Should I write movie reviews?

Because I am a movie slut I have taken two bullets for you this weekend. I saw The Fantastic Four and Island, both of which you can afford to miss.

The best thing about Island was the theater we saw it in, The Moolah. The décor, the leather seats, the full service bar, and my passing crush on Scarlet Johansson were the only things that made it bearable. Actually the cast, including the always watch able Djimon Hounsou, Steve Buscemi and Ewan McGregor, did a great job with their relatively brief screen appearances and can’t be faulted for the performances of their digitized, flame and bullet retardant doubles, who logged considerably more screen time through the never ending cascade of shrapnel that comprises the second and third acts of the film.

Director Michael Bay, who gave us The Rock and Armageddon and produced that atrocity Pearl Harbor, could have done us the favor of omitting one or two explosions in order to hire an army of writers to fix his script. Instead of adapting two film classics from the seventies (Logan’s Run and Coma) into an intelligent, dystopian sci-fi thriller that comments in useful and compelling ways about the coming ethical questions that modern science raises like the excellent Gattaca, Bay weakly stitches several key concepts together using exploding film. If you decide to attend take your favorite headache medication before you go as a preemptive strike.

As for Fantastic Four, I’ve gotten used to Films like X-men and Spiderman that transition my childhood comic book fantasy life into adult arenas. Fantastic Four is a good kid’s movie, and if I had an eight year old sitting around the place I might take them to go see it. A nine year old would be too precocious to enjoy this little sliver of cinematic folly that repeatedly asks the question, “Isn’t Jessica Alba hot?” The production team failed to recognize that the popularity of the Marvel franchise is that is appeals to viewers of every age through complex characters and plot. If in the future producers would like to see the ongoing returns in the rental and DVD markets that the better superhero vehicles have earned this is a lesson they are going to have to learn.