TheRetroCritic

So few movies I've seen on the big screen that left me with a feeling of "what the hell did I just watch?". There was The Time Machine , which just kinda ended, Broken Flowers , which I just didn't get, a couple of others and Zack And Miri Make A Porno . I mean, it's not like the subject matter was a big surprise, after all, the title is pretty darn clear! That said the movie I got was very different from what I had imagined. For one thing: they don't actually make a porno. We're teased early on with the possibility of Jason Mewes and co. taking on "Star Whores" but that just crashes and burns and the film becomes about making a porno in a coffee shop but then it turns out the film's not about that all but in fact is all about the Seth Rogen/Elizabeth Banks romance. This would work had the film been substantial enough in various domains (laughs, heart, smarts) but this is a bare movie which... I guess fits the porno theme in a way.

It's funny how some movies shouldn't work and technically don't but totally do. Mallrats is one of those movies. Cinematically, it's all over the place. As a romantic comedy, it gets pretty corny and you could literally take out TS's (Jeremy London) subplot out entirely, replace it with more dick jokes and the whole movie would be even better for it. Not classier but better. As it stands, the tone is kinda hit-and-miss and some of the performances either fall flat (Claire Forlani's Brandi) or are hammy as hell (Michael Rooker). The result is a film which feels like many different types of movies stuck together randomly into some sort of post-modern 90's collage: the dialogs have a Woody Allen-esque verbosity to them every so often, all the Jay and Silent Bob stuff is pure Wile E. Coyote cartoon, the gross out jokes are straight out of something like Caddyshack so it's a weird mix to say the least. That said, as with several other Smith flicks,

You'd think a Die Hard film in which John McClane rides a plane, flies a car into a helicopter and runs Maggie Q over into an elevator shaft would be pretty darn classic. Well, somehow Die Hard 4.0 (or Live Free Or Die Hard ) found a way to not make that into the best THING that 2007 had to offer. This sequel sees Bruce Willis' NYPD cop (now detective) being assigned the task of picking up some computer hacker, played by a grating Justin Long, and bringing him to the FBI for questioning. As it turns out, the kid was used as a pawn by a terrorist organisation (run by Timothy Olyphant) to set-up a "firesale", basically a cyber attack resulting in financial meltdown. McClane and Matt (Long) are soon under fire and instead of sticking with the FBI they decide to take on Gabriel (Olyphant) themselves, which doesn't really seem like the most reasonable solution but hey. There'd be no movie otherwise. But this is partly why 4.0 doesn't really cu

Back in the day, The Matrix was the shit. Just when you thought sci-fi movies couldn't possibly blow your mind ever again, Matrix came along and changed everything. Here we had a mix of big ideas, comic-book visuals, anime-style philosophy, martial arts, ground-breaking special effects... it was cyberpunk at its coolest, smartest and most fun. It made Keanu Reeves, dark sunglasses, black trenchcoats/catsuits, mobile phones and computers badass. The Matrix was the very definition of "geek-gasm". Then it was announced that a trilogy would hit our screens and we all simultaneously emptied our bowels into our own shoes: we were THAT excited. The possibilities! Can you imagine The Matrix with an even higher budget? An expansion of that world with Neo flying and everything? Well, we got what we wanted I guess. Except... We wanted something good lol Watching it when it came out was certainly an experience. We were like 6 or 7 friends when I went to see it, completel

The prospect of Mark Dacascos kicking zombie ass in a post-apocalyptic city in an I Am Legend B movie was almost too glorious to put into words. Sadly, the only ass I ended up kicking was my own, for putting myself through such a dull, sluggish watch. Production company The Asylum have had the odd nice, creative surprise: Sherlock Holmes battling dinosaurs being one of the highlights. Here though, they've somehow managed to make a sci-fi epic with a martial-arts master fighting zombies about as boring and uninteresting as it could possibly get. An achievement in itself? Yeah... The sad thing is that had the film stuck to Dacascos and the creepy army guys things could have potentially become somewhat entertaining but Jennifer Lee Wiggins' insufferable tacked-on love interest, which comes in about halfway through, is just a pain to sit through. The bad acting coupled with the annoying little comedy routines she gets with Dacascos are definitely not the film's shining mom