Heather MacDonald’s
Been Rich All My Life
Opens July 21, 2006
Quad Cinemas
An ice cream cone of
a film with double scoops of sass and class!
Starring: Bertye
Lou Wood; Cleo Hayes; Marion Coles; Elaine Ellis;
and Fay Ray
Heather MacDonald’s
Been Rich All My Life is a feel-good
documentary about a talented and fun group of
Harlem dancers named the Silver Belles. These
ladies became friends back in the 30’s
when they were chorines at the Apollo Theater
and the Cotton Club. They continued their friendship
as the world of big bands and chorus shows died
off, taking up other lines of work to support
themselves. But then in 80’s they reunited
to form the Silver Belles.
Here is a quote
from their press release: Been Rich All
My Life, the new film by Sundance Award-winning
director Heather Lyn MacDonald, follows the
most unlikely troupe of tap dancers you'll find
today, the Silver Belles, a group of sassy hoofers
who met in the chorus lines of the Apollo Theater,
the Cotton Club and other legendary Harlem venues
of the 1930s. Now aged 84-96, they're still
not ready to give up dancing and have been performing
together again to standing ovations in the concert
halls of New York City.
MacDonald follows
the dancers as they rehearse and perform. We
get to know them both by seeing them in the
film and also through the stories they tell
about both themselves and each other (these
ladies are great gossips). And what stories
they tell. They travelled through the Jim Crow
South, but they also took a triumphant tour
of South America and perfomed with the USO during
World War II. We hear about the Harlem Clubs
that employed black workers but only allowed
white patrons. We here about their how their
dear friend Bertye Lou Wood took each of them
under her wing when they joined the chorus and
then we watch them stand by Bertye as she became
ill and passed on.
One of the most
remarkable things about watching this film was
seeing how their friendship and their love of
perfoming has kept them forever young. Or maybe
they were just born that way - forever young.
Quad Cinemas
|34 West 13th
Street New York, NY
Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's
Brothers of the Head (UK)
Opens July 28, 2006
Reviewed by
Frank J. Avella at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
Brothers
of the Head, the poignant and affecting
fiction feature debut from Keith Fulton and
Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) exhilarates
the viewer with it’s frenetic camerawork,
oddball docu-storytelling and intense performances.
This oddball
work appropriates from several distinct genres
to create it’s own. Imagine blending Zelig
with Velvet Underground with The
Elephant Man with Reds with Twin
Falls Idaho, and (here’s the paradox)
coming up with something alltogether original
and dazzling.
Brothers
of the Head takes you on a rocu-journey
inside the lives of conjoined twins Tom and
Barry Howe (real life identical twins Harry
and Luke Treadaway), who are discovered by an
1970’s music promoter and fine tuned into
a pop/rock act. Their story is told via “old
footage” from a documentary that was shot
at the time of their career genesis, along with
present interviews with those who were closest
to them.
It is an easy
sell that these boys actually existed (plot
spoiler--they did not) since the film unfolds
in a most extraordinarily real manner. Definitely
NOT a mock-umentary (a la This is Spinal
Tap), the characters and situations are
given quite serious due and envelop the audience
into complete belief capitulation.
Both Treadaway
brothers (in their film debut) deliver immensely
searing and impressive performances. Luke is
mesmerizing as Barry, the brazen, difficult
one and Harry is perfectly piercing as Tom,
the quiet ticking timebomb. The entire ensemble
are to be applauded as well.
Tony Grisoni
has crafted a clever and disturbing script based
on the novella by Brian Aldiss who gets kudos
for imagining this strange and surreal saga.
The original
songs are reminiscent of the glam/punk early
70’s but have a style all their own. The
lyrics are simultaneously satiric and sometimes
sentimental.
Brothers
builds to a truly haunting final image
that makes quite an impression. This is an alltogether
absorbing film that piques the viewers curiosity.
You find yourself desperate to know more about
the Howe twins...if only they actually had existed.
André Téchiné's
Changing Times
Opens Friday, July
14, 2006 at the Paris Theatre
Opening
Bastille Day at the Paris Theatre, Changing
Times is an intimate drama starring two
A-list giants of the cinema – Catherine
Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu. Yeah,
it’s from France. Moreover, there is
a lot of longing, pain, pathos, and hushed
conversation. But I’m not making fun,
because it really works, and if more films
like Changing Times were made in
the States – and released in the summer!
-- “Hollywood” might not be such
a dirty word for the first nine months of
the year.
More than anything, the French really love
their film actors. They’re respected
as purveyors of the nation’s artistic
heritage, and each new film seems a celebration
of all the emotional journeys we’ve
experienced with them in the past. In
Changing Times, it’s awfully hard
to resist Deneuve and Depardieu as first loves
encountering each other again after thirty
years. She’s totally believable as Cécile,
a wife and mother who has “been accused
of being cold,” leading a strained but
comfortable life in Tangiers as a radio host.
And he’s perfect as the awkward Antoine,
an accident-prone engineer who’s come
to Tangiers to oversee the construction of
a media center. The catch is that his trip
to the region is a ruse; he’s been in
love with her all along, and he’s come
to make her fall for him again. This is signified
by orchestrated contact, some nervous behavior
that borders on stalking, anonymous flowers…
and a heartbreaking old photo of the two famous
faces together, each in their glorious prime.
It may be Deneuve from Belle de Jour
and Depardieu from Loulou; whatever,
they’re beautiful, and the classic movie
memories enrich every moment they share together.
(They previously co-starred most notably in
Truffaut’s The Last Metro,
1980).
A highlight, without question, is a scene
that follows after their car breaks down,
and the couple is compelled to walk through
a forest to a seaside villa. The conversation
is touching and tinged with sadness. Director
André Téchiné (My
Favorite Season) wisely uses shadow here,
capturing a tentative human connection that
the rest of the film’s characters, who
are all younger, struggle to find.
Yes, there are other people in Changing
Times. It’s a movie about personal
stories, and the film is happily not content
to rest on the sheer weight of the two leads.
Ensemble is another great quality of French
cinema. There is Sami, Cécile’s
son, who has arrived at the family home in
Tangiers with Nadia, a Moroccan turned Parisian,
and her nine-year old son. The arrangement
is not what it seems; Sami has a former boyfriend,
a groundskeeper on a nearby estate, and Nadia
has come to town primarily to re-connect with
her twin sister Aicha, a devout Muslim who
shuns the company of men and works in a McDonald’s.
Strikingly, Lubna Azabal plays both sisters,
and through these two characters, Changing
Times dramatizes a cultural divide that
factors into every storyline.
Nadia is westernized (she’s a drug addict,
after all), and her condition soon catches
the attention of Nathan, Cécile’s
physician husband. Played by Gilbert Melki,
at least half of this role is curiously spent
in the family swimming pool. It’s a
fair suggestion that the character is adrift;
indeed, that all of them are trying to find
direction when love and country are so jarred
by – you guessed it – the changing
times. Téchiné, who is largely
unknown in the US outside of the art-house
circuit, is a subtle filmmaker who lets us
watch as the tension between France and North
Africa does more human damage, both universally,
and personally. (For greater combustion on
this subject, see 2005’ s French masterpiece
Cache). Even in a 2004-set film, it’s
striking to see Antoine in his tailored suits
supervising the local laborers on his Tangiers
construction project. At the same time, Téchiné
is adroit enough to use hand-held camera and
a noisy bulldozer montage to symbolize Antoine’s
personal devastation.
Changing Times offers a key event
that puts it all into perspective, but I won’t
mention it, even if the idea of “spoiler”
is almost beside the point in a film as nuanced
as this one. The surface pleasures are enough,
and that includes what is ultimately one of
Deneuve’s best performances in many
years. Watch, for instance, as she bolts her
broadcast booth and wildly berates Antoine
when he pays an uninvited visit to her radio
station, only to return, seconds later, to
her cool on-air demeanor as if she had merely
stopped to swat a fly. Changing Times
is Téchiné’s 4th film
with Deneuve, so they have that dazzling “short-hand”
we hear so much about in artistic collaborations.
As a film, Changing Times succeeds
along the same lines: If you happen to love
French cinema, it will meet you half way…
Ed Burns's
The Groomsmen
Opens Friday, July 14, 2006
Reviewed by the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
Reviewed by
Noelle Ashley
The Groomsmen
screened at the Tribeca Film Festival to
a full house. This funny, feel-good film is
written and directed by Ed Burns, who plays
Paulie, a man about to get married. The central
topic revolves around what it means to be a
grown up. At age thirty-five, Paulie and his
four childhood buddies are lovably dense in
this area – or are they?
Brittany Murphy
does a fine acting job as Sue, Paulie’s
fiancé. When she’s not touching
her pregnant belly, she is flailing her skinny
arms in anger at Paulie. Sue hates his blasé
attitude about their upcoming commitment.
The guys spend
a week hitting every possible spot for male
bonding: the pool hall, the bar, the fishing
boat, the golf course, band rehearsal in the
garage and a strip club. The official bachelor
party, however, is a baseball game that turns
into a brawl, in the tradition of their drinking,
blue-collar ways.
Instead of supporting
Paulie, the groomsmen burden the groom-to-be
with their own problems. His old friend TC (John
Leguizamo), who left town eight years ago, returns
with a secret. Jimbo (Donal Logue), Paulie’s
brother, has sibling rivalry and marriage issues
that have gone too far. Dez (Matthew Lillard),
a father of two who settled down at age twenty-two,
obsesses about getting their high school band
back together. Mike (Jay Mohr), Paulie’s
cousin, lives with his dad and has no date to
bring to the wedding.
The men are a
bunch of self-proclaimed derelicts trying to
understand life. John Leguizama said, “Behaving
badly in your thirties isn’t as cool as
behaving badly in your twenties.”
There is a sense
of realism to the movie, set in the Long Island
suburbs and filmed in the Bronx (City Island)
and Brooklyn (the Ditmas neighborhood).
Burns feels affection
for suburban life and he doesn’t believe
previous films do it justice. “I’ve
seen some films that paint a less than flattering
picture of life in the ‘burbs, as if the
suburbs cause or are responsible for a lot of
that dysfunction,” he said. “This
was in part a reaction to some of those other
films, but mostly just my looking back on the
world I grew up in and wanting to paint a realistic
picture of it.”
Brittany Murphy
calls Burns “the only writer/director
that I’ve ever worked with that, if someone
drops one little part of a speech out, he’ll
say, ‘If it keeps dropping then it’s
not supposed to be there because it’s
not organic and it doesn’t feel real.’”
Referencing her last film with Burns, Sidewalks
of New York, Murphy said, “All of
his films have just a feeling of a natural,
easy, flowing nature. Everybody is here because
they want to be, because they like Eddie and
they like working with Eddie, and that energy
is really incredible to be around every day
at work.”
In July, Bauer
Martinez Entertainment will distribute the film,
produced by Edward Burns, Philippe Martinez,
Aaron Lubin, and Margot Bridger on a $3.2 million
budget.
Like The
Brothers McMullen, Burns’ much-praised
debut, this character-driven tale is entertaining
but also meaningful. One touching moment is
when Paulie’s brother sits alone in his
house and sings the song he wrote for his wife
back in high school. In the previous scene,
he told her he couldn’t remember the words.
Andrucha Waddington’s
The House of Sand
Opens Friday, August 11, 2006
Portugese with Engish Subtitles
Shabby
Chic on the Moon
Reviewed by
Wendy R. Williams
The opening
scene of Andrucha Waddington’s The
House of Sand is dazzling. A wagon train
is being battered by horrendous winds as it
strugges across a raw moonscape of sand clifts.
A crazed old man, Vasco de Sá (Ruy
Guerra), is pushing a crew of exhausted drivers
and two bewildered women, his wife, Áurea
(Fernanda Torres), and her mother, Dona Maria
(Fernanda Montenegro), past a crater. The
scene appears to be set on a another planet
and in a way it is; the desert wastes of Northern
Brazil appear to be a place never before touched
by man.
Then they find
water and they stop and and de Sá declares
that they will now settle and build a home.
The crew, having just received confirmation
that he really is crazy, immediately desert.
His wife and her mother want to leave but
cannot. So they stay, effectively imprisoned
by the rawness of the land and the insanity
of de Sá. And even the “accidental’
death of de Sá does not free the women.
They are now deserted and destitute. So they
stay, thrown on the mercy of a runaway slave,
Massu (Seu Jorge), and his band.
The rest of
the film tells the story of how they manage
to survive. Áurea is pregnant and they
need a home, food and safety – all the
things that are in short supply in such a
deserted place. But survive they do; the film
follows them for the next forty years as civilization
slowly comes to them.
The House
of Sand is a beautiful movie - a true
art film. The land is rawly gorgeous and so
are the two actresses. Fernanda Torres and
Fernanda Montenegro give outstanding performances,
Ms. Torres playing both Aurea and her daughter
Maria and Ms. Montenegro playing Dona Maria
and the older Aurea.
The art direction
(Tulé Peak) is fabulous. I have never
seen destitution look so appealing. As the
clothing and furnishings age, they acquire
a patina and a charm that is beutifully captured
by the cinematographer, Ricardo Della Rosa.
There is one scene where an expedition of
soldiers encamp near their home. The soldier's
tents, cots and lanterns look like they were
designed by Ralph Lauren. It is truly Shabby
Chic on the moon.
The
House of Sand received its North American
premiere at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.
And here is an interesting bit of trivia from
IMDB.com, "director Waddington wrote
the two lead roles especially for his wife
Ms. Torres and his mother-in-law, Ms. Montenegro."
Neil Burger’s
The Illusionist
Opens Friday, August 18, 2006
Starring: Edward
Norton; Paul Giamatti; Jessica Biel; and Rufus
Sewell
Reviewed by
Wendy R. Williams
Neil Burger’s
The Illusionist asks the question:
Did we see it or did we not? Set in nineteenth
century Vienna, the film takes us on a trip
to a land of magicians, evil princes and swooning
damsels-in-distress.
Here is a quote from their press release: "Director
Neil Burger's screen adaptation of Steven Millhauser's
short story 'Eisenheim the Illusionist'. Eisenheim
(Edward Norton) is a magician in early 1900's
Vienna, who falls in love with a woman well
above his social standing. When she becomes
engaged to a Crown Prince, Eisenheim uses his
powers to win her back and undermine the stability
of the royal house of Vienna.”
Edward Norton
plays Eisenheim, a magician who entrances Vienna
with his magic shows, quickly developing a reputation
as a sorcerer who posseses other-wordly powers.
He becomes wildly popular and attracts the jealous
attention of the despot Crown Prince Leopold,
played in smarmy magnificence by Rufus Sewell.
Eisenheim also attracts the attention of Leopold’s
fiancée, Sophie von Teschen (the before-mentioned
damsel-in-distress), who soon recognizes Eisenheim
as her childhood love. Sensing Sophie’s
attraction to Eisenheim, Leopold becomes even
more enraged and instructs Chief Inspector Uh,
played by Paul Giamatti, to either expose Eisenheim
as a fraud or arrest him.
We are then treated to a battle of mind and
will, between Leopold and Eisenheim. Chief Inspector
Uhl manfully tries to make his problem go away
but he certainly possesses no magical powers.
The plot thickens and evil rules the land, or
does it? In the world of illusionists, everything
is not always the way it seems and what you
think you know.....well, that is why you need
to see this film.
The Illusionist
is a vintage fairy tale and the filmmakers artfully
chose to film it in a patina of gold and brown,
resembling the daguerreotype photographs of
the previous century. The scenes in the theaters
are particularly evocative. Magic tricks are
performed and lit with candle light; it is truly
smoke and mirror.
There are many great performances in this film
but of particular note are Edward Norton’s
brooding Eisenheim and Giamatti’s Chief
Inspector Uhl. Norton plays the magician with
a quiet fierce strength, awing his audience
as much with his brooding stare as with his
tricks. Giamatti imbues his character with a
jovial and corrupt sophistication hiding a basic
decency. Norton and Giametti’s performances
are the heart of the film; they are so believable,
we believe in their magic.
Nick Guthe's
Mini's First Time
Reviewed at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival
Opens Friday July 14, 2006
Reviewed by
Brian Shirey
In her first
starring role since 2003’s Thirteen, Nikki
Reed is the ultimate LA bad girl in a biting
dark comedy that plays like a cross between
Heathers and Body Heat.
The title is
accurate, but it’s not what you think.
Mini is way beyond virginity; in fact, she doesn’t
think twice, as her wry voice-over informs us,
about spending her high school nights part-timing
at an escort service. Mini’s First
Time is a character study of a young woman
who finds that life is in ALL the first-time
experiences, and morality, compassion, and remorse
should not get in the way.
Writer-director
Nick Guthe sure knows how to exploit the premise:
He gives Mini a trashy actress mother (Carrie-Anne
Moss), a scumbag PR guy stepfather (Alec Baldwin),
and a snazzy sports car. Then he sets the whole
thing in the homes of the SoCal super-rich,
and lets Mini loose in a hot-red string bikini.
Mini’s First Time is the kind
of film that makes you laugh because the shallow
people are so willfully mean (and it conforms
to what a lot of NYers think about LA, anyways).
Mini gets sexually involved with her own stepfather,
of course, and together they devise a sick plan
to get rid of Mom.
In his manic,
befuddled way, Baldwin gives another memorable
performance; he’s a master of subversive
comedy. Reed is heartless from start to finish,
but beneath it all, she creates a sharp sense
of what unloving parents can do to a kid. The
movie looks great, especially the ritzy sets;
you see the kind of moneyed world that seems
to encourage depraved behavior.
Most of all,
Mini’s First Time is a wildly
entertaining LA satire with smart writing…
and we can see it all from the calm safety and
sanity that is New York City!
Richard Glatzer and Wash
Westmoreland’s
Quinceanera
Opens August 4th
www.sonyclassics.com/quinceanera/
Starring: Emily Rios;
Jesse Garcia; Chalo Gonzalez; David Ross; Jason
L. Wood
Quinceanera
is a narrative film that views like a documentary.
The film opens with a Quinceanera (celebration
of a Hispanic girl's fifteenth birthday) party
in the Hispanic Echo Park neighborhood of Los
Angeles. Magdalena’s (the talented young
Emily Rios) cousin’s parents have thrown
an expensive party for their daughter which
included transportation of their daughter’s
Quinceanera Court in a rented Hummer limo. Magdalena’s
own fifteenth birthday and Quinceanera party
is approaching and she dreams that she too will
have such a beautiful party. But Magdalena’s
father is a store front pastor who moonlights
as a security guard and he does not have the
money or the desire to put on such an elaborate
party.
So plans are
made to have a modified celebration. Magdalena’s
aunt volunteers to alter her daughter’s
dress to fit Magdalena; but every time she brings
it over for a final fitting, it no longer fits
in the waist. The aunt and mother confer and
decide that Magdalena must be pregnant, which
she is (by her boyfriend Herman (J. R. Cruz)).
But this pregnancy is one of those unfortunate
pregnancies that occur without any actual penetration,
the stories of which strike fear in couples
making-out in the back seat of cars.
When Magdalena truthfully tells her father that
she has not had sex with Herman, he throw her
out of the house and she is forced to move in
with her uncle Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez) who is
already supplying a home for her cousin Carlos
(Jesse Garcia), who was also thrown out of the
home of Magdalena’s dress-lending Aunt
because he is gay.
The saintly Tomas
sells champurrado (a Mexican hot drink) by pushing
a shopping cart down the streets of Echo Park.
Tomas’s home is a small two room cinderblock
building in the backyard of a house. His home
is plain, but Tomas has created an incredible
fantasy garden in the backyard with beautiful
plants, patios and sculptures made from glass
bottles.
The property
is soon sold to a gay couple who began to renovate
the maing house and have parties. They are immediately
attracted to Carlos and invite him to attend
their parties and also their smaller more intimate
celebrations with predictable complications
(there is one of him and two of them and they
were looking for a party, not a romance).
There are many
controversial themes at play in this movie (Quiceaneras,
gay rights, gentrification) and none of the
characters (except Tomas, Magdalena and Carlos)
end up looking very good: the boyfriend and
his parents who decides that the baby could
not possibly be his and disavow all responsibility;
the Bible toting father who throws out his fifteen
year old daughter; the mother who supports her
husband in such a despicable decision; the sister
and brother-in-law who disown their gay son;
the gay couple who moves into the front house
and wreak havoc on the life of the old man in
the back house. If people should decide to picket
this film because they feel their particular
group was demeaned by the filmmakers, it would
be a diverse group of picketeers.
But the
film should not be dismissed because of these
stereotypes. It has one incredible underlying
charm: It was filmed in the actual homes of
Echo Park and many in the cast were from the
neighborhood. So the homes we see are the real
homes, the foods are the actual foods and the
Quinceanera celebratory promenades and dances
are performed by the girls and boys from the
neighborhood, wearing borrowed gowns and suits.
So this film should be seen, because it is a
charming visit to a part of our country that
many of us may never see and tells a story about
a world that we will most likely never be privy
to. And the film tells its story in such a real
way that I felt that I had actually met the
incredible young stars (Emily Rios and Jesse
Garcia) and know their story.
Woody Allen's
Scoop
Opens Friday July 28, 2006
Reviewed by Frank
J. Avella
Last year's astonishing
thriller Match Point proved a triumph
for Woody Allen and silenced detractors who
insisted the master's shining era as an extraordinary
and significant American filmmaker was over.
Now comes Scoop, a very funny comedy
that I am guessing critics will maul with shouts
of alleged redundancy and appropriation (mostly
from his own oeuvre). God forbid Woody borrow
from his own genius style!
Now, truth to
be told, Scoop is more Hollywood
Ending and Manhattan Murder Mystery
than Annie Hall and Manhattan,
but you can't knock every one completely out
of the park every time. It's important to either
remember or do some research to learn that now
classic Woody flix like Love and Death,
Interiors and Stardust Memories
(to name a few), were initially met with quite
the cool critical reception.
I'm not exactly
sure where Scoop falls in the Woody
canon, but I am sure that it's certainly not
the debacle Curse of the Jade Scorpion
was. Scoop IS consistently amusing,
devilishly entertaining and nicely acted
The film kicks
off with a killer opening: Ian McShane, an egocentric
journalist finds himself dead and crossing the
River Styx with the eccentric Fenella Woolgar,
who claims she was assassinated because she
knew the identity of the Tarot Card Killer,
a serial murderer on the loose in London.
The way the still-story-hungry McShane crosses
back over into the land of the living to deliver
the 'scoop' to Scarlett Johansson is one of
the many joys of the movie.
McShane is terrific
in way-too-small part. Johansson, as she did
in Match Point, perfectly embodies
the Woody heroine - eager, driven & uncertain---all
simultaneously. Hugh Jackman charms as the suave
would-be killer. Allen, looking a bit weary,
is his hilarious self.
The production design is splendid and Woody
pays homage to George Steven's masterpiece A
Place in the Sun in a key scene, although
the end results are quite different.
The scoop on
Scoop is that it's absorbing, winning
Woody by way of Woody past. I eagerly await
the next Woody. I have a feeling we may all
be happily surprised.
David R. Ellis's
Snakes on a Plane
Opens Friday, August 18, 2006
Just so you know
-- it was well worth the wait.
Starring: Samuel
L. Jackson; Julianna Margulies; Nathan Phillips;
and Rachel Blanchard.
Reviewed
by Elias Stimac
Yes, I am one
of those movie geeks that likes to go to the
first showing of certain films the night before
the actual opening so I can say I was one of
the first to see it. Since there were no official
critic screenings for Snakes on a Plane,
looks like I am one of the first to review it
as well.
In case you are
the only person on the planet who hasn't heard
about it, Snakes on a Plane is a little
movie that redefined how movies are marketed
thanks to a massive online response based on
speculation and anticipation leading up to the
actual release of the picture. In other words,
everyone has been talking about it and blogging
about it for about a year now. No other feature
has ever enjoyed that unprecendented build-up.
Of course, any movie that received the mega-hype
that SoaP got is going to find it extremely
difficult to live up to fan expectations. That
being said, the movie was actually pretty much
what fans expected and pretty damn good to boot.
This mile-high
thriller is a cross between 1970s disaster movies
(remember all those Killer Bee flicks?)
and the current wave of horror movies that seem
to flood the theaters with more and more frequency
these days. Director David R. Ellis maintains
a fast and furious pace fast while telling this
tale of a murder witness whose flight to L.A.
to testify is diverted by a crateload of crazed
rattlers and bloodthirsty serpents. Luckily
for viewers, there are enough scares, enough
laughs, and enough plotline to keep them not
only occupied but intrigued as well.
The main reason
the film does not plummet to the ground is Samuel
L. Jackson, who has been in enough of these
genre movies to know how to balance the shock
with the schlock. His air of authority is hilariously
punctuated by angry outbursts such as the catch-phrase
we all know from the trailer where he screams
that he's had it with the m-f-in' snakes on
the m-f-in' plane.
The rest of the cast are game and hang on for
dear life as the stakes and the cheese rise
along with the dramatic tension. Particularly
noteworthy are Julianna Margulies as a flight
attendant on her last run, Kenan Thompson as
a PSP-playing bodyguard, and David Koechner
as a male chauvinist pilot.
The music soundtrack is a bit disappointing
given the massive awareness it garnered on the
Internet, but there is a cool video at the end
featuring Cobra Starship (the video can be seen
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV24FN4rDzE).
Snakes on
a Plane will probably do very well at the
box office and even better on DVD, where home
viewers can shout at the screen and mimic the
idiotic lines that spring up every now and then
like a killer cobra (watch for my favorite,
the breathy "good luck" from a dying
victim).
Okay, now get
ready for the sequels, spoofs, and parodies!
Elias Stimac
is an entertainment reporter and reviewer for
hollywoohoo.com.
Send comments to hollywoohoo@aol.com.
