Because I Said So

Time passes and the world moves on, but Hollywood is still making the same basic thriller — in which American government and industry are the bad guys — that it has churned out for 30 years

The Fifth Element by Luc Besson is what every crappy Hollywood postmodern extravaganza would be if it had the wit and the boldness of the author of La Femme Nikita and The Professional—together with a Hollywood blockbuster-sized budget of $100 million. With it, postmodernism has entered into its rococo phase. Some day, if anyone ever…

Whatever by Susan Skoog stars Liza Weil as Anna Stockard and Chad Morgan as her slutty friend Brenda, two high school girls in 1981 who do the standard “survivors” turn on behalf of the I-am-womanism of Ms Skoog. It follows the by-now familiar path of mythologizing and romanticising the sufferings of women, particularly young, post-pubertal…

You should be ashamed to be watching this movie. I know I was.

Children of the Revolution, written and directed by Peter Duncan, represents the less attractive side of the Australian sensibility I have so often had occasion to praise here. For it is a too-natural development out of healthy skepticism to turn merely cynical, and that is what, I take it, we have here. There is, to…

Josh and Jonas Pate, co-directors of Deceiver, have all the vices of the Coen brothers—mainly pretentiousness and self-conscious artiness—without any of the virtues. Their film is not funny and not even particularly intelligent, although it tries very hard to be the latter. So much so, indeed, that the three main characters are introduced to us…