The Ice Harvest
April 13th, 2007
It’s the night before Christmas in Wichita Falls, and John Cusack plays a crooked lawyer who runs off with two million in mob money in the first scene of the movie. During a very long night in a very odd town, he has to navigate overly solicitous cops, dangerous strip club owners (Connie Nielsen), an untrustworthy partner (Billy Bob Thornton), and the drunken friend who ran off with his wife (Oliver Platt.) The brisk screenplay by Richard Russo and Robert Benton, based on a novel by Scott Phillips, keeps the movie swerving between outright hilarity and Cusack’s increasing desperation. One of the sharper and more entertaining crime/heist/noirs I’ve seen in a while, The Ice Harvest may earn itself a spot on our list of Christmas movies for cynics.
The Ice Harvest. Harold Ramis, ***
Bad News Bears
November 13th, 2006
Trying to catch up with Linklater. His big-budget movies usually retain enough character to make them worthwhile (cf. School of Rock), but this remake rides almost entirely on Billy Bob Thornton’s recycled Bad Santa shtick, and it’s not enough. The kids are bland, the pacing’s off, and the movie fizzles. The best I can say about is that it taught me more about baseball than all 16 hours of Ken Burns, but that’s not saying much.
Bad News Bears. Richard Linklater, 2005. **
[tags]richard linklater, film, children, baseball, sports, 2 stars, billy bob thornton[/tags]
