Austin Powers in Goldmember

I was a big fan of the original Austin Powers movie. I paid to watch it in the theater, even before it became a major hit. I even liked the sequel, mostly. So it was something of a puzzle why I never bothered to watch this third installment. Now I know why. Apparently I smelled a rat, and my experience watching this flick confirmed my intuition. The only truly good thing about this film is that, at an hour and a half, it’s mercifully brief. The quick running time probably reflects the fact that there just weren’t any ideas left at this point. The cast and crew even acknowledge that very point in the very midst of the proceedings, breaking the fourth wall repeatedly to acknowledge the repetitive nature of the jokes. 'Jokes,' in this case, is a term of convenience; the actual laughs are few and far between. There are, however, certainly takeaways from this movie. One, Beyoncé was a profoundly good looking girl back in the day (and is probably still holding up fairly well)—which explains at least in part why so many people lose their minds over anything she does. Two, it suddenly becomes clear why Mike Myers pulled back and restricted himself to mostly character roles in the wake of this fiasco. One supposes that if you were expected to continually repeat the success—both financial and artistic—of the first of these flicks, you’d probably wind up withdrawing in disillusionment, too. At least one can congratulate this group for calling it an end here—if it truly is the end for Powers, in this relentlessly recycling and rebooting world—even if that spasm of wisdom came one film too late. (Late edit to add: Gah! There's rumors of a fourth movie in development. Shame on them!)

Party Monster

Engaging and entertaining in a bizarro world sort of way. The biggest problem is that, while stars Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green do a good job, they're just too lightweight to carry a story with a lot of dark undertones. The dissonance between their characters and the underlying ugliness does the story a disservice. Give it a try if you really like 'the weirdness.'

Rat Race

It takes a few minutes to get cooking, but once it does it provides plenty of satisfying comedy. And Jon Lovitz has one of the funniest scenes that I have ever seen in a movie.

Radio Days

Maybe this is where the downward slide started. Woody Allen's self-indulgence, which served him well early on, began to pull him down with this bit of autobiography. A nice idea--life during Allen's childhood, in the "radio days"--arrives too disjointed, too hit or miss, too erratic to be called a success. The film is better during the family sequences than the inevitable, shoehorned-in Mia Farrow storyline (back when she and he were still tight). The overall cast is excellent, the presentation is sterling and accurate to the period, but that self-indulgence--and some heavy-handed "statement" scenes--do just enough to pull this movie down. Not awful, but not what could have been.