Concern

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man really does manage to suck, in spite of itself. The butchered editing manages to utterly fail to bring together interesting interviews, and interesting performances of interesting songs, a feat that’s probably hard to do deliberately. Ignoring that, the film is pretty good, but just a tape of the performances, and then a separate tape of the interviews with Cohen and other musicians would have been just as good. The final U2+Cohen performance, while a good rendition of Tower of Song, fails to bring any climax to the feature, probably because it really looks lip-synced, and not a live performance.

Also, the sound in the theater kept cutting out, which is, you know, bad for a concert film.

A Scanner Darkly

This is good. It’s really faithful to the novel, and here that faithfulness pays off; I also really enjoyed the performances, especially Robert Downey Jr., which pretty much every review will say the same. The animation is nice, but felt more cartoonish than Waking Life did — I suppose that’s because the latter had many different, more painterly styles, while this film was animated by professional animators. I think a lot of the charm of the Rotoshop stuff came from individual style, and thus here it’s flatter, more uniform, and ultimately less interesting.

Clerks II

This was kind of awesome. I loved Clerks., and this doesn’t live up to that, but it’s still really fun. It manages to present raunchy, sick comedy without getting too stupid, which is a rare feat.

Miami Vice

I’ve become kind of a fan of Michael Mann; I thought Collateral was really good, and Heat was incredible. Vice ranks third in that list, but it’s still good. The film is mostly amazingly shot — with the exception of a lot of night shots, which are all film grain (maybe that’s intentional, because that style kind of highlights the danger happening in the dark) — but the story and acting only evoke a solid B.

Superman Returns

I liked this movie. Maybe for no other reason than how it captured really well the feeling of the Christopher Reeve movies. There are some dumb moments, yeah, but it isn’t Superman 3-dumb.

Donnie Darko

I finally got to see this, and it’s pretty good. It’s a much simpler story than I’d expected, but well set up and nicely executed.

Shattered Glass

This is great. It’s a simple story about Stephen Glass, an associate editor for the New Republic, who fabricated many of the stories he wrote for the magazine. It’s simple, and well-acted; and surprisingly, Darth Vader plays Glass, and does a fine job of it.

X-Men: The Last Stand isn’t very good. The story had potential as being a really heavy end to the trilogy, filled with impossible angst and tragedy, but it’s just presented wrong. Chalk it up to poor direction, I guess. It really shows that Singer wasn’t responsible for this one.

I have a gut feeling that this was rushed out to bank off of what really is a great franchise (and a general mania over turning comic books into movies), and that Singer was too busy or too disgusted with the script or process to take part. Kind of sad.