Kevin M. Williams

The pictures, the writing, the cast, and the flow...all wonderfully combined by a master storyteller. So many points of view handled fairly, even epically, a film with so many standout scenes that 'a best one' cannot be chosen. One of the best movies ever made is a Western.

In the heat of planning this film, Moby Dick, sort of story-behind-the-story-you-know story, the producers decided to make "an epic". It's a feeling one gets throughout the length of it, and certainly grand strides are made with look of it, the cinematography. But what kind of a epic to make becomes the question: A family film? Man vs. Nature? Class struggle? A historical retrospective perhaps? A monster movie? Or maybe a survival tale? Or? Or? Or...maybe just make all of them, throw them all together. The constantly shifting plot focus unfortunately works to disallow attachment to the characters or to the story. I wanted to like all of it more than any of it deserves to be liked. The monster story, the famous one I came for, got sidelined, regulated to being only part of a larger story. The monster, Moby Dick, should've had his name where it belonged, on the title, to correct any question as to what this gorgeous film should have been about. Herman Melville thought of that. Focus on the fight with the monster.

Is there an afterlife? A dying rich man wants to know and so pays a scientist to investigate the possibility at the "Mt. Everest of haunted houses". With him are his wife as well as two psychics for a one week stay. Creepy, ominous and dimly lit, the story leans into the tradition that is more about mood and less about jump scares, more about wondering what that sound you heard was than about showing you what made the sound. The slow building tension works as this film has become one of the standards of the genre since its release.

In this unusual Western a posse vigorously pursues a man across some trackless desert badlands as he is accused of murdering the town sheriff. The man is an Indian, a Native American, and the posse, all white, join the fray not to curry to any civilized notions about dispensing justice but to indulge their blood lust. This is a proposition that all accept as natural. What's different in this film is the overall POV. In a genre that mostly demonizes Natives this one goes the other way. Hard. There is some brutality, barbarity, and cruelty ahead.

A no-nonsense prison dream scenario about a square guy dealt a bad hand, and how he plays it. It's not going to be pretty. Vince Vaughn breathes through this like an old-school steam engine, powering this testosterone nightmare into dream status. By the end, you consider wanting to go to prison yourself. Grindhouse confectionary contentedness.

One presidential lookalike gets the chance of a lifetime when the real president falls ill and he has to fill in for a minute. This White House fantasy is played light and for smiles and with a little romance thrown in. There's not a picture of Frank Capra among the many portraits at the White House, I know, but I had a thought to look for one while watching this. A little patriotic? OK.

A salvage crew is directed to an unbelievable find: an abandoned cruise ship out in international waters. The pickings look good but (cue ominous foreshadowing music) this cruise ship has a gruesome history. The film is purely formulaic and only newbies to this genre will be surprised. (Spoiler alert: nobody stays together, everybody goes off wandering in the dark on their own. And if they make it back to the group, IF, then you think they'll talk about whatever ooze-coming-through-the-walls paranormality they just had experienced with the rest, give everybody a heads-up, let 'em know? Nope. I guess that's the point. I should be happy nobody's flashlight goes out unexpectedly) Still, everyone does their job competently enough.

A pair of rich curmudgeons have some fun switching the lives of two opposites, testing the nature vs. nurture philosophy. One guy, raised to be rich, is reduced to abject poverty while another person, homeless, is given the former rich person's life. So its a situational comedy from the 80s headed by 2 personable SNL alumni - got to push the comedy for that reason - which (like SNL) turns out to be hit-and-miss. The film doesn't deserve to be forgotten in a DVD dustbin for those infrequent awkward moments of cringe.

Here is a typical Hollywood 1930s-era rom-com (as in from the Great Depression, when everybody dreamed that being rich was the answer to life's difficulties and the movies reflected that) simply retooled for modern times: a poor outsider ingenue faces considerable obstacles when she dares to aspire to marry the rich favorite son. It's so overdone, so familiar, it's go-to-sleep-with-the-teevee-still-on cold oatmeal. Except here everything is done in "Asian". There's simply too much to list and so I'll only note that the romantic lead attempts a Cary Grant impersonation - shamelessly. Heading this assault is the indomitable Michelle Yeoh (who I love, and so enough about that!) as the hard-nosed matriarch. But, back to the film: not bad.

Surly bandits with automatic weapons hijack a New York City subway car during rush hour and hold its passengers as hostages for ransom money. The passengers and hijackers are all diverse character types, adding flavor and dimension on top of the expected tension that the harrowing situation demands, and the film delivers the goods. New York City, dirty, grimy, smelly, and foul demurely plays a minor supporting role. Good stuff.