Eyes Wide Shut (The Cornfield #53)

We begin the year with a holiday picture, and a review from Film.com in 1999; this was written, as I say below, very quickly after seeing the film, and time has only enhanced my strong feeling for the movie. Having posted a number of things for the absurd idea of “the Cornfield,” I may step [...]

Mission: Impossible II (The Cornfield #53)

I haven’t seen the new one yet. Instead, a 2000 Film.com review of the second installment. The rap on the first Mission: Impossible movie was that nobody could understand the plot. Still, the picture was a worldwide blockbuster, so the problems of lucidity couldn’t have been that troubling, right? At least that’s the attitude seemingly [...]

Deep Impact (The Cornfield #51)

More near-misses lately in the world of asteroids and their relationship to Earth, prompting a visit to a Film.com review of the non-Armageddon from 1998. As it turned out, I was wrong about Armageddon not being just as much a soap opera as Deep Impact; read about the grisly results here. And MSNBC is still [...]

Wilde (The Cornfield #50)

Anglo-Irish literary subjects are on my mind at the moment, and Oscar Wilde died on Nov. 30, 1900, and that’s about it justifying a look at a 1998 Film.com review of a rather disappointingly normal movie. One of the elements of Wilde, the film bio of the great Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde, is the suggestion that [...]

Thirteen Days (The Cornfield #49)

We just passed the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which will serve as pretext for re-printing a 2000 Film.com review of a movie I found particularly annoying. I think I’ll stick with The Missiles of October. That 1974 TV production (shot on video, if memory serves), starring William Devane as John F. [...]

Tomcats (The Cornfield #48)

A Film.com review from 2001, this time hitting the nadir. In the old days of stupid teen sex comedies, a certain amount of gratuitous female nudity was implicit in the purchase price of the ticket. One could expect a Peeping Tom scene involving the girls’ shower, for instance, or a never-to-be-seen-again starlet doffing her bikini [...]

Sweet November (The Cornfield #47)

At least one more Film.com review from 2001, this one a particularly flaccid remake. Pat O’Connor’s directorial output has been sufficiently uneven (Cal on the plus side, Inventing the Abbotts on the other) that it is credible he could turn out something as monumentally silly as Sweet November. I, for one, find it hard to [...]

Freddy Got Fingered (The Cornfield #46)

We continue trolling for Film.com reviews from 2001. Incredibly, this is not the low point. I remember seeing the trailer for this film with a preview audience full of Tom Green’s demographic, and the forceful laughter they supplied to the jokes in the trailer had a kind of defiant quality, like “This is our guy, you [...]

The Dish (The Cornfield #45)

And another Film.com review from 2001. This movie is one of those unheralded little Aussie pictures (Love Serenade is another) that provide a large amount of feel-good. The Dish comes to us from the Australian filmmaking group that made The Castle, a splendidly silly film (and a huge hit down under). They’ve come a long [...]

Town & Country (The Cornfield #44)

I’m reprinting a few Film.com reviews from 2001. And besides, one had to address the unending demand for more material on Town & Country. When Charlton Heston is the funniest thing in a comedy, you’ve got problems. Such is the case with Town & Country, the star-crossed film that strands a group of talented people [...]