If I hadn’t seen the other four Star Wars movies, I would think Attack of the Clones was 90 minutes of shit and 45 minutes of decent movie. Having seen the others, though, I think this one is 90 minutes of shit and 45 minutes of really good movie.
I love movies about average people, but what I love is for the characters to be “average” and not genuinely as dull and lame as the real average. I want them to subtly exceed the boundaries of the mundane and serve as inspiration, amusement or a lesson to the rest of us living in dingy apartments near railroad tracks.
Solaris raises interesting questions, and then it answers them before it dares let an audience do anything as dangerous as think for itself. There are long, dull passages of dialog that don’t illuminate the issues. Instead they lay them out like a textbook.
I wanted more chasing and crimes, to see how the kid did it. But Spielberg thinks a character can’t sneeze without some corny backstory to explain it.
Adaptation is a movie that people in Starbucks would probably call “meta” something, without really knowing exactly what that means. Fuck knows I don’t.
If I’m going to spend a night in Manhattan with a worried guy, I’d rather it were Griffin Dunne in After Hours, but The 25th Hour is pretty good.
