items tagged with Airplane!

STAR TREK

J.J. Abrams' Star Trek revamp is the second pop-mythology origin tale that Hollywood has delivered this month, and it's a pleasure to report that the film is everything Wolverine isn't: speedy, smart, thrilling, funny, and, in the end, almost criminally enjoyable.

Hollywood, in its infinite wisdom, chose to open a whopping seven wide releases this past Friday, and since the market apparently wasn't glutted enough, also expanded distribution of the Ed Harris western Appaloosa from 14 theatres to 1,045. As business strategies go, this one was a bit of a head-scratcher, but it was refreshing to see a weekend when there truly was something new for everyone - the only people screwed in the deal, it seems, were movie critics without access to press previews.

Oh hey, that's me!

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS

National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the follow-up to 2004's globe-trotting-archaeologist adventure, could generously be termed "perfunctory"; it gives (family) audiences exactly the formulaic, Indiana Jones-lite action, romance, and humor they adored in the original. It could also, less generously, be described as "crummy," as returning director Jon Turteltaub ensures that every remedially staged sequence has the same bland, going-through-the-motions tone as the one that came before. (At least its predecessor provided a few jokes.)

SNAKES ON A PLANE

Incessant buildup for a potential Hollywood blockbuster is nothing new, of course. But in the case of Snakes on a Plane, it was the nature of the buildup that proved fascinating; everything hyped about this cheesy scare flick - the hysterically candid title, the presence of Samuel L. Jackson in bellowing motherf---er mode, the re-tooling to secure an R rating from its original PG-13 - seemed to promise, "This movie is gonna suck, and you're gonna love it." Offhand, I can't think of another movie that was so aggressively - one might say honestly - marketed as the schlock it was almost certain to be. By the time the movie opened last Friday, the anticipation among connoisseurs of cinematic crap had reached such a fever pitch that nothing less than the Best Bad Movie of All Time would do.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Snakes on a Plane isn't the best bad movie of all time. But it'll still do.

Jeez, you take one week off from regular movie reviewing and you fall so behind … .