| Critic |
Review |
Quote |
Analysis |
This Week's Verdict |
Manohla Dargis,
The New York Times |
Snakes on a Plane |
"There are several different ways to die from an encounter with a snake and this film has them all. Not long after the passenger lights turn off, the rubber, computer-generated and (several hundred) live snakes slither into the main cabin, where they proceed to sink fangs into faces, necks, limbs, torsos, one bared and bountiful female breast and the unseen organ of a male passenger who forgets the number one rule of using strange bathrooms: check the toilet bowl. Naughty by nature or perhaps more by design, these snakes don't just dart out of toilets; they also slide up bare legs and under dresses, moving in and out of more bodily orifices than the adult-film star Ron Jeremy did in his prime." |
Reading all the breathlessly sexed-up reviews for this film are starting to convince us that, aside from the internet-geek-marketing angle, Snakes on a Plane might be a pioneer in one more area: The movie that is its own porn remake. |
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Armond White,
New York Press |
Trust the Man |
"Brad Freundlich's Trust the Man has an all-star Indie cast — Julianne Moore, David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Billy Crudup — that acts just like the casts of some big-budget studio movie. (Call this one, The Devil TiVos Anderson Cooper.) Representing their own moneyed, empowered, egotistical selves, the cast flash glamorous smiles from high up on the screen down upon the sad-sack audience. The stars' dilemmas as restless, uncommitted couples feed into our drab ticket-buyers' envy. It may be difficult to see what's wrong with Trust the Man given so many insufferable indie films from The Squid and the Whale to Little Miss Sunshine and The Night Listener; but you have to diligently remember how good movies used to be." |
Now, honestly, what else do you expect from Armond reviewing a movie called Trust The Man?? Oh, and don't worry, he doesn't just pick on middlebrow indie hits in this one; his last graf is devoted to trashing "the woeful Funny Ha Ha," proving that no pond is too small for some sharks. |
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Michael Atkinson,
Village Voice |
The Pusher Trilogy |
"Your first impression of this five-hour-plus underworld trilogy is that director Nicolas Winding Refn is an engineer of epic scale and structural ambition, and that the tiny kingdom of Denmark is apparently a snake pit of narcotic squalor and homicidal chaos...But the Pusher movies play less like features than like the nastiest hit TV series HBO never made, and a stateside cable remake does seem plausible." |
We have most definitely gone through the looking glass when a Village Voice film critic seeks to legitimize a Danish film for a highbrow audience by comparing it to a cable-TV series. |
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Elizabeth Weitzman,
New York Daily News |
Factotum |
"You don't have to be a fan of the late barfly poet-author Charles Bukowski to enjoy Bent Hamer's Factotum, but you do have to accept that an abject drunk can be a keen observer of American life. Matt Dillon, fresh off an Oscar nomination for Crash, plays Bukowski's alter ego, Henry Chinaski, in an ambling, episodic glimpse of a man whose passions are divided evenly between opening a bottle and writing a story. Mostly, he opens bottles." |
I think the examples of Bukowski, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner have already proven that abject drunks can be keen observers of American life. That is, y'know...when they're not railing against the Jews. |
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Stephanie Zacharek,
Salon.com |
Snakes on a Plane |
"I saw one of the first showings of Snakes on a Plane on Thursday evening in a multiplex in Times Square (it wasn't screened for critics), and the only thing I truly loved about it was the excitement of the audience beforehand. We booed during a preview for some dumb-looking Denzel Washington thing; we cheered for the trailer of Craig Brewer's truly weird-looking Black Snake Moan (which, like Snakes, stars Samuel L. Jackson). When we became restless after too many trailers, a soft hissing noise filled the theater, a boo that was actually a cheer. Time to bring on the motherfucking snakes!" |
Inadvertent Existentialism Alert: "A boo that was actually a cheer"...Really, doesn't that phrase kind of sum up the entire thing? Not just Snakes on a Plane, but Summer movies, Hollywood, art...even life itself? |
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