items tagged with Elisabeth Shue

LOOPER

Rian Johnson’s Looper, a time-travel thriller set primarily in the year 2044, casts Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a contract killer whose life is upended with the arrival of his latest target: his older self, who has been transported from the year 2074 and is played by Bruce Willis. This means that, with Gordon-Levitt delivering rather uncanny likenesses of his co-star’s traditional scowls and smirks – and with the younger actor’s countenance bizarrely altered to resemble the elder actor’s familiar face – Willis essentially plays both leading roles ... which isn’t the most enticing of setups if, like me, you generally find one Bruce Willis more than enough.

PIRANHA 3D

Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D puts you in the unexpected position of actively rooting for the piranha, not because the effects are all that great (they're actually pretty awful), but because more flesh for the fish means fewer irritating humans to put up with.

HAMLET 2

Hamlet 2 has been designed as a broad farce, but I'll tell you: In the movie's climactic number, when Hamlet and Jesus took their time machine back to the night of Hamlet's death, and Hamlet prevented Gertrude from drinking the poisoned wine, and Hamlet found it in himself to finally forgive his father, and the Tucson Gay Men's Chorus sang Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," it was pretty damned moving.

Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.

HIDE & SEEK

(Warning: Potential spoilers – for both Hide & Seek and Million Dollar Baby – ahead. Proceed with caution.) If you haven’t yet seen Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, it might be too late to do so without prejudice, since numerous critics, pundits, and op-ed writers have probably already ruined the film for you.

SPACE COWBOYS

There’s so much goodwill invested in Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys, mostly stemming from its venerable and accomplished cast, that I feel like a killjoy for saying that the movie itself is really mediocre.