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Film Friday: Even Ringo Starr Is Better Than Roland Emmerich
If there’s something that all critics know, it’s that it’s great fun to rip apart something that’s incredibly bad. Especially if you know the person who made it deserves it. So as a result there’s a regular bounty of great criticism thrown at Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C. The guy has foisted some of the worst, laziest, most idiotic films on the public ever (his take on Godzilla should have had him tried in the Hague) and just the trailer of 10,000 B.C. seemed like it was intentionally trying to make us stupider.
The Globe and Mail’s Liam Lacey takes an early lead with, “Emmerich and co-writer Harold Kloser are clearly open to capricious historical invention, so it was a bit disappointing not to see a passing Mayan checking his sundial watch, or Noah sailing by waving hello from his arc’s [sic] upper deck,” but Eye’s Adam Nayman also wins us over with a reference to The Warriors. Can’t miss the Star’s Peter Howell, either, for his use of the word “crapitude.”
Probably the most interesting piece of criticism this week comes from NOW’s Susan G. Cole, though. Her review of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is amusingly annoyed with Frances McDormand and Amy Adams to the exclusion of all else. Adams is “grating” and “anyone who saw her performance at the Oscars knows exactly what I’m talking about.” Do we?
Also out this week is Brit-crime heist-flick (or whatever we call this very exact genre) The Bank Job. It’s set in 1971, so unfortunately not one of the criminals will say to the other, “I was chatting up a bird when some prat pushed me. So I said, boyakasha and, like, mashed him up.”
Also this week: Cinematheque Ontario begins its Edward Yang retrospective (covered well by NOW’s Norm Wilner); the Bloor is showing The Diving Bell and the Butterfly all week and one of our favourites, Night of the Hunter, on Wednesday; and The Royal is showing Canadian Music Week stuff, including D Tour: A Tenacious Documentary at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow night. Dealing with the fallout from their (terrible, unwatchably terrible) big-budget film during their supporting tour, it sounds pretty good!