Film

[NOTE: Film Critic Kevin Bowen is visiting his hometown – El Paso, Texas – and attending the third annual Plaza Classic Film Festival. The festival, running from Aug. 4 to Aug. 14, features 80 classic films. Bowen will write sporadic reports based on his viewing of the classic films as watched at the festival.] NOT…

[NOTE: Film Critic Kevin Bowen is visiting his hometown – El Paso, Texas – and attending the third annual Plaza Classic Film Festival. The festival, running from Aug. 4 to Aug. 14, features 80 classic films. Bowen will write sporadic reports based on his viewing of the classic films as watched at the festival.] THE…

A TASTY TICKING CLOCK Like any good pizza delivery driver with a bomb vest strapped to his body, 30 Minutes or Less knows how to get there, get the job done, and get it over with a second to spare. When it comes to explosives, every second counts, and there aren’t many films with such…

TWO GUYS WHO LOOK ALIKE SWITCH BODIES This summer, we’ve reached a crisis point in the American comedy: why can’t Jason Bateman get promoted or laid? The summer comedies are stocked with middle-aged men who dream of having sex but never do. That’s a healthy sign for marriage, I suppose. But if you’re a married…

IN THE HEAT OF THE IRISH NIGHT What is a veteran Irish policeman to do? There he is, tending to his rounds of bar fights and domestic disturbances. Stealing drugs off car wreck victims.   Indulging in lovely imported visitors from “the agency.” Thinking nothing of selling the IRA back their lost-and-found weapons. In The Guard,…

IS BETTER QUALITY THE SAME AS HIGH QUALITY? I like marriage. I do. At least in theory. I am unmarried, myself. But my parents are married. My friends are married. It seems like a good deal. So why is it that more and more, I find myself rooting against marriages when I watch them on…

LIVING (AND FIGHTING CRIME) IN THE PAST Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. But he likely invented modern life.   He then used his fortune to build Greenfield Village, a park dedicated to the preservation of the horse and buggy world he had nudged to the past. The further we go with technology, the more…

HORRIBLE COMEDIES Horrible Bosses pretends to be a movie for all people who hate their bosses, but really it’s a film for all people who hate film. Directed by Seth Gordon and partly produced by Brett Ratner, it’s the a classic case of a movie that doesn’t seem that wretched, until you start to take…

A PROMISING TRANSFORMATION:   ONLY HALF BAD A funny thing happened on my way to pan Michael Bay’s midsummer mega monster mash Transformers: Dark of the Moon. It turned out that I liked about half of it. Strangely, that would not be the gargantuan 3-D final hour of demolished Chicago skyscrapers, impossible Special Forces stunts, flying…

MATER THE SIDEKICK CAR Imagine that after   Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace George Lucas ditched the whole Anakin/Vader storyline and turned   Attack of the Clones over to Jar Jar Binks. If you can imagine that without crawling into a mental fetal position, then you can imagine Cars 2.   In this animated sequel from…

MEDIOCRE HERO Have you ever gotten into a conversation – and for the life of me, I hope you haven’t – about the supposed fascist underpinnings of comic book superheros? A film that accepts and teases this fascist nature is The Green Lantern. Test pilot Hal Jordan joins an interplanetary army built on the idea…

ABSENCE GROWS MYSTERY If Terrence Malick is a saint of cinema, then this is his holy lesson. Over a four-decade career, the mercurial American visionary has mastered absence and flowered a daunting mystery. After making one of the most impressive debuts in American film history, 1973’s Badlands, he quit talking to the press. After the…

WOODY AS WILSON, OWEN AS ALLEN Yes, you can believe what you’ve been reading – Midnight in Paris really is the best Woody Allen film in a long time. It’s a love letter to Paris, an ode to the Jazz age and the writers of the Lost Generation, and a romance with the past. It’s…

PACKED WITH ACTION, BEREFT OF LAUGHS Kung Fu Panda 2 breaks new ground in the history of cinema. Â  Everyone knows you can’t use 3-D in the second movie in a series. You have to wait until the third one. Breaking the 3-D sequel custom appears to be Panda’s lone innovation. Otherwise, this is one of…

WHO PIRATES OF THE CARES? The thing about Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides – if anyone still cares – is that it’s an improvement for the series. But that’s just it…no one still cares. Of course, the box office will argue with me. A disturbing number of dollars will pile into the bank…

AND THE NOMINEE WAS… The thriller Incendies, a 2010 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film, is a Canadian product spoken in French about events that took place, fictionally speaking, in Lebanon during its infamous civil war. The death of a Canadian immigrant with a secret past, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), places the burden of discovery…

FIFTH TIME’S A CHARM It’s the moment that we’ve all been waiting for! No, not when Vin Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock†Johnson throw each other through a series of windows, as they sweat nails in a scuffle only missing a cage. (The moment when The Rock spits out broken glass is precious.) It’s rather…

HERE WE GO AGAAAAAIN! A train. A bomb. A bomber. A mystery woman. And a ticking clock. Source Code, the second film by Moon director and David Bowie offspring Duncan Jones, builds itself out of these classical Hitchcock-style elements. Through a computer virtual reality program, a military program places an injured air force captain onto…

METHOD SPOOKING There is one good thing about the indie horror flick Insidious, directed by the original SAW helmer James Wan: Â  the awesome retro-Bernard Herrmann-style score, all nutso violins in the key of Psycho. Otherwise, there’s not so much to say about a pretty conventional schlock horror story that might as well be made by…

BRADLEY COOPER LEAPS FROM DULL HEARTTHROB TO ENGAGING ACTOR Has there been some secret value to a flipped-out Charlie Sheen declaring himself the Nietzschean Ubermensch, living by a porn star code that mere mortals could only hope to appreciate? I would say yes. In his little henpecked heart, every man would love to stand on…