REVIEW: May [2003]

I need more parts. Kids don’t like weird. They like being weird and marking those weirder than them as pariahs out of jealousy and/or entitlement. The question where it concerns May Dove Canady (Angela Bettis) is whether she was ever actually weird at all. As writer/director Lucky McKee explains via a brief prologue, the kids stayed away from her because of how she handled her lazy eye. Rather than lean into it and make it a non-issue, her mother did everything in her power to force young May to keep…

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REVIEW: Clueless [1995]

I totally paused! I’m not sure why we picked Amy Heckerling‘s Clueless five days after it opened (I save my ticket stubs), but I do remember enjoying it. Not in spite of assumptions either—unless we went because it was the only PG-13 film out (I became a teenage six months earlier). Maybe my love of cinema as more than superficially reductive genres with targeted demographics existed even then since that two-week span also included Apollo 13 and Nine Months. And because I wouldn’t have known about Jane Austen or Heckerling’s…

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REVIEW: Waitress [2007]

“I’m happy enough” I’m not sure whether my wanting to see Waitress was due to its off-kilter humor, shown via its trailer, or because of the horrible tragedy surrounding writer/director/supporting actress Adrienne Shelly. Her murder definitely overshadows the dreamlike comedy she has left behind as her final foray in Hollywood. This is a tale of a poor girl dragging through life, desperately looking for a way out. As far as style goes, I can only think of Edward Scissorhands as having the same hyper-real environment filled with quirky characters and…

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REVIEW: Unknown [2006]

“He must be tied up for a reason” Here is a little known film that never reached theatres in Buffalo, despite its all-star cast of talented actors. When you have guys like Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Peter Stormare, and Joe Pantoliano, with Jeremy Sisto and Bridget Moynahan thrown in, and an intriguing trailer about five men waking up with amnesia in an abandoned warehouse, not knowing which side of good they are on, (a couple people are hurt and/or tied up), how could this film not be raking…

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