items tagged with Christopher Walken

THE STEPFORD WIVES

As crummy movies go, Frank Oz’s remake of The Stepford Wives is pretty darned terrific. The film has been plagued by rumors of trouble on the set and post-production nightmares and general confusion throughout, and you can practically see these turmoils on the screen; the movie is bizarrely assembled and terribly edited – characters’ motivations change from scene to scene with little rhyme or reason – and it all falls apart before your eyes. Oz doesn’t seem to have a clue how to treat the material, but one person does: screenwriter Paul Rudnick. He knows exactly what he’s up to – a bitchy, campy tale involving a group of nerdy men who enact revenge on the successful women they feel inferior to – and individual scenes in this Stepford Wives are so hilarious and dead-on smart that you wind up enjoying the movie despite being aware of how awful much of it is. Like last summer’s Rudnick-written Marci X, it’s a perfect example of a comedy in which individual set pieces far exceed the whole, and it can be blissfully enjoyed on its own underwhelming terms.

SPELLBOUND

I have always considered it a personal mission to convince people that documentaries can actually be fun – recently, I enjoyed a hard-won victory when my mother (who, as she is wont to say, “gets enough drama in life”) acceded to watch Bowling for Columbine and found herself liking it – and, bless their hearts, the folks at the Brew & View appear to as well.

FREAKY FRIDAY

Everyone I know has enormous fondness for the 1976 Disney comedy Freaky Friday, wherein mother Barbara Harris and daughter Jodie Foster switched bodies and discovered, on one very strange day, how the other half lived.

BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE

Since she executive-produced the film, I shouldn’t feel too badly for Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House; she obviously knew what she was getting into.

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND

George Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, plays like the funny, ironic companion piece to A Beautiful Mind, and the new film shrewdly, and hysterically, plays off your knowledge of Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning opus.