06 Jun 2006

"The Break-Up" Is Hard to View: Also, "The Living Sea"

By Mike Schulz

THE BREAK-UP

There are a whole bunch of different movies circulating within the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston comedy The Break-Up, and every single one of them is more enjoyable than the one they're stuck in. Director Peyton Reed's film concerns the battle of wills that commences once Vaughn's Gary and Aniston's Brooke decide to split, but here are five of The Break-Up's subplots that, I'm guessing, would have made for far more entertaining feature-length viewing

21 Mar 2006

E for Extraordinary: "V for Vendetta," "She's the Man," "The Shaggy Dog," "The Human Body," and "Bugs!"

By Mike Schulz

V FOR VENDETTA

A day after seeing it, I'm still a bit shaken by John McTeague's graphic-novel adaptation V for Vendetta. Action blockbusters - not to mention action blockbusters based on comic books - have been so dour and pedestrian of late that I don't know if I've fully grasped the extent of Vendetta's greatness yet; it's the kind of explosive, overwhelming work that gets better and better the more you think of it. The film is a little 1984, a little Phantom of the Opera, and, with its screenplay by the Wachowski brothers, more than a little Matrix-y, but it casts an extraordinary, devastating spell. It may be the most fully realized film of a graphic novel the genre has yet seen, a movie you want to talk (and argue) about long after the closing credits.

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