Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.


July 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 54

Total Comments: 14


Full Archive



Mr. Brooks / USA / 2007

I thought it’d be a long time before I saw another film as incompetently plotted as the third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, but Mr. Brooks is in a league of it’s own. The film potters along as a fairly entertaining, slightly daft little serial-killers-among-us movie until about halfway through, when it is utterly sideswiped by the single most ludicrous, unconvincing narrative development this side of the third act of Fight Club, from which point it’s downhill all the way. Daft coincidences, unconvincing character swerves, utterly meaningless subplots…

It’d all be pretty entertaining if the filmmakers (including producer/ star Kevin Costner, desperately playing against type as the titular psychopath) didn’t take it all so damn seriously. They seem to think they’re making a proper drama here, making some kind of statement, God knows about what (the propensity for serial murder is treated as a condition somewhere between alcoholism and a bizarre genetic disorder). But the fact is that when you have creepy Kev sneaking about the place in a variety of ludicrous fake moustaches, conversing with his invisible alter ego (played by a very much post- History Of Violence William Hurt) and generally chewing the scenery, it’s very hard to see this as anything more than a late night TV movie thriller with major pretensions.

by Tom Huddleston | Source: DVD
21 Jul 2007 11:06 AM | Submit Comment


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