items tagged with The Rundown

CLICK

A quick scan of Adam Sandler's screen credits reveals that - if you include his cameos in pal Rob Schneider's comedies - Click is the 13th Sandler film I've reviewed over the past decade-plus, and of this baker's dozen, it's easily my favorite. Mind you, I still didn't like it much. Yet despite Click's predictable story arc and the inability of its star to shake off the Sandler Movie staples that generally make his films so wretched, it isn't bad. With its script by Steve Coren and Mark O'Keefe, Click has more than a few moments of true invention, and director Frank Coraci provides some unexpectedly clever visuals. And, best of all, it has Christopher Walken.

THE ALAMO

The Alamo is surprisingly not-bad. John Lee Hancock’s long-delayed drama is by no means a great movie, but it’s a pretty darned good audience movie, a middlebrow weeper like A Beautiful Mind or Titanic that, despite its flaws (and against your better judgment), you can find yourself really falling for.

Among the year’s seemingly endless spate of business-as-usual Hollywood product, with the remakes and sequels and – in the case of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines – a de facto remake of a sequel, I saw exactly one work in 2003 that, with absolutely no qualms, I would call a masterpiece, and it made its debut on HBO. (It was that kind of year.)
Read More About 2003 In Movies...

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.