The Modest Thoughts of a Jive Sucka

PRESENT DAY Movie Review Schadenfreude A Go-Go

Valkyrie

“…his earnestness suggests at best some kind of fictional American soldier trying to infiltrate the Luftwaffe.”
Roger Friedman - Fox News

“In the end, you just have to wonder why a flick featuring a one-armed, eye-patch-wearing Tom Cruise who tries to kill Hitler isn’t more fun than this.”
Sean Burns - Philadelphia Weekly

“But with a cardboard Cruise at the core of ‘Valkyrie,’ you just never care.”
Brandon Judell - Culture Catch

“He’s distractingly bad.”
Christy Lemire - AP Movie Critic

“Tom Cruise the movie star never disappears into Claus von Stauffenberg the brilliant military man.”
Moira McDonald - Seattle Times

“Alas, incongruous vocal intonations aren’t even the most significant problem plaguing Singer’s film, what with Cruise — missing a hand and saddled with an eye patch, making him seem like a National Socialist pirate — apparently engaged in a contest against himself (and cinematic history) to see how long he can hold the same, intensely resolute expression, and the answer unfortunately turning out to be 120 minutes.”
Nick Schager - Slant Magazine

“If Mr. Cruise doesn’t work in ‘Valkyrie,’ it’s partly because he’s too modern, too American and way too Tom Cruise to make sense in the role…”
Manohla Dargis - New York Times

“Cruise cannot suggest the aristocratic hauteur or the steely authority needed in this role. Watching ‘Valkyrie’ (which begins with a tense, well-staged battle scene in 1943 Tunisia in which Stauffenberg nearly dies), you wonder why the German officer we’re rooting for is an American, while most of the other Germans are British, except Wilkinson, who is English but really does seem like a Nazi.”
Michael Phillips - Chicago Tribune

“Most disappointingly, there’s a gaping hole at the center of ‘Valkyrie,’ and his name is Tom Cruise.”
Alonso Duralde - MSNBC

“Think of ‘Valkyrie’ as a reasonably entertaining drama about the time Tom Cruise tried to kill Hitler.”
Mick LaSalle - San Francisco Chronicle

“…he’s quite simply bad in ‘Valkyrie.’ It’s arguably his worst performance.”
Brian Tallerico - HollywoodChicago.com

“Cruise is unconvincing and stiff as the disenchanted Col. Claus von Stauffenberg.”
Claudia Puig - USA Today

“His penchant for disfiguring or masking his famous face (’Vanilla Sky,’ ‘Minority Report’) has hit the silly point, yet he’s still too showy to disappear into the role. Plus, he may be the poofiest-haired Nazi in history.”
Joe Neumaier - New York Daily News

Flashback Movie Review Schadenfreude A Go-Go

Remembering...

Harlem Nights

I don't mind that Nights is a potty-mouth benchmark; crude verbiage is appropriate to the leads, as well as the film's subject matter. This is, however, an amazingly mean two hours. Even the funniest gag involves Murphy's fatal shooting of three men.
Mike Clark, USA Today


In Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy continues his one-man war against the female gender. Those women he doesn't kill outright are punched, maimed and slugged with garbage cans. But apparently they deserve it-there isn't a single female character in the film who isn't a prostitute.
Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune


The movie veers uneasily from not-funny comedy to not-persuasive melodrama. Murphy forgets that the dialogue in old-fashioned crime pictures was as highly stylized as the settings. In place of sharply polished wisecracks, he gives us the steady mutter of the witless, unfelt obscenities that are the argot of our modern mean streets.
Richard Schickel, Time


Eddie Murphy's directorial work is amateurish at best. And as a performer he looks as if he is in agony, as if his mother made him stand in front of the camera for punishment.
Hal Hinson, Washington Post


As it stands, Murphy has put his idols and friends in front of a camera, given them a watered down version of The Sting and hoped they'd make the best of it. They don't.
Chris Dafoe, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Flashback Movie Review Schadenfreude A Go-Go

Revisiting...

Sidekicks

All of you who have at one time nursed the notion that Joe Piscopo may be some sort of lower life form are proven correct in this silly waste of celluloid. He lends a note of reality to the film in what must surely be his dream role, that of an over-amped, Steroidian karate instructor with a penchant for Neanderthal idiocy and serious overacting. Brilliant, even if it is typecasting.
Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle



Subtle manipulation can sometimes make a good movie better. Overt, obvious manipulation is guaranteed to sink any endeavor. Sidekicks is such an example. This film goes out of its way to make the villains as nasty as possible, while lauding the assets of the heroes. Everything builds to a climax where good faces evil. Guess who wins. If you can't, maybe Sidekicks is your kind of picture.
James Berardinelli, ReelViews


"Sidekicks" is one of the more far-fetched examples of what might be called the 97-pound-weakling school of film making. The movie is burdened by a fill-in-the-blanks screenplay in which the actors have to spout such nuggets as "dreams do come true if you want them bad enough" and remain kindly and straight-faced.
Stephen Holden, New York Times


What really grates about ''Sidekicks'' is its hypocritical message. As in all karate-kid movies, Master Lee instructs Barry in pseudo-Zen hogwash (''You must respect the wood,'' yada-yada). But the fantasy sequences are chock-full of guns and vengeance -- that they're bloodless makes them no less violent -- and when Barry finally fights back against a bully, it's not his courage that makes the other teens cheer him on. It's their hopes of seeing a broken bone or two: schoolyard bloodlust, presented as one of life's little pleasures.
Ty Burr, EW

[This movie is awesome - Ed.]

Flashback Movie Review Schadenfreude A Go-Go

Remembering...

The Avengers

The film flails incoherently from set to set, trying to be kicky and madcap and pop, but with no sense of the show's casual acceptance of the absurd.
Salon.com, Charles Taylor

There's something reassuring about the fact that The Avengers is so rotten: proof yet again that people with piles of money can hire wizard production designers but can't fake class.
Slate, David Edelstein

It's a completely botched effort -- botched in its direction, its writing and editing.
San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle

This big-budget bore looks lovely but is so miscalculated that you can't help but wonder whether anyone involved had ever seen the original.
TV Guide, Maitland McDonagh

To say Fiennes and Thurman don't have the chemistry of Macnee and Rigg isn't enough. They don't have the chemistry of Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. They don't have the chemistry of Boris and Natasha.
Northwest Herald, Jeffrey Westhoff

Flashback Movie Review Schadenfreude A Go-Go

Just a lumbering, poorly photographed piece of derivative sci-fi drivel, full of grunting extras scampering around in animal pelts and more dank, trash-strewn sets than I ever care to see again.
Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman

So heavy and lifeless that you keep waiting for those three little front-row kibitzers from "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" to appear at the bottom of the screen to start goofing on it.
Boston Globe, Jay Carr

The script, based on a novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, is deeply dumb, depressingly derivative (ripping off "Planet of the Apes" the most) and just plain nonsense.
USA Today, Andy Seiler

A ghastly, unappealing mess that lacks a single absorbing character, engaging story line or entertaining snippet of dialogue.
Portland Oregonian, Shawn Levy

Compounded by a dated visual style, patched-together special effects and ludicrous dialogue, Battlefield Earth is a wholly miserable experience.
Los Angeles Times, Robin Rauzi

One of the darkest, ugliest, most uninvolving and incomprehensible major-studio fantasies I've ever seen.
New York Daily, News Jack Mathews

A picture that will be hailed without controversy as the worst of its kind ever made.
Slate, David Edelstein

It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.
The New York Times, A.O. Scott

Flashback Movie Review Schadenfreude A Go-Go

Revisiting...

Two of a Kind

The funny thing is, for all of this heavy traffic, the script is amazingly lightweight. Hardly anything happens. Let's take inventory. The movie contains a food fight (always a sign of desperation at the concept level), several chase scenes, one of your basic Lovers-Walking-Down -theSidewalk-Talking-Angrily-to-Each-OtherWhile-New-Yorkers-Look-On scenes, and no less than two examples of our old friend, the Semi-obligatory Lyrical Interlude. In both of them, Newton-John sings on the sound track while the lovers make goo-goo eyes at each other. This movie should have been struck by a lightning bolt.
Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert

Aside from the presence of the two stars, Two of a Kind has all the earmarks of a bargain-basement job.
Variety Staff (Not Credited)

The results are so disastrous that absolutely no one is shown off to good advantage, with the possible exception of the hairdressers involved.
The New York Times, Janet Maslin

A stupefying shambles, Two of a Kind just noses out "Staying Alive" for Worst Picture of the Year.
Time, Richard Corliss

The "wow" kind of bad that people still talk about 20 years after the fact. Rent it and see.

eFilmCritic.com, Scott Weinberg

Flashback Movie Review Schadenfreude A Go-Go

Revisiting...

The Princess Bride

The leads are vacuous; the absurdities sometimes forced and obvious.
Geoff Andrew,Time Out

Reiner abandons his previous movie's sense of farce and satire for much broader and more innocuous comedy.
Austin Chronicle, Marjorie Baumgarten

It also doesn't help that Cary Elwes and Robin Wright as the loving couple are nearly comatose and inspire little passion from each other, or the audience.
Variety Staff (Not Credited)

Kinda cute, occasionally amusing and very, very slow... I just wish [it] had more momentum, more oomph.
San Francisco Chronicle, Peter Stack

Rob Reiner's not up to it: when the movie is meant to be romantic, the tone is frequently mushy and sexless, and when it's meant to be anachronistic and satiric, it's vaudeville-vulgar.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Jay Scott

The movie is ungainly – you can almost see the chalk marks it's not hitting. But it has a loose, likable shabbiness.
The New Yorker, Pauline Kael

Flashback Movie Review Schadenfreude A Go-Go

Revisiting...

Cocktail

There isn't a scene in Cocktail that isn't cheap and dumb, and whether its camp entertainment value compensates for its contempt for women is a question. Cocktail makes beer commercials look deep, makes "Top Gun" look like "Hamlet."
- Boston Globe, Jay Carr


Cocktail, has no reason for being other than to market the Cruise charm like a cheap celebrity perfume. It is a bottle of rotgut in a Dom Perignon box.
- Time, Richard Corliss


Cocktail is unbelievable - a picture that sets itself up as a gritty, authentic character study but is laughable, false and stupid in all its details. The only connection to reality here is that there are actually such things as bartenders.
- San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle

Cruise is walking in the footsteps of Troy Donahue and John Travolta here. He does what comes easy. He bumps and grinds and grins till his lips ache. It's a performance with all the integrity of wax fruit. And Cocktail is mud in your eye.
- Washington Post, Rita Kempley