“I’ll see you at the movies.” – Roger Ebert’s Final Written Words.
It’s as I said in my review for “Starting Out in the Evening”: Come obscurity, irrelevance, success, or fame, a writer still has to write, regardless. In Roger Ebert’s case it was, come disease, sickness, and life altering illness, a writer still has to write. And Roger Ebert, no matter what he faced in his life, had to write. In the end, whether you agreed with him, hated his ability to raise controversy, or just had a relative indifference toward him, very few movie critics changed the world of cinema and the landscape of writing as he did. It’s with a heavy heart that I write about the passing of my favorite movie critic of all time, as Roger was a man who seemed to almost know he was dying.
What if the blob was a sentient being with a massive ego? That’s basically the summation of “Phantoms,” a film that alternates from tedious, to goofy, to downright silly quite often. The tonal shifting often affects “Phantoms” turning it from a mediocre horror film to just a downright idiotic horror film with no semblance of common sense. Why does every single monster or being with a consciousness suddenly turn in to a comedian when they have the upper hand? Freddy Krueger turned from a specter in to a clown, Pinhead began spewing puns suddenly, and during the finale of “Phantoms,” the being begins spouting one-liners like it’s going out of style. In the midst of possessing Liev Schreiber’s character, the monster screeches with a half body “How low can you go?!” as it chases our heroines through a house slithering along the ground.