If Tinker, Tailor, Solidier, Spy is croquembouche (the elaborate, ornate dessert), simultaneously being rich and decadent with its twisty, turny plots, and subtle and nuanced, with its labyrinthine undercurrents, then The November Man is a skittle. There’s an approximation of what the spy/espionage genre entails, it’s just not actually there… which is why we have […]
“Holy crap, they made a Godzilla movie!” That brilliant and insightful cinematic commentary came from yours truly, roughly during the last third of director Gareth Edwards’ (Monsters) summer reboot of filmdom’s favorite green-skinned gargantuan, Godzilla. I couldn’t resist – as an avowed monster-lover dating all the way back to the days of “Creature Features” on […]
Ain’t it grand? Wes Anderson has a toy box. And in this toy box, Anderson has a camera – some might find it frustrating, while others find it magical – that frames almost every scene perfectly symmetrically. Sometimes this camera, from a fixed spot, will rotate left or right 90°, even 180° (and once in […]
Mince a large cut “Titanic”, without the emotional resonance, tenderize a hunk of “Gladiator”, leaving out all that pesky action and visual pizazz, then season liberally with “Conan The Barbarian”, being sure to leave out most of the gore, throw them all together and bake. Ta-da, you have “Pompeii” – a movie that couldn’t be […]
Yes, it’s better than “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (which, in all fairness, isn’t necessarily a bad movie, just a bloated one. It just felt so… padded, in parts.) Whereas director Peter Jackson’s original foray into Tolkien territory with “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy was lengthy, it was also unquestionably epic, with each step […]
As trite as it is to say – or to be told – Gravity is a movie that has to be seen on the big screen. The vastness of space is captured… or rather, recreated, in such a way, that all the upcharges (3D, IMAX, even the supercomfy lounge chairs) are entirely justified and only […]
“In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Anybody opposed to the military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist: union members, landless farmers, intellectuals, and the ethnic Chinese. In less than a year, and with the direct aid of western governments, over one million “communists” were murdered.” Those are the words […]
“When you look into their eyes, you know somebody is home. Somebody’s looking back.” – John Jett, Former SeaWorld Trainer Those words, spoken by a former trainer in Blackfish, drive home a point that many, many people can easily forget – this is not a person in a costume, not an animatronic figure that is […]
Courtesy of the cheese factory known as The Asylum, SyFy channel offers up their latest serving, Sharknado. If the name isn’t enough of a hint, the storyline says it all: “When a freak hurricane swamps Los Angeles, nature’s deadliest killer rules sea, land, and air as thousands of sharks terrorize the waterlogged populace.” Now, I […]
It was the Russians. In watching Pacific Rim, directed by Guillermo del Toro from a screenplay by del Toro and Travis Beacham, I found myself swept up in the richly realized, deeply designed world, and dizzily finding myself looking for a baseline to plant myself to. And that’s when I saw the Russian Jaeger (giant […]
