bridesmaid Tagged Articles at Cinematical

No wonder everyone's got Snakes on a Plane fever. Not only does it have the best title in years, but also it has a certain "B" movie spirit that, lately, has been all but lost.

A simple look at the movies playing on 400 screens or less this week confirms it. Sure, we've got movies based on comic books and cheesy sequels (or both at the same time). We've got chases and escapes and adventures and comedies, but they're all so serious.

Originally "B" movies were so called because they ran in front of the "A" feature. "B" movies were generally short and cheap and wallowed in all the lesser genres that never win any Oscars. No one noticed at the time, but later, it became apparent that certain filmmakers, like Edgar G. Ulmer or Andre de Toth, had a real touch within these confines. Many of these features burst with a certain kind of furious energy, mainly because the studios didn't care. As long as these cheapies didn't go over budget and came in on time, they could tell the dramatic story of a violent hoodlum or the story of a giant gorilla wrestling on the Golden Gate Bridge with a blob monster from outer space.

If you only see one movie in 2006, make it An Inconvenient Truth, which drops to 346 screens this week. And yes, that includes the heavily lauded United 93. Because, frankly, the point of that movie will be lost when 20-foot walls of water have crashed down upon and destroyed large chunks of the world. When you walk out of An Inconvenient Truth, you feel terrified, energized and hopeful. And if you're a Republican (or, in fact, one of many Democrats) that doesn't like Mr. Gore, please just put that aside for 100 minutes. Party politics will be the least of your troubles when the environment hits its critical tipping point as discussed in this film.

It keeps me awake nights to think that, while an estimated 3.1 million people have seen An Inconvenient Truth, some 33.8 million have seen The Da Vinci Code (now on 201 screens). I know I'm supposed to go into greater detail when I write a review, but The Da Vinci Code is really just about the dumbest movie I've seen in a while. And it has nothing to do with the book (which I haven't read) or its nifty little treasure hunt. I'm just talking about a work of complete cinematic incompetence by Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman, who -- inexplicably -- both won Oscars in 2002. (Howard beat out Robert Altman, David Lynch, Ridley Scott and Peter Jackson.) If this is a measure of our national intelligence, I think I'd better run out and invest in some scuba gear before it's too late.