Shanghai Noon (2000)
Starring Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan.
Directed by Tom Dey.
Kilgore rates it: 4 (out of 10)

I hate macaroni and cheese. I have always hated macaroni and cheese. When I was a young Trout, my father would try to convince me that I should like macaroni and cheese. "You like macaroni, don't you?" he would say. "And you like cheese, right? So you should like macaroni and cheese."

I like Owen Wilson, and I like Jackie Chan, so I figured I would like Shanghai Noon, the buddy movie starring both of them plus the fetching Lucy Liu. I was wrong. With its rickety plot, clanking jokes, and feeble groping at a Message about Friendship and Loyalty, I would have rated Shanghai Noon lower if not for Jackie Chan's trademark fight scenes and two genius comedy lines from Owen Wilson that had to have been improvised, because they didn't fit in this script. Go rent The Royal Tenenbaums and Legend of Drunken Master instead.

Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003)
Directed by Bret Wood.
Kilgore rates it: 7 (out of 10)

Hell's Highway tells the story of the Highway Safety Foundation, the people responsible for those safer-driving-through-scaring-kids-shitless films you might have seen in driver's education. An interesting if not riveting documentary, Hell's Highway includes interviews with two men who carried movie cameras to the scenes of car wrecks and filmed the awful wreckage, the mangled corpses, and the merely injured screaming in agony; and spliced the footage into films like Signal 30, Wheels of Tragedy, and The Last Prom. The documentary uses copious footage from these films, so avoid watching Hell's Highway if you're unwilling to look at headless bodies, dead babies, people with glass ground into their ruined faces, and blood splashed everywhere. Of course, you probably are willing to look at such things, which is what makes these films so weird and fascinating. The documentary also includes interesting commentary from an educational film historian (how do you get that job?) who helps put these bizarre films into historical and cultural context.

+posted by Lawrence @ 4/01/2004 07:55:00 PM