Review: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

Reviews

Goya's Ghosts

Hauntingly awful

By BRETT MICHEL | July 18, 2007

1.5 Stars

VIDEO: Watch the trailer for Goya's Ghosts.

There’s a ghost within Milos Forman’s latest, all right — it’s the looming specter of a once-great filmmaking talent rising after an eight-year silence, and the resulting folly is hauntingly awful. In its look, the film approaches Amadeus, but Forman’s script, written with Luis Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière (Belle de jour), is drawn from a soapy palette and compounded by dumfounding casting choices. Stellan Skarsgård’s Goya and Randy Quaid’s King Carlos IV add to the hilariously Python-worthy Inquisition-era Spain. Still, there is one profound marriage of actor to material: Javier Bardem rises above some shaky English as the soft-spoken, opportunistic devil, Brother Lorenzo. His political maneuvering finds Inés (Natalie Portman), Goya’s model and muse, imprisoned for heresy. After a short bout with nudity, Portman spends the second half of the film shambling about in what amounts to zombie make-up, chewing scenery faster than Saturn devoured his son.

Related: Politics as usual?, Less is Moore, Primary concerns, More

Topics: Reviews , Luis Bunuel, Milos Forman, Natalie Portman, More

| More

Friends' Activity

Popular

Most Viewed

See more deals

view all

[ 02/17 ] "Guys, Gals, and Glitter" @ Club Café

[ 02/17 ] Handel and Haydn Society conducted by Jean-Marie Zeitouni @ Symphony Hall

ARTICLES BY BRETT MICHEL

REVIEW: THIS MEANS WAR | February 16, 2012
What promises to be a modern Jules and Jim (until you realize it's directed by a 43-year-old who calls himself "McG") quickly devolves into Spy vs. Spy territory, only with incompetently staged and edited action and little of that ol' Mad magazine zing.

REVIEW: THE VIRAL FACTOR | January 17, 2012
Made for a modest budget of $17 million — and feeling like it (who needs convincing explosions in an action movie?), Dante Lam's latest still gets the job done from a run-and-gun standpoint.

REVIEW: EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE | January 17, 2012
Too soon? For Stephen Daldry's 9/11 drama, the right time is "never."

REVIEW: THE DIVIDE | January 10, 2012
Many a teleplay for The Twilight Zone threatened atomic Armageddon, and though Frontier(s) director Xavier Gens nukes New York in the opening shots of his latest thriller, he finds more inspiration in the horrors of human nature as seen in the old TV show's episode "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street."

REVIEW: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL | December 20, 2011
Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) returns to the screen in dramatic fashion as new teammate Jane (Paula Patton) and the returning Benji (Simon Pegg) break him out of a Russian prison.

See all articles by: BRETT MICHEL

Most Viewed

Most Emailed

ANARCHISTIC AND SELF-TRAINED, ARE STREET MEDICS THE FUTURE OF FIRST AID?
April 25, 2009: outside of the IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington, DC, police with batons are attacking a group of protesters.

THE OVERDUB TAMPERING COMMITTEE
Armed with an idea, a hastily written manifesto, a press release, and some software to disguise my computer's IP address, I was able to raise the question, "How do you know that what you're illegally downloading is the actual music it claims to be?" This is a story about how my pop-music infatuation led me to fabricating a web of lies I called the Overdub Tampering Committee.

OUT: PREPARING FOR ONE H.E.L.L. OF A WEEKEND IN CAMBRIDGE
Next weekend at the Democracy Center in Harvard Square, Vermont DIY label Get Stoked! Records and bike safety group Helping Everyone Live Long (H.E.L.L.) will co-host a weekend with a stacked line-up of Northeast punk, hardcore, indie rock, pop-punk, and emo bands.

BOSTON BALLET'S 'SIMPLY SUBLIME'
Boston Ballet's "Simply Sublime" (at the Opera House through February 19) traverses 20th-century ballet's arc from Russian romance to a robust and confident neoclassicism.