In one of the many bloody interactive Flash cartoons that made their way from joecartoon.com to Joe Cartoon: Greatest Hits #1 (BCI Eclipse), a foul-mouthed gerbil waiting for the viewer to trigger his gruesome death in a piranha tank snarls, "I'm hoping that someday you'll grow out of this crap." But for those who haven't matured past humor centering on pot, booze, profanity, Larry The Cable Guy-style hick accents, and extreme violence done to cute animated critters, this DVD is the place to be…
Hailed as a return to form for Woody Allen—whose previous returns to form, such as Sweet And Lowdown and Melinda And Melinda, have all been overrated—Match Point (DreamWorks) isn't much more than a superficial redux of Crimes And Misdemeanors, but hey, at least it's a start. Remarkably, Allen's strengths lay not with the faux-sophistication of the dialogue, but with the thriller plotting, which resolves with a delicious visual metaphor…
Adapting his novella, Steve Martin wrote Shopgirl (Touchstone) and turns in one of his more engaging recent performances as a rich bachelor who buys his way into a young woman's heart, but keeps himself at a distance. Equally good is Claire Danes as his sweet-natured plaything, forced to choose between his fatherly pampering and the genuine affections of a slob (Jason Schwartzman) who doesn't have his shit together. Decisions, decisions…
It wasn't as bad as most critics said it was, and it wasn't as bad as it could have been, as Ultraviolet later proved. But the big-screen, live-action sorta-adaptation of Peter Chung's animated series Aeon Flux (Paramount) is still more style than substance, and not terribly unique style at that. Still, its flashy futurism makes it a good action movie for a brain-dead summer evening…
It stands to reason that the story of history's greatest lover would get the most scandalous cinematic treatment possible, but not so Casanova (Touchstone), a period comedy from middlebrow Miramax house director Lasse Hallström. Hallström treats Casanova as a rakish adventurer set loose among prudish oafs, searching for a heart to call home, which only slightly distinguishes the film from the average romantic comedy…
The tragedy of Tristan and Isolde is one of those venerable stories that's never been turned into a good movie. Kevin Reynolds' Tristan & Isolde (Fox) doesn't break that streak. Medieval scholars might be entertained by the many anachronisms, but apart from a memorably off-key performance from James Franco, this is pretty dull stuff.