s idiocy. Only time will tell. In meantime, I will do my best to describe the worst turkey I’ve seen since The Forgotten (2004).

Five-Sentence Movie Reviews: Special Edition–The Mist (2007)

Yes–this review is longer than five sentences. Sue me.

* * *

The Mist (2007)
“You don’t have much faith in humanity, do you? None whatsoever.”

The Mist is based on a Stephen King novella of the same name. King’s story runs 133 pages, and leads the collection of horror tales in Skeleton Crew (1985). The movie was written and directed by Frank Durabont, and faithfully follows King’s text except for the ending. In a small New England town, a particularly violent thunderstorm is followed by a thick mist that rapidly descends on the townspeople before they have a chance to figure out what’s happening to them. The story focuses on a group of about thirty people trapped in a supermarket. Outside, the mist contains an assortment of bizarre, lethal creatures that attack anyone who wanders into it. Inside, the trapped occupants quickly divide into two factions, one falling under the spell of a religiously insane woman who interprets the mist as an apocalyptic judgment from God, and the other led by a level-headed graphic artist who attempts, as best he can, to reason his way through the nightmare.

Five-Sentence Movie Reviews (vol. 2)

It’s Friday, so if you have nothing to do this weekend but watch the Red Sox screw up the universal yin-yang even more by actually winning another World Series, allow me to recommend three great movies for your viewing pleasure: Spirited Away (2001), Night of the Demon (1957), and 12 Monkeys (1995).

Five-Sentence Movie Reviews (special edition)

My five-sentence movie reviews are normally reserved for DVD titles, since I don’t get to the theater too often. But today, I give you The Kingdom.

The Kingdom (2007)
“This is a very bad neighborhood.”

Lollipops and marbles figure in this action-packed version of “CSI” goes to the Middle East. After putting all its creative energy into the opening credits, The Kingdom offers 90+ minutes of Hollywood shoot-’em-up cliches: the good guys are indestructible expert marksmen, never run out of bullets, ever, and never get shot, until it’s time to make the audience cry. One character suffers a horrible ordeal that would send any ordinary human being into several years of psychiatric care, but through the magic of the movies he recovers with nary a mental scratch. Indeed, this same individual seems to exist only to twice ask an invasive and insensitive question, the second time so as to set up the final 30-second sequence in which The Kingdom makes its Big Point. It’s well taken, but after watching this film phone in its morality with two or three montages of dreamy music and sad eyes, all I could think of was, hey, this is where the remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990) ended up. But The Kingdom is well-executed on a technical level, so I enjoyed not liking it.

Five-Sentence Movie Reviews (vol. 1)

This is the first post in the series. You have no time to waste, so I’m getting right to the point with these puppies. Every now and then, I’ll throw in a sixth sentence at no charge.

Dark Star (1974).
“Don’t give me any of that intelligent life crap, just give me something I can blow up.”

John Carpenter’s directorial debut began as a student film in the early 70s. The producers demanded new scenes, but the DVD has Carpenter’s cut. Weary space travelers, twenty years out from Earth, contend with boredom, a lack of toilet paper, an alien beach ball, asteroid storms, and an artificially-intelligent bomb that has decided to detonate before leaving the ship. One of the astronauts (Doolittle) engages the bomb in a hilarious philosophical debate about its own existence. If you’re in the right frame of mind, Dark Star is a gem; otherwise, it’s just an oddity from a director known to occasionally lose his audience.