Epinions Recent Reviews for willbradbury

If One More Potter Pagan Calls This Movie "Chamber of Horrors," There'll Be Bloody Murders!

Sat, 16 Nov 2002 22:01:46 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - In "Lord of the Rings," Frodo Baggins has to come of age in a real hurry. It's like that old adage: childhood is over the instant you know you're being stalked by a horde of Grim Reaper wraiths. Harry Potter, on the other hand, has the luxury of easing...

Naomi Watts Takes a Regrettable Stop At Hell’s Blockbuster in “The Ring.”

Fri, 15 Nov 2002 16:44:39 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - The "Ring" trailers have been promising more screams than in the audience at the end of A "Hard Day's Night," but instead the movie delivers a psychological fear fug thick as the "Felicia's Journey" moor mists. The movie concerns a killer video tape...

Waking Life

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 09:24:06 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - There are so many great lines and adages concerning dreams. There's the Tweedledee line in Alice in Wonderland," Are you the dreamer, or merely part of someone else's dream?" There's the Poe line about life being "a dream within a dream." Denise...

Almost Famous

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 09:20:38 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury -

Watching Almost Famous, I find myself wondering what, exactly, is the focus of the movie? Is it Patrick Fugit's character, William "The Enemy" Miller, a young rock journalist who gets the ultimate experience for a young rock...

The Moulin Rouge

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 09:17:37 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - There are few things I enjoy more than Christmas with my girlfriend's kin. Well, maybe a good scourging with razorwire, having my nether portions consumed by land-roaming piranha, listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks, on helium, sing The Mikado,...

Dracula (1992)

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 09:13:46 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - Every director wants to do a picture that is colossal and consequential. It seems a little self-indulgent, yes I know. Or maybe a little sycophantic, as most directors attempting a spectacle movie choose a great historical figure. There's David Lean with...

Wit

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 09:10:47 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - In Wit, the cancer-ridden Vivian Bearing(Emma Thompson) is bald for much of the movie. Traditionally in cinema, a shorn woman is usually a woman of strength (a sort of anti-Samson) such as in G. I. Jane, or Aliens. Those movies dealt...

Kiki's Delivery Service

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 09:06:51 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - I've yet to meet a person who, upon hearing the title, doesn't immediately assume it is some stag show about an escort service. It's actually kind of amusing when you consider that Kiki's Delivery Service is one of the most benign, family friendly...

A Clockwork Orange

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 09:01:05 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - My ex-girlfriend held a dim view of Pauline Kael and her criticism (especially for that Saturday Night Fever thumbs-up, oy), and was convinced she lived all alone, save about a hundred cats. I find this very amusing because Kael absolutely...

Dogma

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 08:56:26 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - I'm on the Yale Herald movie review site (one of over 250 movie review sites I peruse on a weekly basis), connected through that omnium gatherum (to borrow a Joseph Mitchell word) of cinema-related reviews and info, www.mrqe.com, and there's a B &...

Harvey

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 08:52:09 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - James Stewart (a born everyman, who even has an everyman-sounding name) plays Elwood P. Dowd, which sounds like the name of a traveling business man. And Elwood is a business man of sorts. Although what he peddles, kind of like what the Jehovah's...

X-Men

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 08:49:00 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - Patrick Stewart is a real glutton for undesired attention. Severely resenting Star Trek: The Next Generation for attaching him to Captain Jean Luc Picard (one of Stewart's pet peeves is being called captain when, as he frequently points out, he...

State and Main: Plenty of Charm, but No Carbohydrates

Sun, 11 Aug 2002 13:12:33 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - I’ve always wanted to be a celebrity, I think.

I’ve even got my own Klondike bar commercial all planned out.

You know those Klondike bar commercials, right? Those spots with the sunny-voiced announcer trying to get noteworthy...

Overture Leaves a Ringing In Your Ear.

Wed, 7 Aug 2002 10:52:42 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - In the beginning and the middle of Lawrence of Arabia, there would be extended sequences of blank screen and music in order to provide theatregoers with a chance to get settled and, later on in the show, to take a stretch. Likewise, Lord of the...

Wow! I'm Being Paid What I'm Writing About!

Fri, 2 Aug 2002 14:31:34 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - Did you ever have a friend who never had the chutzpah to tell off someone they were mad at, so they would get you to do it? That's kind of like what a cartoonist is. Fearing rejection, apprehensive of ostracization, they create these mouthpieces to...

Almost Worth Getting Run Over, Just to Ride In It!

Mon, 3 Jun 2002 15:09:57 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - NOTE: You know, some people have asked me through e-mail whether I really am the way I am in my reviews, dry-witty, somber, calculating. So I decided that I would plunk down and, in one big swoop, hammer out my customary two-and-a-half pages in exactly...

Harry, Harry, Not at All Contrary.

Mon, 3 Jun 2002 11:21:54 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - J. K. Rowlings is the Devil, don't you know? Like some demoniacal Pied Piper, according to the Radical Right Fundamentalists, she'll lead our children like charmstruck lemmings away from their homes and into the sea, to drown. I find this perception, for...

About a Boy: Has a High Fidelity to Well-rounded Characterization.

Sun, 26 May 2002 12:36:42 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - "Do you see this?," I asked the librarian at the check-out desk of the adult section of the local library, indicating the top video in my stack, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain. "This is a Hugh Grant movie. Not only...

A Somber, Trippy Jabberwocky Poem of Lesbian Doinking.

Sat, 25 May 2002 13:11:14 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - There is a candy bar commercial out now set in a High Fidelityesque vinyl shoppe, with a Jack Black doppleganger clerk. Some beanpole enters the shoppe whose chintzy attire designates him as one of those never-wuzs whose sole pastime is going...

Flying Fish, Gabbing Swine, and Fiddling Kitties. Just Another Day in Wiesner World.

Thu, 23 May 2002 12:50:53 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - Looking at the cover of David Wiesner's The Three Pigs, I find myself struck by how wonderfully goofy is the face of a pig, this cabbage leaf-eared, rodeo clown-lipped creature, with a beezer blunt as a child's first sexual queries. And even...

Alka-Seltzer Plus: Vile as Limey Ginger Beer!

Tue, 21 May 2002 11:58:30 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - It begins with a ping in the biological engine, a clang in the pipes that wasn't there the hour before. Your breakfast goes down like a barrel cactus. You've a gutful of ten-penny nails and piranha teeth. Your joints are in Chinese crucifix tortures,...

Star Wars Deux: I Sold My Soul to Satan For This?

Mon, 20 May 2002 11:49:43 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - Well, I did it. I managed to see Star Wars, Episode Two: Attack of the Clones on the very day that it premiered. How did I accomplish this stunner? Well, actually it’s kind of a funny story. I was walking in the woods, you see, and chanced to...

Fight Club: David Fincher On His Soapbox!

Wed, 15 May 2002 09:37:47 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - I thought we might open this review up with a little mental exercise, a couple laps around the intellectual trim trail to get you limbered up for the body of the review. Now I read recently in The New York Times(although, it could have beenThe...

Miami Herald: The Miami Herald, Or the Gators N' Geezer Gazette.

Tue, 23 Apr 2002 08:31:06 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury - I originally felt obligated to write about The New York Times, seeing how I spend so much time over there on-line, hanging out in the bottle club, slurping down Long Island Iced Teas with Elvis Mitchell and Janet Maslin, Andrew Sarris making an...

Blade II: Featuring the Most Frightening Baldies Since Coneheads!

Tue, 9 Apr 2002 23:52:55 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author willbradbury -

Sitting in the multiplex, watching Blade II, I found myself thinking," What is it with bald people and villainy?" In the flick, the chief bad guys, the Reapers, are bald. The Lord of the Vampires is bald. Reinhardt, a turncoat vampire hunter,...