Thursday, June 30th, 2011
Super 8
J. J. Abrams has what’s good in Steven Spielberg, and he has what’s bad, but he doesn’t have what’s great. It’s been groaned to death that Super 8 is an imitation of early Spielberg; what seems to be missing is the once obvious fact that Spielberg was, in his more skillful way, also strip-mining childhood [...]
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Thursday, April 21st, 2011
Source Code
12 Monkeys ÷ (Groundhog Day + Unstoppable) = Source Code > your average blockbuster. That’s a fairly simple formula, especially compared to the one supplied by the screenwriter, Ben Ripley; and if you don’t want to know what his is—well then I suggest you close this browser and refresh Facebook for the nth time instead. [...]
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Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Sucker Punch
The beer in my gut from before I hit Sucker Punch doesn’t preclude me from knowing what the film was about; I only wish it did. The trailer had me fooled that maybe Zack Snyder, directing his own material for the first time, had gone ballistic in a redeemable, wacko-Zacko way. I’ve successfully evaded his [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Tron: Legacy
It being a Disney movie, the hero of Tron: Legacy never inserts his hard drive into his paramour’s sex drive; they don’t even cyber. If they had, they might have prompted an error message: The film is destined to produce computer-generated progeny of its own. That said, I actually kinda enjoyed this software saga; I’m [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
Unstoppable
Like Depression-era bums, the director Tony Scott and his associates—late of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3—keep on riding the rails. I think that they identify with the unionized railway workers in Unstoppable, whose job is to keep things running smoothly, and make sure that nothing goes off-track; these filmmakers are engineers rather than [...]