davidscruggs

This movie can best be described as close-up, intense, non-stop, stylish action with lots of realistic gunplay, wild car rides, dead bodies, hardbodies and a light, crisp script. And all of it filmed, cut and spliced for maximum impact. Some folks call Bad Boys II a meaningless movie with a Miami Vice story line for the big screen. They're thinking too hard. I call it great entertainment. Far as action goes, very little went down that irritated me: you know, unrealistically volatile cars, bottomless semi-automatic clips and diving gunfire that always hit its mark. Oh those trite bits were there, but they flashed by so fast, I really didn't mind. I'd rank Bad Boys II as one of the best action movies of the year. Definitely better than Tomb II, A League of Extraordinary Gentlement, Arnold's T-3 and others I've forgotten. I saw a few kids in the theatre, but I wouldn't recommend you bring yours. For the kids, there was too much f-in' profanity, too many slo-mo Matrix-esque bullet entries and too many shots of flesh in wet skimpy suits or diced up in buckets. In sum: no Oscars here, but dang, what a fun movie for adults.

Some reviewers whine that the writers of 28 Days Later were rehashing old fare: Omega Man and Resident Evil are mentioned. But let's face it: this movie and its ilk aren't intellectual and they aren't high art forms. They're all post-apocalyptic entertainment, and I must say, 28 Days Later... did a fine job of entertaining me. The excitment rose and fell, the lulls roused my anticpation and discomfort, the uncertainies were uncertain, the forbodings worried me, the monsters were ghoulish and believeably made up, there was just enough gore to make the necessary impression, profanity was moderated, the main characters drummed for my sympathy, and the bad guys understandably bad. And the ending, well, it was as proper as any. I might not buy the DVD, but I'd watch it again sometime on, say, HBO.

The story and set behind Pavilion of Women were grist for a powerful movie. It's about an American priest (Willem Dafoe) running an orphanage in Asia who becomes entangled with a proud Chinese family's tugs of war over love and duty. While Pavilion is engaging enough to keep you awake, it didn't project any of the majesty of greater love-versus-duty romances that come to mind. Its characters cried, but not amid enough conveyed tragedy for its viewers to join in sympathy. Dafoe seemed to absorb his role, but not wholely, for soft-spoken and even-keeled as Dafoe can be, the priest in this movie would have been better portrayed by someone as unknown in the U.S. as the movie's Chinese cast members, whose anonymity aided their credibility and certainly carried the show. There are several wonderfully intense scenes that might even take you back to a love-struck moment in your past. The cinematography gave me pans of the city and garden life now and then, but it left me wishing it had lingered on Asia's beauty and austerity long enough to arouse a connection in me with these people living in 1930s China.

I wouldn't say give it a swerve, because the performances of the local cast was often great. But neither would I recommend making it a late-night movie, if you want to see it before nodding off.