Movie Reviews

Been a while. Two weekends out of the country and all that. So this is covering a stretch of time - but that's all right I guess.

Get it out of the way first, I guess: Snakes on a Plane! After all the hype and the anticipation, this turns out to be exactly what it should be: a no-nonsense exploitation picture, that tells you what it's going to do and does it. Samuel L. Jackson, a host of character actors, and snakes on a plane - all of it delivered at a nice clip, at least after a slow start, all of it executed with plenty of laughs, some chills, all the snakes you could ask for, hissing and spitting and biting and slithering and swallowing and squeezing to their hearts' content. It offers pretty much exactly what you want in a cheap disaster movie - nods to the classics, cheap laughs, kids in peril, pricks humbled, the clock beaten, with something to shiver over - snakes on a plane!

Little Miss Sunshine: this seems to be the indie hit of the summer. People seem to like it. For good reason. It's standard fare, I suppose - dysfunctional family takes a road trip, wackiness ensues. You've got Greg Kinnear, playing a failed success guru; Toni Collette as his Long Suffering Wife (who, of course, pays all the bills). Alan Arkin as his father, living with them because he got thrown out of the old folks home for being a junkie. Paul Dano as a 17 year old who's taken a vow of silence because of Nietzsche, and Abigail Breslin as a junior beauty contestant. Throw in Steve Carrell as Toni Collette's suicidal gay Proust scholar brother - you can see the wackiness coming a mile away. They head off to a beauty contest in a rattly old van - not just wacky, but zany! hijinks are sure to come... But it works. In a way, it's not too different from Snakes on a Plane - it's perfectly generic, it lays out its ingredients plainly - and then delivers. It is, in fact, wacky - zany even! It also has an underlying generosity, to the family at least (and a few outsiders). For all their posturing and raving, they all seem to like one another, and they all come through when they are tested. And the performances are all you could hope for. It's as good a cast as you could imagine - and they are without exception excellent. Carell and Arkin are what they are - ringers - surpassingly brilliant, stealing corners of the film without trying, and without stepping on anyone else's toes. (Carrell's scenes with Paul Dano work particularly well.) Kinnear and Collette hold down the center, she sensible, he deluded; and the kids match them. It's a nice little film. When I started seeing trailers for it, the beauty pageant plot put me in mind of Michael Ritchie's Smile - the films aren't that similar, in the end - but it's still a good comparison. Little Miss Sunshine isn't far from Ritchie's blend of satire and pathos, and that's very high praise.

The Oh in Ohio: a bit of a disappointment. With Parker Posey and Paul Rudd as a married couple frustrated by the fact that she has never had an orgasm, plus Danny DeVito and Mischa Barton as the beneficiaries of this split. It's amusing, the characters are sympathetic, the cast is excellent and all doing very good work - but it still feels thin... too bad. I don't mean to complain too much - it's enjoyable and clever and all, but never gets past "amiable"....