January 3rd, 2010 admin
2009
Starring: Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits, Verne Troyer, Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law
Director: Terry Gilliam
Runtime: 122 Minutes
Distributor: Sony Picture Classics
Rating: PG-13
The passing of Heath Ledger was a tragedy, and with it we mourn the loss of a great and gifted performer coming into his own and standing on the cusp of greatness. But if there is one tiny nugget of positive impact we can salvage from such tragic circumstance it is the effect his untimely death had on his dear friend and director Terry Gilliam. Midway through his dark hearted Faustian saga in which a thousand year-old carnival owner battles The Devil for souls in an unwise wager, Gilliam suddenly found himself without his leading actor.
With much of the real-world action wrapped already, Gilliam hit on a stroke of genius whereby he envisioned that each of the three times Ledger’s character, the enigmatic, amnesia-stricken George, would step through the mirror into the Imaginarium, a surrealist netherworld where temptation battles imagination for the right to consume you or set you free, he would be played by a different actor (first Johnny Depp, then Jude Law, and, finally Colin Farrell). At the time the idea seemed risky to say the least, but having now been realized the notion of a man with no conscious memory being different each time his subconscious is tapped into seems so natural and straightforward it is difficult to imagine how such scenes could have been more effective had Ledger played the parts himself. This unforeseen obstacle jolted Gilliam and sparked within him an explosion of ingenuity, channeled like a diamond bit to the purpose of salvaging his picture from disaster.
Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.
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November 7th, 2009 admin
2009
Starring: Max Records, James Gandolfini, Katherine Keener, Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Dano, Forest Whitaker, Lauren Ambrose
Director: Spike Jonze
Runtime: 94 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: PG
For more than a decade offbeat auteur Spike Jonze, director of surrealist headscratchers Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, dragged his labor of love vision for Maurice Sendak’s celebrated children’s fable about a bedroom busting Odyssey through a troubled boy’s imagination all around town looking for a studio to work with. Universal threatened for a good long time before baulking and ultimately the property ended up in the hands of Warner Bros. Then disaster! Early test footage of some admittedly wonky animatronics found its way online causing uproar and the collective soiling of executive smalls. “Think of the children!” they wailed, as rumors circulated of narrative darkness traumatizing terrified tots at focus group screenings.
While certainly reactionary – the film is nowhere near as scary as some would have you believe – Warner’s concerns were not without merit. Jonze absolutely was not thinking of the children, he was thinking of us. As has been correctly summarized already in several reviews, Where the Wild things Are is not a kids movie. Nor is it an ironic hipster film, the likes of Labyrinth and Dark Crystal. Rather, it is a move aimed at adults about what it was like to be a kid.
Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.
Posted in Fantasy, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »
November 6th, 2009 admin
1939
Starring: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Margaret Hamilton
Director: Victor Fleming
Runtime: 102 Minutes
Distributor: MGM
Rating: G
The fact that seventy years on this screen adaptation of perhaps America’s most celebrated fairytale has lost none of its power to enchant and astonish adults and children alike tells you everything. First published in 1900 by author L. Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz was greeted with Harry Potter like acclaim, spawning a subsequent thirteen more books, a stage musical, twenty-six unofficial stories, a television mini-series, and a dark as midnight 1985 sequel. Yet this 1939 production remains the definitive Oz experience, rediscovered with all its magical wonder by each new generation.
Few films have seared themselves into our collective consciousness and achieved such cultural iconography with such lasting impact. That it is so universally well received and remains so un-weathered by changing trends, shifting ideals, and new media is down to it’s many subtle layers. There are as many different ways to read The Wizard of Oz as there are yellow bricks in the road; it’s a fairytale; a musical; a coming-of-age story. It’s a social commentary on depression era America; a girl’s sexual awakening; The Odyssey for kids still learning to read.
Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.
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August 7th, 2009 admin
2009
Starring: Carter Jenkins, Austin Robert Butler, Ashley Tisdale, Ashley Boettcher, Gillian Vigman, Robert Hoffman
Director: John Schultz
Runtime: 86 Minutes
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Rating: PG
A cosmic coming together of bad weather, bored pre-teens and a desert like release slate in terms of kid friendly fare (for us Muggle folk at least) conspire to propel this charmless CGI romp to the top of the tree virtually by default of there being no alternative. Co-scripter Mark Burton actually has pedigree to make you think otherwise, having been involved in the deliciously inventive Chicken Run, the venerable Wallace & Grommit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and the sorely underrated Madagascar prior to this. But loading up on such kiddie cult classics as Spaced Invaders and Gremlins, marrying it with the pizzazz of Spy Kids, there is almost an inspiration overload and the derivative result falls disappointingly flat.
A cast of impossibly white-teethed pre-pubescent youngsters, alongside High School Musical’s Ashley Tisdale as the pristinely perfect elder sister, comprises the Pearson family offspring. Jake and Tom are the vessels by which the kid power will be vicariously funneled, while Tisdale’s Bethany is the elder sister whose presence enables the true villain of the piece to make his entrance – her jerk boyfriend Ricky. Frog-marched up to their parents Maine summer home (where is Steven King when you need him?) for fresh air and a meteor shower, Jake and Tom are quickly bored and itching for something to happen.
Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.
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July 8th, 2009 admin
2008
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Sienna Guillory, Helen Mirren, Andy Serkis, Paul Bettany, Eliza Bennett,
Director: Iain Softley
Runtime: 106 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros
Rating: PG
Of the entire imagined-shit-coming-to-life-and-causing-chaos sub genre that has bombarded the family friendly calendar slots in the last year or so (Bedtime Stories, Night At The Museum, Imagine That) Inkheart is certainly the best. But honestly that’s not saying much. Perhaps better to say it has the most ambition because easily digestible escapism for grandma and all the kids it most certainly isn’t.
About fifteen minutes in after Brendan Fraser’s antique book dealer Mo (about as convincing as Meg Ryan as a helicopter pilot) has dragged her around yet another dusty store, pocketed a tome of apparent rarity, and been accosted by a weird man with scares and fire coming out of his hands, daughter Meggie (Bennett) turns to her dad and demands to be told what the hell is going on. It’s a feeling you’ll most definitely share, as it’s a question that sadly persists throughout the entire length of the film and one that flatly stamps out any hint of fun that threatens to emerge.
Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.
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June 29th, 2009 admin
2009
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Tuturro, Ramon Rodriguez
Director: Michael Bay
Runtime: 150 Minutes
Distributor: Paramount
Rating: PG-13
For all its gloriously silly excess the first live action Transformers movie was a harmonic convergence of director and material. Perhaps for the first time Michael Bay was granted legitimate free reign to indulge his inner thirteen-year-old with high-octane carnage, vehicle porn, ‘splosions, and his pathological obsession with helicopters. Seemingly Bay was born to direct this franchise and he duly delivered a smash hit that was everything it needed to be; big, bold, brash, and very, very loud.
Revenge of The Fallen should by rights be Bay’s Empire Strikes Back, with the stage set for an all-action follow up that broadens the scope, darkens the tone, and even offers an Emperor figure (The Fallen) to stand alongside Mengatron’s Darth Vader. But just as it seemed he had found his place in the filmmaking world – helming $150 million toy adverts – paradise duly crumbles, and St. Michael delivers a plodbuster that’s chaotic, unfocused, lazy, and one that violates that most sacred of cinematic commandments – thou shalt not bore.
Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.
Posted in Fantasy, Feature Films, Reviews | 1 Comment »
May 13th, 2009 admin
1989
Starring: Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger, Jack Palance, Robert Wuhl, Jerry Hall
Director: Tim Burton
Runtime: 126 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros
Rating: PG-13
When a second big screen adaptation of DC’s flagship comic book series about a borderline schitzo billionaire turned caped crusading vigilante was suggested there were concerns that it might emulate the camp “Pow! Zok!” ‘60’s television show which, for all its nostalgic charm, was terribly daft. After the budget swelled to then epic proportions (Batman was the first $100M picture), fretting studio execs’ fears weren’t so much put to rest but rather baited into full blown panic with the casting of Michael Keaton in the role of Bruce Wayne. Up to that point Keaton was a man best known for his comedic mania in titles such as The Dream Team. But director Tim Burton saw something in the twitchy Keaton, who had been able to flick a switch and make the grotesque (not to mention dead) freelance exorcist, Beetlejuice, come alive so vividly, so to speak. As it turned out, Burton was spot-on and Keaton flourished in the role of defender to the dark, moody and lavishly stylized world outlined by his director.
Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.
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May 5th, 2009 admin
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
2009
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Leiv Schreiber, Danny Huston, Taylor Kitsch, Daniel Henney, Ryan Reynolds
Director: Gavin Hood
Runtime: 107 Minutes
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Rating: PG-13
When you consider that, fan boy factor aside, this latest outing from hit-and-miss factory Marvel Studios is little more than a jumped up, pixel-spraying advert for lunchboxes and bedcovers, you really have to wonder what the two hundred thousand odd eager beavers who downloaded the leaked, effects free rough cut were so excited to see? Hugh Jackman’s heavyweight thesping? Well, after sitting (or should that be suffering?) through the allegedly now complete experience, replete with all the digital wizardry, the first thing that comes to mind is the question of why exactly they bothered to spend the money? From the obvious rear-screen projection of the interior driving sequences to the abominable CGI Patrick Stewart, who honestly looks more like a GI Joe someone held too close to a naked flame, the effects work is just awful, and yet amazingly it’s the best thing the film has going for it.
Following up his disappointingly flat, star studded, political drama no one saw, “Rendition”, Oscar winning director Gavin Hood explores the fabled genesis of this most celebrated badass, desperately trying to cram in so much story that even a set of adamantium claws can’t cut through it.
Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.
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March 9th, 2009 admin
2009
Starring: Jackie Earle Hayley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino
Director: Zack Snyder
Runtime: 163 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: R
That it was declared too ambitious by the likes of Darren Aronofsky – who promptly delivered The Fountain, and unfilmable by such men as Terry Gilliam – who has since coughed up Tideland, speaks to the towering stature of Alan Moore’s monolithic graphic novel. A revered tome of cascading political discourse Watchmen was a calculated deconstruction of the superhero genre, and a thumb in the eye to a cocksure American people whom Moore believed had empowered some very dangerous people with some potentially catastrophic agendas.
Arriving on the heels of Frank Millers’ The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen cemented a new era for the comic book and the exaggerated caricatures of America’s perceived superiority that dwelled within its pages. Not just a single origin story but many, compartmentalized yet fiercely interdependent against the backdrop of a sprawling period of social upheaval that is both a distorted mirror to our past and a terrifying vision of our future. For twenty years directors more accomplished and renowned than helmer Zack Snyder had grappled with the adaptation, and none had come close. Could Snyder really achieve the impossible?
Read More…
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November 13th, 2008 admin
Broke, depressed, and exhausted, down on his luck eighties icon Jean Claude Van Damme returns home in search of sanctuary and a little privacy. Instead he finds himself embroiled in an international media circus when the local police mistakenly believe he is the mastermind behind a botched armed robbery turned siege at a local post office.
Click here to read the full review at Suite101.com.
Posted in Action/Adventure, Comedy/Romance, Drama, Fantasy, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »
