kennelco film diary

(2001) dir. Ivan Reitman
A pretty weak comedy here, with minor laughs and moderate highlights. Marketed as the next Ghostbusters, this film lacks any pizzazz that Ghostbusters had.
Ivan Reitman, of course, was the director of Ghostbusters and is clearly trying to recapture some of that film’s spirit here. It fails.
Anyways, this film was pretty [...]

(2001) John Carpenter
This film had the making of a good, contemporary B-movie. Starring Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube and Pam Grier, it had the “street cred” of some seriously lower drawer stars that have potential to have their low budget charm.
The world of the film really isn’t all that different from the types of post-apocalyptic [...]

(2001) dir. Victor Salva
Here is a case of something that I have been experiencing a lot lately. A film that starts very well, shows a great deal of promise, setting mood, affecting a narrative that feels more unusual, but then fails to deliver on the early minutes’ promise.
In this case, however, the ultimate package [...]

(2001) dir. Stephen Sommers
So, yes, I was catching up on all of the summer flicks that I missed in 2001. None of these had managed to inspire me to get out to see them theatrically (though I think that these types of action flicks tend to fare better on the big screen, being special [...]

(2001) Hironobu Sakaguchi, Moto Sakakibara
This film is all about photorealistic animation. Marketed as the first film to have totally digital actors (a real misnomer, but there you go), the naturalism of the digital characters is supposed to be so stunning that you “believe.”
And in many ways the photorealism is amazing.
There are definitely shots, if [...]