Review Roundup: TROPIC THUNDER, VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA
By Norm Schrager at August 16, 2008 | 10:56 pm | Print
If you’re still hung over from the big Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince move to ’09 (and Twilight to the coveted Fall ’08 spot), just remember: There are movies to see this weekend. Imagine that. And not a big “event movie” in sight…
:: TROPIC THUNDER
Rotten Tomatoes: 84 / 100
Metacritic: 72 / 100
filmcritic.com: 4 / 5
Red Band Trailer (and it’s only about 2:30, not 10:00+)
A big budget comedy that works?! Looks like it. Forget the protests (unless you’re protesting, of course) and laugh hard at this broad, tasteless skewering of self-involved actors and Hollywood excess. Oh, and war films and retard movies.
:: VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA
Rotten Tomatoes: 79 / 100
Metacritic: 70 / 100
filmcritic.com: 3 / 5
Three frighteningly good looking people and a movie director
A couple months ago, The Howard Stern Show’s Artie Lange pointed out that Woody Allen has made about one movie a year for around 35 years, and none of them suck. Some aren’t great, but none are outright bad.
I couldn’t agree more, especially with the auteur’s last handful from his British movement: Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream. This one’s a big, bold happy, complex international love story — the kind Allen would have made as a drama in the early 80s. And the cast couldn’t be any freakin’ better looking. By the way, the title (always an interesting exercise for Allen) is two different women’s names and the city where all this sexy stuff goes down.
:: STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS
Rotten Tomatoes: 19 / 100
Metacritic: 35 / 100
filmcritic.com: 1.5 / 5
In reviewing Attack of the Clones in 2002, Peter Keough began his review with this question: Is George Lucas the world’s worst filmmaker? Fast forward six years, and it seems like a lot of people think, at the very least, Lucas might be the worst decision-maker. With this apparently thin, dull animated addition to his epic Star Wars landscape, the beauty and excitement once attached is diluted once more. Then again, there was that Wookie sketch in the Star Wars Christmas special in the late 1970s…
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[...] faux “Spanish diary” excerpts to the New York Times, chronicling the making of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There are plenty of links to the piece out there, but little opinion, so here’s mine: This [...]