The Stepford Wives; Sunday, Bloody Sunday; The Terminal; Terminator 2: Judgment Day; True Romance; Woman Under the Influence; and The Woodsman

The Stepford Wives (2004)
Why remake an okay suspense film that was an of-its-time metaphor for women’s liberation (based on a novel that was a good satiric thriller) into a meaningless, heartless, unfunny comedy with shiny stars and a once-good director? Because Hollywood has run out of ideas, that’s why. Remakes and rehashes, no matter how bad, have become de rigueur. This pedantic Stepford is proof positive that the moneymen backing movies these days are all soulless robots.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971)
An intimate and well-crafted look at a man, a woman, and their shared male lover. Innovative in its time for it’s unflinching portrayal of unmarried sex and homosexuality, the film is far less scandalous now but still edgier than anything currently being shown on broadcast TV. The performances are strong and director John Schlesinger keeps a firm grip on the material, but over time it’s become a slowly paced artifact of a particular era, and does not continue to astound in the same way as Schlesinger’s trippy and daring Midnight Cowboy (1969), always fresh Darling (1965), and striking Billy Liar (1963).

The Terminal (2004)
From a story credited to Andrew Niccol (the writer-director of the underrated Gattaca) and a guy named Sacha Gervasi comes a screenplay by Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson. A screenplay that sucks. A screenplay that crash-lands all over the screen. A screenplay best described by one of the standard dictionary definitions of the word terminal itself: Causing or ending in or approaching death. Tom Hanks wastes a good accent and a lot of charisma playing a kindly foreign man stuck in an airport because of bureaucratic B.S. Partially based on a true story? Partially pulled out of a feces encrusted Pan Am lavatory, if you ask me. Telling the story of the real man and the real bureaucracy might have been interesting. Putting Tom hanks in a good movie would have been even better. But instead director Steven Spielberg does neither, opting for a flight plan that drags viewers through sickeningly sweet and ham-handed plot points, kindergarten-level dialogue, wooden acting courtesy of the gorgeous Catherine Zeta-Jones, one-note good guys, a two-note bad guy (Stanley Tucci valiantly, if briefly, tries to insert some complexity and sympathy into a character designed to make the actor look like an evil fool), zero chemistry between the majority of the leads, and nothing else. The one redeeming feature: frequent Wes Anderson star Kumar Pallana plays Gupta Rajan, the airport’s janitor. Pallana has a natural pizzazz that lights up the screen and The Terminal gives him a chance to grow as an actor, but, sadly, he’s trapped in the same bad movie as everyone else. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, having lost their minds at some point in a distant galaxy, long long ago, have now hired Jeff Nathanson—the writer behind such bad-movie classics as Speed 2: Cruise Control, Rush Hour 2, and The Terminal—to write a new draft of Indiana Jones IV. They keep mentioning that he did a good job on Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. Maybe, but I keep picking up the following radio signal in my false tooth: "Air Traffic Control to Flight Indiana Jones—you’re going down. Repeat. Prepare for a crash landing."

Article Author: Lucas Brachish

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