Now You See Me Movie Review

First published at Mostly Movies on 11 June 2013.

It opens with an impressive magic trick – one that is played on you, the movie audience – as Jesse Eisenberg, playing street magician Daniel Atlas plies a card trick for both his fictional street audience and the camera. I will admit to having been duped by the card trick even though I knew it was really a trick of digital effects more than anything else. That, unfortunately, is the method behind most of the magic in Now You See Me, a movie about magicians pulling off one of the greatest tricks in history that fails to enthrall as magic and just barely holds up even as movie magic.

Rango Movie Review

I think Gore Verbinski has found his true calling as a director. I don’t know why I didn’t see it from the Pirate of the Caribbean movies, but he is most suited to directing animated adventures. After all, the exploits of Captain Jack Sparrow are nothing but cartoon action using live actors amid a whole bunch of CGI. But last year’s Rango, Verbinski’s first stab at an animated feature, is a marvelous little gem of a movie.

Johnny Depp gives full life and voice to the title character, a chameleon who gets lost in the desert and unwittingly becomes sheriff to a dying town replete with rats, muskrats, lizards, tortoises and other desert vermin. It begins with Rango staging heroic plays and tableaux with literally lifeless supporting characters. This is because he’s a pet in a diorama being transported by car along the highway. It suddenly occurs to him that in order for his stories to be more interesting, to give his eponymous hero more depth of character, there needs to be an ironic twist that flings his protagonist into an unexpected situation. Then what do you know? His cubicle home gets flung from the car and smashes on the highway leaving him to fend for himself in the desert.

Wedding Crashers Movie Review

This review was written at the time of the film's 2005 release, but not published until now.

It is ostensibly Vince Vaughn’s performance that drives the hard laughs in Wedding Crashers. Although it is otherwise a fun and often hysterical movie, Vaughn’s role as the foil to Owen Wilson’s more or less straight man provides the most brevity. His rapid-fire monologues are among the funniest moments, as when he pours the truth out to a priest over a glass of scotch or when explaining to his secretary why he has no patience for the world of dating.

The movie introduces us to Jeremy and John (Vaughn and Wilson, respectively) as divorce mediators who have great chemistry between them to the point that they are able to lull a bickering soon-to-be-divorced couple into submission and compromise. The chemistry between the two actors, who have worked together in the past but never shared top billing, is palpable. We believe that Jeremy and John are good friends.