Some day it’ll just end. Everyone will go home, get on with their lives. Tall grass will cover the battlefields. And all the pilots we’ve lost won’t mean a damn thing.
– Reed Cassidy, Flyboys
Reviews – Movies: F
RATINGS KEY
0/5 – Terrible. Not worth the eyestrain.
1/5 – Bad. Only watch it if there’s nothing else on TV.
2/5 – Okay. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either.
3/5 – Average. Rent it and watch it once.
4/5 – Good. Worth watching a few times (or even buying).
5/5 – Excellent. Watch it, buy it, quote it, love it.
Flightplan (2006) • Reviewed 4.28.07
0/5
Hitchcock’s classic The Lady Vanishes gets a high-tech update: a recently-widowed mother (Jodie Foster), returning from Europe to America on a double-decker passenger jet, wakes up to find her young daughter missing... and nobody else on the plane can even remember seeing the little girl. As the mother frantically searches the plane, her tension mounts—well, not really, since Jodie Foster starts out the movie on the verge of a nervous breakdown and hits full-blown hysteria within ten minutes, so she’s already plateaued by the time she’s running along the aisles. As bad as I knew this movie was going to be, I certainly expected a better performance from Foster, who spends the entire movie with the same expression on her face: furrowed brow, mouth open, eyes bulging like her head is about to explode. Of course, with a face like that, everyone on the plane is completely justified in thinking she’s a lunatic—and we, the viewers, are obviously supposed to doubt her sanity as well, because then we will be EXTRA SURPRISED when we finally get clued in on what’s really going on. Except not, because we are not fucking morons. It’s a bad trip right to the end, where we get a climax so ridiculous and illogical that I nearly wept for all the people who had spent good money to see this in a theater. But the real kicker came when one of my neighbors stole this movie from its Netflix envelope before the mail carrier arrived; if ever I pitied a thief, I do now. May this movie break their DVD player, so they may be spared the horror. One point to Peter Sarsgaard for out-acting Jodie Foster; everyone else involved in this gets a 0.
Flyboys (2006) · Reviewed 3.24.07
1/5
A tale of romance and adventure, set against the backdrop of war... but I just rented it for the flying machines, really. Unfortunately, I didn’t even get a decent plane fix; for a wannabe blockbuster, this movie has surprisingly cruddy special effects. The romance is bland, the subplots are blander, and even the dogfights are dull. It’s one of those movies that keeps hitting us over the head with the WAR BAD, WAR BAD, WARBADWARBAD message, yet blatantly encourages us to cheer every time a dirty Hun hurtles towards destruction, blasted to Hell by one of Our Boys. (But, of course, there’s no cheering when even the ugliest Yank screws up and gets gunned down.) James Franco spends a lot of time hunched over in his plane, wincing and turning away in manly horror as yet another two-dimensional character goes down in flames. I kept waiting for the zeppelin destruction that I’d seen in the trailers; when it finally came, it was ridiculously brief and cheaply done (and again, we’re supposed to cheer, but where do you think those Germans went when they leaped from the airship to escape the raging flames?). I watched it through to the end, but now I kind of wish I hadn’t—I should have winced and turned away in manly horror and thereby saved a few hours of my life.
Freeway (1996)
4/5 | Reviewed 11.16.07
A modern take on the classic tale of Little Red Riding Hood—only now the titular heroine is a troubled, illiterate teen with a crack-whore mother and an abusive stepfather, fleeing from Social Services and trying to get to her grandmother's trailer park by hitching a ride with a man named Bob Wolverton. Talk about your grim fairly tales. There's enough blood and violence in this film to put the goriest werewolf movie to shame. Reese Witherspoon seems a tad too mature and squeaky-clean to play such a fucked-up character, but she gives it a good effort, and the character is awesome—she's the kind of girl who, when threatened by a serial killer with a straight-edge razor, pulls a gun on him, cusses him out, pistol-whips him, gives him a lecture on bad manners, and then shoots him in the neck for good measure. And then gets down on her knees and asks God's forgiveness before taking the guy's wallet and going for a burger. Kiefer Sutherland is at his creepy, sociopathic best as Wolverton, the nice guy you just know can't be as good as he seems. For those who take their comedy black—very, very black.
