Etching its way across the twenty-something collective awareness like a defunct needle on vinyl, The Brady Bunch Movie is a post-latchkey kid's wet dream. Constantly making fun of itself and its family value system, the movie time-warps the 1970s "Sunshine Day" Bradys and all their polyester trimmings to the nihilistic '90s. All the performances, especially Gary Cole as the moral-quipping Mike Brady and Jennifer Elise Cox as Jan, are brilliant. Director Betty Thomas went all out for the '70s cheese factor, right up to having an aged Davy Jones save the day for Marcia at the Westdale High School Dance. Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of the original Brady Bunch, wanted this movie version darker, adding a Brady divorce and having Alice involved in soft porn activities. However, Paramount wisely wouldn't allow the idea of a dysfunctional family to tarnish the polished silliness of this flick. The Brady Bunch Movie makes far out fun of America's most pronounced cultural icons and is well worth checking out.
Amazing Movie Chain: Shelley Long--Outrageous Fortune--Bette Midler--Scenes from the Mall--Woody Allen--Hannah and Her Sisters--Carrie Fischer--STAR WARS--Obi Wan Kenobi
Full of gloriously bloody mass slayings, racial stereotypes, and bad dialogue, The Hunted is everything a ninja movie should be. Take a gaggle of ninjas, a compound of samurai, and a few geishas (those Asian women sure do love sex!) and add in some cliché notions of Japanese honor and a bumbling white computer salesman from New York and you've got a fast train to action city. After about one hour of senseless and thoroughly enjoyable violence, the white man (Christopher Lambert) fresh from his three week samurai training program by a drunken sword maker, defeats the most notorious ninja in all of Japan. Hey, the white man triumphed over the bubonic plague, world war enemies, and 80's fashion, so there's no way he'll meet his demise in some silly little ninja. We liked this one so much we've included the following value-added information:
1) a dialogue sampler:
"What does he think I am, a donkey?" Christopher Lambert uses this
quirky line when a drunken sword maker dupes him into carrying heavy buckets of
coal. Boy, did he tell him! The bigwig execs thought this line was so funny that
they used it twice.
2) an analogy built between this film and Empire Strikes Back:
Christopher Lambert is to a jedi knight what the drunken sword maker is to Yoda
what Japan is to outer space what tiny Japanese extras are to Ewoks.
Amazing Movie Chain: Christopher Lambert--Highlander--Sean Connery--The Last Crusade--Harrison Ford--STAR WARS--Obi Wan Kenobi, jedi master.
Peter Falk and D.B. Sweeney are sure to give tissue manufacturers a sales boost with this admirably sappy film. It's not a chick flick, but it will make sensitive guys in the audience want to go bowling together and drink a lot. The movie focuses on the relationship between a grandfather and his grandson, delving into brief, but influential moments of their lives in what ends in a not-so-traditional Hollywood fashion. D.B. Sweeney plays a self-absorbed, but aspiring heart surgeon while his grandfather, Peter Falk helps him out whenever he has an emminent chance of screwing up his life. If for nothing else, see the film just to watch Gary Coleman give Peter Falk rugby lessons.
Amazing Movie Chain: Peter Falk--STAR WARS-Obi Wan Kenobi
The Walking Dead was meant to parallel the hopelessness of the Vietnam conflict with the futility of the African-American experience back home by telling the story of four black marines dropped into a suicide mission. Whoops. Not quite. Instead, it parallels the hopelessness of Preston A. Whitmore II's career as a writer-director with the futile struggle of four respectable actors dropped into a dead-end script. Do everything in your power to avoid this movie.
Amazing Movie Chain: Joe Morton - Crossroads - Ralph Macchio - My Cousin Vinny - lil' Joe Pesci - JFK - Kevin Costner - Bull Durham - Tim Robbins - IQ - Meg Ryan - Working Girl - Harrison Ford - STAR WARS - Obi Wan Kenobi
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