Friday Film Roundup: Little to Crow About in Most Markets
Today’s film roundup from Past the Popcorn:
Yes, it’s the slowdown in the lead-up to the Big Summer Blockbusters–and there’s little to get excited about this week. The best of the crop is probably The Hoax, which just now goes into wide distribution. The circuitous story of Clifford Irving’s bogus Hughes biography, the film may be “artistic and competent,” but Greg Wright anticipates that, like Breach and Zodiac before it, “the ticket-buying reaction” will likely be “Lived There, Still Have the T-shirt.”
The B-grade thriller Disturbia, meanwhile, strikes Jeff Walls as “a fun, entertaining thriller,” if little more than a “remake of Hitchcock’s Rear Window.” That’s a far more charitable assessment than Greg Wright’s opinion of Perfect Stranger and Pathfinder, though. In the former case, Wright finds Halle Berry’s latest thriller a “pathetic” R-rated exercise in “prurient thrill,” and in the latter calls the much-delayed Viking yarn a reinvention of “The New SUVs: Stupid Unbelievable Vikings.”
Jenn Wright, though, finds great value in a mostly-gentle unrated foreign picture, Grbavica. A portrait of the women and children who survived Bosnia’s civil war, the film is “a dark picture that refuses to be depressing while still effectively showing the world that the fight isn’t over yet.” Wright gives it a strong recommendation.
In other features, Greg Wright records a bit of the roundtable interviews he sat in on with the creative minds behind Hot Fuzz, due out next week. The excerpts demonstrate how the team can call their own film “bombastic” and “ridiculous”–without being the least bit down on it!
