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Gregory Weinkauf

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Dorkula

Blade confronts the ultimate vampire, and geeks everywhere rejoice

By Gregory Weinkauf
Dec 9, 2004

They walk among us. They resemble people, approximate our words and actions, present themselves more or less as human. And yet they are more--a different species, with their own dark legends, their own clandestine meeting places. They are dorks, and they are going to be pretty OK with Blade: Trinity...
Boy Meets Whirl

A lost lad longs for life in I Am David

By Gregory Weinkauf
Dec 2, 2004

Movies pushing the indomitableness of human nature tend to make me puke, mainly because they're often created with a palpable self-congratulatory air by film-biz insiders whose real-life concept of "suffering" extends to being brought an incorrectly prepared frappuccino. This emetic response is doubled when the featured indomitable human happens to...
Call Him Al

An epic story turns human--and fallible-- in Oliver Stone's Alexander

By Gregory Weinkauf
Nov 25, 2004

If you've ever gone line-dancing with a gaggle of amputees on crank and hallucinogens, you know something of the feeling engendered by viewing Alexander. This broad, bold and ambitious film by Oliver Stone presents itself as a fairly straightforward endeavor, but its rhythms quickly go strange while its participants hobble...
Peter Panache

J.M. Barrie gets a Hollywood makeover in Finding Neverland

By Gregory Weinkauf
Nov 18, 2004

Oh, that Johnny Depp. Played in some dime-a-dozen rock bands, did some average television, made a few cutesy little movies. Whatever. Yeah, he messes with his looks in a fun way sometimes, but otherwise he merely rides that nicotine-sunken-cheeks thing all the way to the bank. The guy's popular, but...
Gender Pretender

Billy Crudup goes girly in the witty Shakespearean world of Stage Beauty

By Gregory Weinkauf
Oct 21, 2004

Let's just get the term out of the way up front. The term is "fag hag"--and a thousand pardons, sensitive readers, but there is no PC equivalent. This new film, Stage Beauty, is an absolute fag-hag fiesta. Beneath its historical leanings and classic veneer, it's utterly gaga for girls who...
Attack of the Clones

The ghosts of Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On series return--again--in The Grudge

By Gregory Weinkauf
Oct 21, 2004

The Grudge bears the imprimatur of Sam Raimi but, alas, neither his sense of fun nor his smarts. The wunderkind director behind the Spider-Man and Evil Dead franchises has followed in the path of Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver with their Dark Castle releases, launching his own lucrative spook factory,...
Picture Imperfect

Robin Williams messes with memories in The Final Cut

By Gregory Weinkauf
Oct 14, 2004

Outside Tinseltown, not everyone may be aware of the Hollywood Forever cemetery, which specializes in memorializing lives via a process the franchise owners call "LifeStories." The century-old former Hollywood Memorial Park, retooled for the new millennium, presents carefully edited video montages of the lives of celebrities (from Rudolph Valentino to...
The Importance of Being Ernesto

Motorcycle Diaries explores Ché Guevara's formative years

By Gregory Weinkauf
Sep 30, 2004

Revolutionary idolatry is an odd business. Just ask unruly pop singer Stew, of the unruly pop group the Negro Problem. On his Naked Dutch Painter album, the melodic rebel dares to challenge a sacred image. "Don't you wish there was, like, another picture of Ché Guevara?" he inquires. "Like, one...
Days of Future Passed

Sky Captain zooms back to a tomorrow that never was

By Gregory Weinkauf
Sep 16, 2004

Fortune smiles on groovy egregiousness. In the case of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the filmmakers' investment in their weird visions is wildly unorthodox, but the payoff is oddly satisfying. The movie features myriad killer robots, raucous underwater dogfights and Laurence Olivier's best work since he died 15...
Vile With a Smile

Stephen Fry masterfully transcribes the wit of Waugh to the big screen

By Gregory Weinkauf
Sep 16, 2004

Essayist. Playwright. Radio personality. Librettist. Actor. Novelist. Now, with Bright Young Things, the inimitable British wit Stephen Fry debuts as feature screenwriter and director. Best known here in the colonies either as Jeeves (opposite Hugh Laurie) in Jeeves and Wooster, or as Peter in Peter's Friends, or possibly as Oscar...
Gallo's Pole

The weirdo auteur drives morbidly toward his own money shot in The Brown Bunny

By Gregory Weinkauf
Sep 9, 2004

Rare is the film that caters to fans of rabbits, motorcycles, Gordon Lightfoot and fellatio, but now, thanks entirely to Vincent Gallo, we have that demographic nailed. With The Brown Bunny, the cinematic enfant terrible who gave us the awful pleasures of Buffalo '66 returns, but don't expect a retread...
Live Baby Live

Danny Deckchair sends an upbeat message from Down Under

By Gregory Weinkauf
Sep 2, 2004

Some of the people who helped bring you dank, morose amusements such as The Crow, Dark City and The Matrix have a new movie to offer. Like The Matrix, it features a dork who flies through the air. As in Dark City, we witness the protagonist's world radically changing shape...
Jet Propelled

Zhang Yimou makes a soaring, mythic Hero out of Jet Li

By Gregory Weinkauf
Aug 26, 2004

There's a new movie called Hero. Don't confuse it with that dusty Dustin Hoffman vehicle, nor with the epic Bollywood musical espionage extravaganza Hero: Love Story of a Spy (though that's worth a mind-altering look if you can find it). America and India aren't directly involved here, but huge imperial...
Screenplay Zero

Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley struggle through floundering frights

By Gregory Weinkauf
Aug 26, 2004

You know how fear is scary? Well, director E. Elias Merhige is into that, especially in his new serial-killer thriller Suspect Zero. Absent, however, is the dark-comic malevolence the director smartly cultivated in his successful and disquieting Shadow of the Vampire a few years ago, bullied and bulldozed out of...
Future Shock

Michael Winterbottom paints a plausibly problematic tomorrow in Code 46

By Gregory Weinkauf
Aug 19, 2004

The future is almost here. At least, it is according to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Pandaemonium) and director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People), two cinematic visionaries whose combined vision in Code 46 sparks tremendous intrigue--and unrest. At once a weirdly familiar sci-fi trip, a bleak romance, a treatise on...
The Phantom Menace

The ghosts of Ju-On: The Grudge are here to annoy you

By Gregory Weinkauf
Aug 12, 2004

You're not likely to hear this critic utter the phrases "American remake" and "good idea" in the same breath. Godzilla, anyone? La Femme Nikita bastardized into Point of No Return? The Ladykillers? Just say no! Yet when Hidayo Nakata's shocker Ringu was remade successfully as The Ring by workmanlike Gore...
His Guy Friday

A gay movie buff takes tips from Cary Grant

By Gregory Weinkauf
Aug 5, 2004

There is a phrase bandied about that other film industry--"gay for pay"--that means exactly what it says. The queer thing is, this switch-hitting work ethic obviously applies to the "straight" industry as well, since actors not infrequently launch their careers, or rev 'em up, by playing gay. Witness recently Heath...
Meow Mixed

Catwoman prompts both purrs and hisses

By Gregory Weinkauf
Jul 22, 2004

Without risking much critical credibility, it can be said that Catwoman succeeds on its own feline terms. Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty. It's a sleek and self-absorbed animal, adoring itself so ardently that those of...
I'll Sleep, Period

Mike Hodges follows up Croupier with a somnambulistic crime drama

By Gregory Weinkauf
Jul 22, 2004

It would be nice to declare, "Fans of Mike Hodges, rejoice!" or some such thing at the arrival of the veteran director's latest film; alas, not this time. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead shares elements with some of Hodges' previous work, including a familial revenge theme (from his original Get...
Until the Night

Delpy and Hawke reteam to ponder love Before Sunset

By Gregory Weinkauf
Jul 8, 2004

"Memory is a wonderful thing, if you don't have to deal with the past," declares French Celine (Julie Delpy) to her erstwhile American one-night-stand Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Sunset, the meandering but reasonably charming follow-up to the duo's 1995 Euromance, Before Sunrise. In the movies as in life, nearly...
George of the Bungle

Michael Moore goes Bushwhacking in Fahrenheit 9/11

By Gregory Weinkauf
Jun 24, 2004

A strong toxin requires a strong antidote. In the case of the Bush administration, the cure is being served in significant part by Michael Moore, who previously delivered the rousing documentaries Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine. This time, however, the exposé feels even more personal, as Moore reveals...
Frogs Gone Loco

Childhood games turn into obsession in Love Me If You Dare

By Gregory Weinkauf
Jun 3, 2004

It's a sign that a nation may be losing its collective mind when it grants a nutty hack like Quentin Tarantino an exalted title like officer of arts and letters, but there's France for ya. Whether Gallic pop culture is rousingly progressive or embarrassingly adolescent is anyone's call, but few...