Hang on I have to recalibrate my paradigm for this review because it has come to my attention that this is not, for some reason, a 20th century American cinema classic everyone except me knows about, but is instead a movie maybe 5 thousand people total have watched. Which is crazy. It’s literally got Paul Newman in it!
Anyway. It would be very hard to say this is an enjoyable movie if you are a person who thinks enjoying a…
It’s genuinely interesting how this movie was both exactly what I knew it was and also nothing I expected it to be. Perhaps the biggest credit I can give to my dear close impersonal friend Mr. Soderbergh here is that he really does treat Erin with exactly the same level of brash, contradictory, uncharming, difficult complexity that I would expect from any male protagonist in a Serious Film from the early 2000s. She is—undoubtedly—a woman, with a problems a woman…
I love sports movies for two reasons:
1. I have a beating heart and soul, and
2. I love to think about the fact that for human beings, everything is *about* something.
THE MIGHTY DUCKS isn't a groundbreaking piece of cinema. It's not especially subtle, or nuanced, or elegant and restrained in the ways it balances the spoken and unspoken needs and wants and truths of its child heroes and their adult protagonist (played with weirdly stone-faced, deadpan resignation-turned-hesitant-desire by…
Surely there are already essays out there about how much LEGALLY BLONDE owes to this movie, right? I’ve never really heard it called out as a direct reference but it seems impossible not for that movie to have been placed knowingly upon the shoulders of this one.
Anyway. Not to pit bad bitches against each other, and I think LEGALLY BLONDE rules in its own right and of its own time, so this isn’t about that. But MY COUSIN VINNY rules at what it does and what it does is still a breath of fresh air all these years later. An absolute delight.
