Everyone Says I Love You Movie Review

Woody Allen’s career has been a lengthy string of annual hits or misses. Part of what makes him so compelling a filmmaker is how he dives right in and commits himself even to the ones that aren’t so great, just to keep himself working and putting out new material every year. His movies have a way of changing over time – for me at least – so that The Purple Rose of Cairo seemed a lesser effort, a whimsical throwaway, when I was twenty, but when I revisited it at about thirty-one, there was greatness I had missed. Sometimes it goes the other way, as with Everyone Says I Love You, which I liked a lot more seventeen years ago than I did the other day.

Classic Movie Review from My Collection: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

A strange alien ship sits in a forest clearing. Small brown creatures rustle around in the brush. In 1982, anyone who’d seen a commercial or trailer for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial knew the story. But keeping in mind that when movies are written, filmed, and edited there is usually no concept of the marketing campaign to come, one might have surmised through this opening that it was Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We all know the story now and it’s far from it. The two films are hardly even kindred spirits, so different are they in tone and execution.

Modern Classic Horror Review: Scream

This is the natural closing to my personal journey because it was released during winter break of my first year in college. So I was at the beginning stages of becoming a full-fledged adult and being finished with things like getting scared by horror movies. That said, this was a cinematic experience that genuinely frightened me. This was a slasher film to put a cap on a generation's worth of slasher films that relied heavily on certain conventions. I still think it's a fantastic horror movie, but its effect has certainly worn off and been done to death in the intervening years.

Click here for a list of other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

By the end of 1996 it had been so long since a genuinely scary horror movie had been in wide release that it seemed like the genre might be dead forever. Our old friends Freddy, Jason, and Michael had been flogged into oblivion and people were well attuned to the genre conventions resulting in audiences that were a lot smarter than those going to see slasher films 15 and 20 years earlier. These conventions included things like the couple that has sex getting killed; the drug users getting killed; dumb female characters always making the wrong decisions and getting dead as a result; idiot police officers; revenge motives rooted in a complicated back story; obvious suspects as red herrings; and on and on. Kevin Williamson was an aspiring screenwriter when he wrote Scream and eventually sold it, after which legendary horror director Wes Craven was hired to direct.

The Wedding Singer Movie Review

First published in The Connecticut College Voice on 20 February 1998.

Republished here with minor editorial adjustments that do not affect content.

A Rubik’s Cube, a Freddy Krueger mask, a red Michael Jackson leather jacket and plenty of classic tunes are some of the icons that inhabit the romantic comedy The Wedding Singer starring Adam Sandler. This movie is one of the first in what will probably be a series of 80’s nostalgia flicks. Last year’s Grosse Pointe Blank may have paved the way but we will probably be seeing more films set in the 80’s rather than those which remember the 80’s the way GPB did.