Mike Ward

Dreaming Out Loud: Robert Altman at the IFC Center

By Mike Ward

Robert Altman's films often reveal in dreams the strangeness of being alive. This more than anything sums up the timeless greatness of Altman at his best, and starts to convey what’s lost when cinema is thought of as commodity rather than art. [4 January 2007]

May Angels Sing Thee Back to Mayberry: Don Knotts (1924-2006)

By Mike Ward

Knotts' characters would typically fail, but never so as to precipitate catastrophe; he would bumble, but he carried within him a certain virtuosity, which would come out when the story needed it. [6 March 2006]

Benji the Inscrutable

By Mike Ward

Benji is a child's movie, complete with stereotyped characters, cheesy jokes, and goofy kid-pleasing pratfalls that make parents cringe. But its quiet moments verge sometimes, improbably, on the sublime. [10 November 2005]

You Can Say Stuff With a Puppet You Can’t in Person: Trace Beaulieu in Orlando, Florida, 2004

By Mike Ward

MST3k taps into a more sophisticated language than do shows of lesser scope. [1 January 1995]

Animal Husbandry

By Mike Ward

U-571

By Mike Ward

Jonathan Mostow's first feature length film was 1997's Breakdown, with Kurt Russell as Jeff Taylor, a middle-class white man victimized by rednecks in an extortion plot.

Godzilla: The Biggest Blockbuster

By Mike Ward

This summer's blockbusters got nothin' over the biggest, beastiest blockbuster of all... [9 May 2008]

(more Pop Past)

WarGames: The Dead Code

By Mike Ward

This movie has that meandering, free-associative sense of dread familiar to us from watching the real-life fiasco of the last few years. [6 August 2008]

Idiocracy (2006)

By Mike Ward

A brilliantly conceived, but fitfully executed comedy about how bad things are likely to get if we keep going where we're going. [2 March 2007]

Happy Feet (2006)

By Mike Ward

The penguins learn to refine their engrained vocal skills not in the interest of spiritual uplift or any such, but, basically, to get laid. [21 November 2006]

9/11: Press For Truth (2006)

By Mike Ward

In place of an easily grasped universe of absolutes, one must struggle to understand a maze of shifting geopolitical allegiances and ethical compromises. [6 November 2006]

The Path to 9/11

By Mike Ward

The motives and actions of the heroes transcend reproach; the bad guys are so inscrutably evil, they come across as the beady-eyed mole people in B-grade science fiction movies. [14 September 2006]

Flying Nun: The Complete Second Season

By Mike Ward

Mary Poppins had nothing over Sister Bertrille. [12 September 2006]

Snakes on a Plane (2006)

By Mike Ward

The criminals have to come up with an outlandish plot and the relationship between law and lawlessness thence devolves into one of mutual deterrence, theorization perpetuated into extremity. [22 August 2006]

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea: Season One, Vol. Two

By Mike Ward

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is typically more caught up in stories about deterrence than outright conflict; hence, the talking heads and surprising paucity of giant monsters. [31 July 2006]

The Net (2004)

By Mike Ward

I only feel comfortable reiterating Kaczynski's arguments by framing him as the result of an experiment gone wrong in the state-sanctioned exercise of force. [24 April 2006]

The Shaggy Dog / The Shaggy D.A. (1959/1976)

By Mike Ward

In his shaggy-dog form, Wilby can spy on the spies without them becoming any the wiser. In this homage to Cold War vigilance, the movie consummates its break with the more traditional '50s transformation movies. [31 March 2006]

Fateless (Sorstalanság) (2005)

By Mike Ward

The horrors unfold gradually, experienced in detail by their victims, who are unlikely to name what they've been through 'Holocaust', to attach to their testimony the grand trappings of religion and myth. [15 February 2006]

Airplane!: The ‘Don’t Call Me Shirley!’ Edition (1980)

By Mike Ward

Airplane! basically gets by on one joke: sight gags based on tricks of perspective or on thwarting expectation. [11 January 2006]

Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965, 1967)

By Mike Ward

Although the three short movies on the Sins of the Fleshapoids DVD have this uniquely '60s zero-budget feel to them, their ambitions outpace those of your typical grindhouse quickie. [23 December 2005]

The Passenger (1975/2005)

By Mike Ward

He is introduced as a human being in the process of existing rather than any particular person engaged in any particular struggle. [23 November 2005]

Lost in Space: Season 3, Vol. 2

By Mike Ward

These momentary failures of grammar betray a befuddlement at birth and death, that story of origin and destination without which humanness has little meaning. [11 August 2005]

Conquest of Space (1955)

By Mike Ward

Merritt's protests actually date pretty well -- contemporary liberal sensibilities often subscribe to the view that space travel is a continuation or extension of the colonial impulse. [18 October 2004]

Orwell Rolls in His Grave (2003)

By Mike Ward

To lack political power -- as Robert Kane Pappas submits the American people at large do, living in a post-democratic society where the media function in collusion with government -- is also to lack the ability to prove. [27 August 2004]

The President’s Analyst (1967)

By Mike Ward

This technological nightmare fuses free-market corporatism gone amuck with the regimentation and loss of individuality that characterized the Soviet empire. [14 June 2004]

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)

By Mike Ward

Far too vast to be linear or inclusive, the Godzilla story is actually a lot of stories, many of them contradictory. [1 March 2004]

The Out-of-Towners (1970)

By Mike Ward

The real peril, though -- the one preceding all the others -- is that if you let it, the city can steal your thoughts. [1 December 2003]

Dead Like Me

By Mike Ward

Liberated from the selective perception that comes hand in hand with rational existence, the reapers on Dead Like Me are better prepared to anticipate the unexpected. [17 November 2003]

Bingo (1991)

By Mike Ward

Bingo's handful of good scenes usually have less to do with the dog than with humans who struggle with their inability to manipulate tools. [25 August 2003]

AfterMath: Unanswered Questions From 9/11 (2002)

By Mike Ward

For those unfamiliar with the subject, AfterMath provides a hypnotic introduction, complete with split-screen graphics, dance beats, and voice-over narration by hip-hop artist Paris. [17 July 2003]

It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955)

By Mike Ward

The mind of man had thought of everything -- except that which was beyond his comprehension!" [5 May 2003]

The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm (2000/2002)

By Mike Ward

Radioactive poison is a legacy of laissez-faire capitalism's most guilty indulgence. [13 February 2003]

Invaders From Mars (1953)

By Mike Ward

We don't know what's out there, but we're pretty sure it isn't up to any good. [17 January 2003]

Interview With the Assassin (2002)

By Mike Ward

When the movie does work, it's more often than not because of Raymond J. Berry's understated rendering of the assassin as a simple, humorless man. [10 January 2003]

Stealing the Fire (2002)

By Mike Ward

What is the relevance of individual agency in such vast systems as the Nazi war machine or the post-war global arms trade?" [5 December 2002]

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)

By Mike Ward

It's ironic and wholly predictable that Keyhoe's protest against government and military censorship was, in fact, censored in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. [18 October 2002]

E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982/2002)

By Mike Ward

The rerelease of 'E.T.' raises questions that underscore the difference between the Reagan-Bush years and the years of Bush Jr. and Dick Cheney. [4 April 2002]

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968/2001)

By Mike Ward

In this light, '2001' and the revolutionary epoch of its making seem a mere Technicolor blip in an otherwise olive drab post-World War II empire. [1 November 2001]

Band of Brothers

By Mike Ward

The genie of wholesale civilian slaughter is clearly out of the bottle for good, no matter the attempts to bowdlerize it away into forgotten history, or the indignant objections of those who insist 'we' did not 'bring this on ourselves.' [1 January 1995]

Destroy All Monsters by Ken Hollings

By Mike Ward

PULL.

Destroy All Monsters by Ken Hollings

By Mike Ward

Expands upon this fusion of high and low culture, using mass-media tropes to elaborate on endlessly dense themes. The novel is most easily summarized as an 'alternative history,' a what-if scenario.

X (1996/2001)

By Mike Ward

X's whole theology -- to the extent it can be deciphered -- is airlessly pessimistic.

The Watcher (2000)

By Mike Ward

U-571 (2000)

By Mike Ward

A Nazi U-boat commander, peering through a periscope, locks a merchant ship in his sights. After giving the order to fire, he studies the ship's flaming wreckage and proclaims that the crew has succeeded in breaking her back.

Tomb Raider (2001)

By Mike Ward

All this symbolism would be quite impressive, actually, if 'Tomb Raider' ever gave the slightest impression it knew where it was going with it or was eventually planning to use these symbols to say something coherent.

Supernova (2000)

By Mike Ward

Snow Day (2000)

By Mike Ward

Someone Like You (2001)

By Mike Ward

'Someone Like You''s press kit describes Eddie and Jane as a 'Hepburn and Tracy of the modern era', but its undercurrent of painful loss and compulsive grief avoidance is precisely missing from movies like 'Desk Set' and 'Adam's Rib'.

Rules of Engagement (2000)

By Mike Ward

Two years ago, many critics praised Saving Private Ryan as a new kind of war film that brought the horrors of war home with an unprecedented, visceral intensity..

Rock Star (2001)

By Mike Ward

It's disappointing that 'Rock Star'... ends up with such a boring reassertion of straightness, not only with regard to sexual orientation, but also with regard to lifestyles and values more generally.

Pearl Harbor (2001)

By Mike Ward

Pearl Harbor's endorsement of military ideals and barely submerged nostalgia for the war's anti-Japanese racism only abates for a half hour of stunningly rendered shoot-em-up as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and its surrounding airfields takes place.

The Perfect Storm (2000)

By Mike Ward

Novocaine (2001)

By Mike Ward

Novocaine's biggest concern seems to be with the act of lying, and Frank is far from the only guilty party.

Man on the Moon (1999)

By Mike Ward

Far be it from me to accuse Hollywood of wishful thinking. But as the closing credits for Man on the Moon roll under Andy Kaufman's (Jim Carrey's) timid gaze, it's easy to think the film has been seduced by its own notion that a life of sufficient celebrity can offer freedom from the mortality that afflicts ordinary souls.

The Mystery of Oberwald (Mistero di Oberwald, Il) (1980/2001)

By Mike Ward

Set in 1903, 'Oberwald' is an adaptation of a Jean Cocteau play called 'The Two-Headed Eagle'. The play and subsequent video are both premised on the kind of everyplot that evokes many common narratives at once.

Me, Myself & Irene (2000)

By Mike Ward

Charlie's suppressed despair over the failed marriage and the humiliations he suffers as a highway patrolman coalesce into alterego Hank, who emerges David Banner style whenever Charlie encounters confrontation or conflict.

Mission to Mars (2000)

By Mike Ward

Galaxy Quest (1999)

By Mike Ward

Robert Zemeckis's Contact (1997) is without a doubt the finest movie in recent memory to deal with the question of what might be happening to all those rays of media dreck - TV shows, radio programs, and the like - we've been beaming higgledy-piggledy through the cosmos for the last century. Galaxy Quest is almost as certainly the second-finest such recent film, but come to think of it, I can't really recall a third, offhand, so I suppose this might constitute a less-than-ringing endorsement.

Godzilla 2000 (2000)

By Mike Ward

For all of Godzilla 2000's noisy, confused symbolism, its central message is as clear and simple as it was when the series first got underway: what's inside can kill.

Felicia’s Journey (1999)

By Mike Ward

Enemy at the Gates (2001)

By Mike Ward

This is Enemy at the Gates's most elegant theme, one that its often heavy-handed melodrama almost but not quite diminishes: that to be observed is to die, but to be invisible and quiet as the dead may allow you to survive.

The Dish (2001)

By Mike Ward

Cliff, Mitch, and the adorably timid Glenn spend great dollops of screen time trying to recompute Apollo 11's trajectory, covering a blackboard with an engineer's esoteric, mathematical scrawl.

Dinosaur (2000)

By Mike Ward

The movie certainly doesn't devote much screen time to the dinosaurs' long-term fate, instead being content to follow along as Aladar tries to get laid without getting eaten -- you know, the way we all do.

Dr. T & The Women (2000)

By Mike Ward

We're stuck, 'Dr. T & The Women' seems to say. Men and women: this is simply how we are.

Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows (2000)

By Mike Ward

'There are some naysayers,' one Blair Witch fanatic enthuses, 'who come and they say nay.' Not the sharpest wooden stake in the breastbone, this guy.

Almost Famous (2000)

By Mike Ward

Maybe in the deceptive world of fame (or almost-fame), this is the best version of intimacy available, although it's easier to attribute it to the characters' superficiality, and maybe a certain starry-eyed idealism on Cameron Crowe's part.