From the Chicago Reader (July 11, 1997). — J.R.
Men in Black
Rating *** A must see
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
Written by Ed Solomon
With Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Linda Fiorentino, Vincent D’Onofrio, Rip Torn, Tony Shalhoub, and Mike Nussbaum.
Contact
Rating ** Worth seeing
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Written by James V. Hart, Michael Goldenberg, Carl Sagan, and Ann Druyan
With Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Angela Bassett, and Rob Lowe.
Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black and Robert Zemeckis’s Contact, both about the existence of extraterrestrials, are probably the first two blockbusters of the summer worthy of the name, even if many grains of salt are required to make much of a meal of either. I’m not claiming that Contact and Men in Black offer the only genuine chills and thrills around — I caught up with The Lost World: Jurassic Park a couple of weekends ago and enjoyed it more than its predecessor — only that they come closer to speaking my language. Given the preordained preeminence of Spielberg’s romp, I’m sure I would have slammed The Lost World, like most of my colleagues, if I’d seen it when they did. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (June 4, 2004). — J.R.
The Day After Tomorrow
* (Has redeeming facet)
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Written by Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff
With Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian Holm, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, Dash Mihok, Kenneth Welsh, Jay O. Sanders, Austin Nichols, and Perry King.
Roland Emmerich’s latest summer blockbuster is an exceptionally stupid movie. Of course the consensus is that summer blockbusters, even ones that come out in the spring, are supposed to be stupid. But occasionally a summer blockbuster is also expected to offer some food for thought. The Day After Tomorrow, the latest big-budget SF disaster flick, broaches — or stumbles over — the issue of global warming, or what I prefer to call Bush weather, a topic that’s surely worthy of some reflection.
Al Gore declared that this movie was at least an honest fiction about global warming — unlike the fictions about the subject emanating from the White House. Using a stupid movie to call attention to a serious problem put him in a less-than-dignified position, but if he hadn’t tied his arguments to a stupid movie the news media might well have ignored him.
When JFK came out in 1991, all of a sudden, decades after the event, the New York Times and other papers decided the assassination of John F. Read more
