Short and Sweet Movie Reviews
Quick, concise, sometimes entertaining critiques for the short-attention-span mind.

Sunday, May 16, 2004  

Troy (IMDB) (Netflix)
Brad Pitt is Achilles the warrior, Orlando Bloom is Paris the callow loverboy, and Diane Kruger is Helen, the face that launched a thousand CGI server farms. With Peter O'Toole as King Priam and Eric Bana as his other son Hector, one of the few characters that come off well in this story of beefcake and senseless tragedy.

As with most tragic tales, especially mythic ones, the characters make any number of bad choices, some of which challenge the viewer's credulity and make it difficult to go along with the program, and the one-on-one fight scenes are more compelling than the major battles. As mentioned, most of the characters lose your respect as the film progresses (Achilles is mostly looking out for his own glory), but Bana's Hector is the true mensch, taking the hard road at every turn. He should have had a better publicist.


current favorites

Collateral
Sideways
Ray
Team America: World Police
Manchurian Candidate
I (heart) Huckabees
Fahrenheit 9/11
I, Robot
archives
subscribe to the RSS feed

Subscribe to Short and Sweet Movie Reviews via my syndicated feed (through the fine people at FeedBurner). What's with these "feeds" or "RSS," you ask? Feedburner has a good introduction to the technology and how to use it.

The Feed:

Subscribe to this feed through My Yahoo:

links
about
Don Chartier is not a professional movie critic, and proves it with every review.

Expect to see about two posts a week, usually on the weekends, of an idiosyncratic mix of blockbusters, indies and foreign films.

Contact him or subscribe to the free emailed version of these reviews at chartier AT enteract DOT com.