Fine Smoking, Cool Ice, Awful Instinct, Swinging Slugs
F.S./Movie Reviewer
Issue date: 4/5/06 Section: Arts & Entertainment
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Based on Christopher Buckley's 1994 novel, Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking (Landmark's Magnolia) is a satire on some rather easy targets - amoral lobbyists, posturing politicians, calculating Hollywood super-agents and manipulative journalists, among others.
They're not hard to hit, and the approach is in any event more genial than lacerating. Short on venom, the movie is more a lightweight spoof than a scalding satire.
Still, it's an amusing piece, with smiling Aaron Eckhart tying everything together as a spokesman for big tobacco pursued by some homegrown terrorists, a preening senator and a calculating reporter while trying to protect the interests of the industry he serves.
And when he gets together with his colleagues from the alcohol and firearms lobbies to chew over their common interests over lunch, the picture periodically takes wing.
Reitman may not have made a modern Dr. Strangelove, but he's at least managed a reasonable facsimile of Wag the Dog.
The inevitable sequel to the 2002 computer-animated hit, Ice Age: The Meltdown (wide release) arrives in theatres with much the same virtues and weaknesses of the original movie.
The picture is divided into two parts and shuffles between them.
One, concentrating on the efforts of non-verbal squirrel Scrat to acquire an elusive acorn, is a lot of slapstick fun - like a Road Runner cartoon starring Wile E. Coyote Jr.
But the other half, in which the returning trio of mammoth, sloth and saber-toothed tiger lead a bevy of critters to safety from the rising flood waters left by dissolving glaciers, is mostly a slog in more ways than one.
This isn't a bad family film, but it's one you might want to wait to watch on DVD rather than traipsing out to a theatre to see.
A far better movie for children (and also about a long journey) is Duma (Angelika), a live-action tale about a boy and his dog - sorry, cheetah - which he aims to take back single-handedly to the wilderness of South Africa after raising it from a cub.
There's certainly nothing new about the story, but director Carroll Ballard (who made The Black Stallion) is an old hand at this sort of thing, and he's assembled an able cast and excellent crew to give it spirit and sheen.
On the other hand, Basic Instinct 2 (wide release) is equally familiar but of no value whatever.
The steamy sequel to the 1992 smash once again stars Sharon Stone as the sultry novelist who wraps a professional man - a shrink this time, rather than a cop - around her little finger while perhaps committing a series of murders.
There are a few rather explicit moments in the picture, but mostly it's an absurdly convoluted would-be thriller that winds up laughable rather than suspenseful or erotic.
The manipulated psychologist has a print hanging in his apartment that bears the title "I smell blood." People going to Basic Instinct 2 will have the opportunity to smell something else entirely.
Far more enjoyable is Slither (wide release), a loony homage to creature features from the 1950s that mixes chintzy gore effects and yahoo slapstick to excellent effect.
The plot has to do with a guy turned into a blob of goo resembling Jabba the Hutt by an alien that comes to earth in a meteor. But over the course of ninety minutes it also introduces giant slugs and flesh-eating zombies, though always with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
No one will confuse Slither with art. But if drive-ins were still around, this would be the perfect movie to see there.
And it's a pretty good show in an auditorium, too.
They're not hard to hit, and the approach is in any event more genial than lacerating. Short on venom, the movie is more a lightweight spoof than a scalding satire.
Still, it's an amusing piece, with smiling Aaron Eckhart tying everything together as a spokesman for big tobacco pursued by some homegrown terrorists, a preening senator and a calculating reporter while trying to protect the interests of the industry he serves.
And when he gets together with his colleagues from the alcohol and firearms lobbies to chew over their common interests over lunch, the picture periodically takes wing.
Reitman may not have made a modern Dr. Strangelove, but he's at least managed a reasonable facsimile of Wag the Dog.
The inevitable sequel to the 2002 computer-animated hit, Ice Age: The Meltdown (wide release) arrives in theatres with much the same virtues and weaknesses of the original movie.
The picture is divided into two parts and shuffles between them.
One, concentrating on the efforts of non-verbal squirrel Scrat to acquire an elusive acorn, is a lot of slapstick fun - like a Road Runner cartoon starring Wile E. Coyote Jr.
But the other half, in which the returning trio of mammoth, sloth and saber-toothed tiger lead a bevy of critters to safety from the rising flood waters left by dissolving glaciers, is mostly a slog in more ways than one.
This isn't a bad family film, but it's one you might want to wait to watch on DVD rather than traipsing out to a theatre to see.
A far better movie for children (and also about a long journey) is Duma (Angelika), a live-action tale about a boy and his dog - sorry, cheetah - which he aims to take back single-handedly to the wilderness of South Africa after raising it from a cub.
There's certainly nothing new about the story, but director Carroll Ballard (who made The Black Stallion) is an old hand at this sort of thing, and he's assembled an able cast and excellent crew to give it spirit and sheen.
On the other hand, Basic Instinct 2 (wide release) is equally familiar but of no value whatever.
The steamy sequel to the 1992 smash once again stars Sharon Stone as the sultry novelist who wraps a professional man - a shrink this time, rather than a cop - around her little finger while perhaps committing a series of murders.
There are a few rather explicit moments in the picture, but mostly it's an absurdly convoluted would-be thriller that winds up laughable rather than suspenseful or erotic.
The manipulated psychologist has a print hanging in his apartment that bears the title "I smell blood." People going to Basic Instinct 2 will have the opportunity to smell something else entirely.
Far more enjoyable is Slither (wide release), a loony homage to creature features from the 1950s that mixes chintzy gore effects and yahoo slapstick to excellent effect.
The plot has to do with a guy turned into a blob of goo resembling Jabba the Hutt by an alien that comes to earth in a meteor. But over the course of ninety minutes it also introduces giant slugs and flesh-eating zombies, though always with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
No one will confuse Slither with art. But if drive-ins were still around, this would be the perfect movie to see there.
And it's a pretty good show in an auditorium, too.