Miscellaenous Movie Reviews

Been a little backed up at work, so I apparently haven't been posting here much. I'm sure the zero people who subscribe to the blog are disappointed. But here are the last few movies I've watched, none of which really deserve a whole post.

Bowfinger ended up being a pleasant enough little comedy, bordering on innocuous (but not to the degree of some of Steve Martin's other recent work). There were some nice background touches, like the illegal alien film crew that grew increasingly more sophisticated as the movie shoot went on. But on the whole, this movie basically defined its concept (a con-man filmmaker shooting a film around its star without his knowledge) and then didn't go much further than it needed to in using that concept. In particular, they strangely didn't do nearly as much as I thought they would with Eddie Murphy's portrayal of both the paranoid action star and his nerdy twin brother. Of course, after Norbit, maybe I should just be thankful. Three stars.

Kingpin didn't hold up nearly as well as I was expecting. I'm not a huge Farelley Brothers fan anyway, but this road film turned tiresome pretty quickly. The femme fatale character ended up being fairly schizophrenic - kindly one minute, greedy and self-centered the next - and Bill Murray's celebrity bowler character grew tiresome, as well. There's a few good lines ("It's kind of intimidating being around so many great athletes"), but give me The Big Lebowski over this any day for my bowling movie fix. Two stars.

Twelve Monkeys, on the other hand, held up better than I thought. Having already seen it (but not for a while), I already knew the twists coming up, and indeed, towards the end of the film, as Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe began to succumb to the inevitability of the history to come, things did begin to drag down a bit. But as it turned out, the airport-based finale still held dramatic impact and tension. Afterwards, one can't help but notice that for all of the star-power Brad Pitt ended up with for his portrayal of the insane Jeffrey Goines, that plot-line really ended up having little to do with the main thread - it was a giant red herring popping up throughout the film. But still, it's nice to see an intelligent use of time travel in a film (without requiring Cliff Notes a la Primer). Four stars.