items tagged with Eddie Murphy

MIRROR MIRROR

Mirror Mirror is a slightly modernized, family-comedy version of the Snow White fairy tale, and offhand, I can think of few directors less suited to the material than this film’s Tarsem Singh, the music-video veteran whose big-screen credits include those wildly baroque (and decidedly adult) spectacles The Cell and Immortals. Yet every once in a while, when a director is spectacularly wrong for a project, the results can be much more interesting than if he were right for it, and that certainly seems the case here; this aimless, pointless little trifle is mostly a drag, but I can only imagine how deadening it might’ve been without Singh at the helm.

SILENT HOUSE

It’s entirely possible that you’ll need to have seen an awful lot of horror movies – particularly an awful lot of awful horror movies – to be jazzed by Silent House, considering that it’s basically just 90 minutes of a young woman being terrorized by barely glimpsed figures and startling noises in her family’s lakeside summer home. (Contrary to the title, this house is anything but silent.) Yet if you can get past the paper-thin storyline and a climax that’s less “Aa-a-a!!!” than “Hu-u-uh?!?”, the movie proves to be a terrifically nerve-racking and utterly fascinating scare flick, because from first shot to last, the action not only takes place in real time, but seems to have been filmed in one continuous take.

Every January, I share my numerical rankings of the 10 most enjoyable movies I saw during the previous year. I do not, however, share my numerical rankings of all the other titles I caught during those 12 months, as such a list would, I think, be hopelessly arbitrary, terribly self-indulgent, and something that only a person with too much time on his hands would attempt.

Let’s get cracking, shall we?

TOWER HEIST

A lot of people make a lot of fun of director Brett Ratner, partly because his résumé – which includes not one, not two, but three Rush Hour movies – makes it so darned easy to.

IN TIME

Set in either the distant future or some Bizarro World version of the present, Andrew Niccol’s sci-fi thriller In Time imagines an Earth in which time is literally our universal currency; an eight-hour work shift can add a few days to your life span, but a trip to the grocery store will cost you two weeks. (A slowly ticking, neon-green clock embedded in your forearm tells you just how much time you have left to spend.) It’s also an Earth in which humans have been genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, and are then allowed one year more before their bodies shut down completely ... unless, of course, they have the proper means, or the proper lack of morals, to buy or steal as much extra time as they want.