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Patootey
Reviews
Shanghai Noon (2000)
a joy
All of Jackie Chan's movies seem like they would've been
fun to be around, and this one just emanates that joy.
There is such a good heart to this film that you feel better
for just being in the cinema. The script is witty, well plotted
and a great platform for its brilliant physical humor. This is
as much fun watching folks move as you're likely to get
outside of a Paul Taylor or Philobolus concert (or Stomp, or
the Lakers, or whovever rings your bell). And Xander Berkley does his best work ever, solid, assured, funny and
dead on Van Cleef. This movie will brighten your day
Mission: Impossible II (2000)
witless fun
My boy, who's 11, loved it. It does truly well with all kind of
pyrotechnics and flips, but there's a reason that fireworks
shows don't last over two hours. It gets boring. The plot had
no coherence, no attempt to make sense of the dilemmas
that needed solving, so there was no tension in learning if
they could be or how they would be solved. It came out flat
and humorless. And as often happens when folks take themselves deeply seriously, the dialog has all been heard
many times before, and wasn't particularly good the first
half dozen times. I did perk up to realize the girl lead's
character was named Nordoff Hall, like the authors of the
Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy. I have no idea why they did that,
but it was fun to see. Probably they were loads of little
Easter eggs like that scattered through the story, but it was
so doggone soporific my attention wandered. I just couldn't
take another loooooooooong extennnnnnnnnnded romaaaaaaaannntic shot substituting intense gaze for human life.But the people were better looking than most
soap opera folks, the cars were fast, the flames were billowing, so really, it wasn't toooooooooooooooooo bad.
Dinosaur (2000)
Seven writers seem plumb silly
Seven people have writing credits on this movie, and the producers could have saved a bundle by reading a TV Guide listing of the animated Land Before Time. Which wasn't a triumph of originality in itself, but still, seven writers? The story line might have been written by a computer or more likely, a market analyst. Nor does the drawing style reveal any originality. It was odd to see the same face bad guy face of the grasshopper from A Bugs' Life, on the face of the bully dinosaur brother of Dinosaur.
Every character had been market tested in every way. It was truly a film by committee. But I love seeing dinosaur movies, even one as slicked near to death like this. Dinosaurs are just plain fun to watch.
Romeo Must Die (2000)
it's a kick
When the director recorded what the martial artists were doing, it was spectacular. Sometimes he'd add in some truly odd unique special effects - a sort of x-ray insight into the damage caused by certain attacks and the movie went right over the top in a truly rewarding way. Other times he'd try to enhance what Jet Li was actually doing, with some sort of suspended -in-the-air fake stuff, and it would drop the bottom out of the scene. It was the sort of floating kicks that worked like a charm in Matrix, but had an opposite effect here. All in all, the directing had some odd flaws, some major close-ups were out of focus for an entire scene, and you could see too much pancake on the actors in their early shots. It's not the sort of movie you go to for plot coherence or gripping character development so the lack of those elements doesn't mean a thing. It's a fun movie with some spectacular real-life stunts, and some misplaced enhancements.
Stuart Little (1999)
Back! Bigger! and Better! and Really Really Exciting!
It would have been a far better movie as "Eddie the Mouse." Or any new title of it's own, with it's own story to support whatever creative drive voted it out of committee. It was a nice movie, and extremely pretty, and good special effects, and enough new twists on more fart jokes and I had any hopes to expect. But it was constantly reminding you that it didn't trust the magic of the book. Everything had to be Bigger, More Relevant, More Dramatic. It couldn't remain a simple and unexplained fact that Stuart, who looked a lot like a mouse, but who was in fact Stuart, was an unusual-looking boy born to the Littles. In an attempt at Greater Relevance, the rewriters decided that it needed to wink at racial issues, be coy with "inter-species" adoptions, and just generally try to take something fine as it was, and Update. It ended up with all the charm of a really snazzy Vegas lounge version of something from Rubber Soul. On the other hand, it featured Nathan Lane continuing the exploration of his relationship to the world of mice, and any show that he's in is well worth the visit.