FLICKERS

HALLOWEEN II

Serial killer Michael Myers, it turns out, has mother issues. In this disappointing sequel to his intense and much underrated 2007 remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween, rock star turned filmmaker Rob Zombie sends Michael (Tyler Mane) on another killing spree at the urging of his now-dead mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), who appears (all too frequently) as a beckoning ghost standing next to a white horse. Once again, Michael hunts baby-sitter extraordinaire Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), who’s living, one year after the first film’s murders, with the town sheriff (Brad Dourif). In his 2007 movie, Zombie dug deep into Michael’s screwed-up, white trash family history, a process which humanized Michael and made his subsequent brutality all the more unsettling. This time, Zombie doesn’t appear to have many deep thoughts, and so Michael doesn’t just stab his victims, he slices and chomps them into gooey pulp — an overkill motif that actually feels false to the character and quickly becomes a depressing bore. As evidenced by his previous Halloween flick and 2005’s astonishing (and irredeemably brutal) The Devil’s Rejects, Zombie has talent to burn, but he’s slumming here, and one suspects that he knows it. (Chuck Wilson)

Pauline Kael on "All Fall Down" (1962)

Pauline Kael on “All Fall Down” (1962)

 

“…But the film turns out to be a portrait of the writer as an adolescent (Brandon deWilde plays the part) who grows up—“matures”—when he learns that the older brother he idolizes (Warren Beatty) is an empty wreck. Does anybody really grow up the way this boy grows up? He learns the truth, squares his shoulders, and walks out into the bright sunlight, as Alex North’s music rises and swells in victory. How many movies have pulled this damned visual homily on us, this synthetic growing-into-a-man, as if it happened all at once and forever? Suggested party game: ask your friends to tell about the summer they grew up. The one who tells the best lie has a promising career ahead as a Hollywood screenwriter.”

Review: G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra (from Village Voice/LA Weekly)

G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA

Credited as the first “action figure”, G.I. Joe came to life in 1964 as Hasbro’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie doll. There were actually four Joes—one for each branch of the armed forces—and in the imaginations of boys everywhere, they fought Nazis. Forty-odd years later, the Joes have evolved into an international band of soldiers seeking to bring down the evil Cobra Command. In the first of what’s likely to be a lucrative new film series, director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy series, Van Helsing) outfits actors Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans in “accelerator suits” that allow them to jump cars and busses in a single bound as they and their team attempt to retrieve a suitcase containing nano technology that a lunatic billionaire (Christopher Eccleston) plans to use for world domination. After a first hour that plays like a bad TV show, Sommers hits his groove with an over-the-top Paris chase sequence that in turn leads to an underwater finale that’s absurdly overproduced, momentarily diverting, and then instantly forgettable. The script—by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett— is full of embarrassingly bad dialogue, but a recent midnight screening audience laughed benignly, as if to say that they hadn’t exactly been expecting profundity and wit from a summer season toy soldier flick. (Chuck Wilson)