Eugene Weekly : Movies : 3.29.07


.MOVIE LISTINGS | MOVIE REVIEW ARCHIVE | THEATER INFO

 

REIGN OVER ME Written and directed by Mike Binder. Cinematography, Russ T. Alsobrook. Music, Rolfe Kent. Starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler, Saffron Burrows and Donald Sutherland. Columbia Pictures, 2007. R. 124 minutes.

Judging by the way Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler) scooters around New York at all hours, wrapped in headphones blasting The Who, he isn’t your average guy. Strongly reminiscent of Eric Bogosian with a hangover — that or a very tired grad student — Charlie is living a male fantasy: He spends his days at the movies or in record stores while by night he plays drums in a punk band. A connoisseur of junk food and video games, he’s got a bachelor existence par excellence except for one small thing: Charlie can’t remember anything from before his wife and daughters were killed. Read more…

 

The Host Directed by Bong Joon-ho. Written by Bong Joon-ho, Hah Joon-won and Baek Chul-hyun. Visual effects, Kevin Rafferty. Music, Byeongwoo Lee. Starring Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doo-na and Ko A-sung. In Korean and English with English subtitles. Magnolia Pictures, 2007. R. 119 minutes.

Somewhere between plainly campy horror flicks and the cheery spoof of Shawn of the Dead lies The Host, a monster movie more concerned with the dynamics of its ordinary family of accidental heroes than with explaining the appearance of the titular monster. Well, beyond its reason for existing, that is: In a prologue, a concerned Korean morgue assistant is told (by his American boss, no less) to dump bottle upon bottle of toxic chemicals down the drain, which leads to Seoul’s Han River. Read more…