Culture

I was never a big fan of the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans. Believe it or not, a painfully tired Laurence Olivier as Zeus, and mini-skirt-wearing Harry Hamlin with flowers in his hair just didn't do it for me. But the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion special effects were cool. For decades, Harryhausen was the go-to guy for all things monsters — – Three Sinbad Voyage movies, Jason and the Argonauts and Mysterious Island to name a few. Faithfully, this Clash of the Titans includes all of Harryhausen's monsters from the original with pumped-up technology and CGI. Unfortunately, Clash tried to cash in on the Avatar-inspired 3D craze as an afterthought, adding it in later in production, and suffers for it.

I went to see this movie with my mother-in-law. Her main complaint was that she had to watch her favorite actor, Greg Kinnear, die.
“If it wasn't Greg Kinnear who died, it wouldn't be so sad,” she explained.
I have to agree – there are many other less-talented actors who I wouldn't have minded watching succumb to cancer on a windswept Georgia beach in the specially formulated Nicholas Sparks copyrighted “death montage,” in which Kinnear leans heavily on his 16-year-old daughter as he climbs the stairs to his house, a dark-eye-circled Kinnear sitting in a deckchair with a plaid blanket over his knees… and so on.

Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan has garnered respect over the years for his long list of eclectic and stylish movies, including The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica and Felicia's Journey. Now with Chloe, his newest entry into the erotically charged pseudo-thriller genre, Egoyan cannot rest on his laurels, as his reputation will certainly backpedal as a result of Chloe, one of the most tedious movies I've had the displeasure of seeing.
Chloe begins promising enough, with Amanda Seyfried adorning black stockings and garters in soft-focused photography resembling a Penthouse magazine cover. While we listen to her monologue rationalizing why it's perfectly acceptable to be a prostitute because it's rewarding to be someone's dream girl, we stop and think, “How farfetched is this going to be?”

Since writer-director Noah Baumbach came out with The Squid and the Whale five years ago, imitators have have tried to emulate his style. Yet each copy was lighter and smudgier than the last until we finally got handed the hateful Smart People. Not his fault, of course, but it's been annoying nonetheless. With Greenberg, Baumbach picked Ben Stiller, an actor best known lately for the Night at the Museum franchise, to play Roger Greenberg, his self-absorbed slacker protagonist. It's reasonable enough then to be suspicious of how this pairing might pan out given the familiarity we all have with Baumbach's formula.