20 Years Ago I saw The Fugitive with a bunch of friends for my twelfth birthday in September of 1993. This is a pivotal time in one’s movie-going life. By age twelve you’re tired of kiddie movies. You’re ready for the big time. No more cartoons and after-school special nonsense;… Continue reading
Welcome back, Middle-earthers. Nearly a decade after launching his Lord of the Rings trilogy, director Peter Jackson returns with another set of three films, this time adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved book, The Hobbit. The first part, An Unexpected Journey, is a well-made spectacle that makes up for overall lacking… Continue reading
Skyfall is certainly one of the better Bond films of the past twenty years, though it’s not as if competition has been stiff. Appearing in his third film of the series, Daniel Craig has pretty much turned into an embodiment of the action icon, even if the series continues to… Continue reading
Red Tails has supposedly been in the Hollywood pipeline for over twenty years, never finding financing because of the African-American-driven cast. George Lucas has been behind the project from the beginning, and finally became so fed up with the studio system that he decided to finance the film himself. The… Continue reading
Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third in the Earth-destroying series, delivers the goods, plain and simple. Correcting many of the mistakes from its immediate predecessor, Transformers 3 is an epic, exciting popcorn film whose last hour is so relentless and visually breathtaking that all-out sensory overload is a foregone… Continue reading
Look no further than the Toy Story short and the extended The Lion King re-release trailer that precede Cars 2 for reasons why this latest Pixar film just doesn’t cut it. The former two films have true character development, well-written, well-told stories, and spectacular animation. Cars 2 only has the… Continue reading
Green Lantern is a loud, obnoxious, joyless video game that pretty much makes you want to write off superhero origin movies all together. The genre has become such a cash cow that studios now just assume that throwing a character onto the heap automatically guarantees a franchise. Warner Brothers may… Continue reading
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides represents the fourth entry in this unlikely series. Not bad for a series whose source material is a Disney theme park ride. They are, perhaps, the face of disposable, inconsequential summer films, but On Stranger Tides has the faint stink of a phoned-in… Continue reading
Let this be said right off the top: Rango is a visual masterpiece and one of the finest works of computer animation to date. Seen theatrically on a DLP projector, one can only sit in awe of the attention to detail, lush locations, and incredible textures. It’s all so amazing… Continue reading
Watching TRON: Legacy, the long-awaited follow-up to 1982’s TRON, I was reminded of Siskel’s and Ebert’s 1995 roasting of Jumanji. Ebert stated that special effects have to be “at the service of the story.” It was correct then, and it is correct now. There will be very little debate regarding… Continue reading