With the resurgence of movies based on toys in recent years, it was high time to reach into the past and dust off the hidden gem that started it all. Many people who grew up watching the “Transformers” television show will remember that in 1986 Hasbro released a full length animated feature film called “The [...]
President Obama and the Democrats finally managed to squeak through a health care reform bill that promises to insure millions of Americans and eliminate many of the more deplorable practices of the exploitative insurance industry. Whether or not you feel the exact parameters of the bill will effectively remedy the current health care crisis largely [...]
Biting social commentary, breathtaking imagery, an innovative take on centuries-old mythology and a respectable entry into the painfully saturated vampire genre. Well, 1½ out of 4 ain’t bad. “Daybreakers,” the second featured film (2003′s “Undead” being the first) from the twin brothers from Down Under, Michael and Peter Spierig, certainly aspires to turn the vast [...]
Inventive, spectacularly creative, intoxicating. Terry Gilliam’s whimsically absurd tale of a veteran vaudevillianesque performer who makes a deal with the Devil to live forever in exchange for his daughter upon her 16th birthday is at once delightfully preposterous and magically rewarding. “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” Gilliam’s 12th film, marks the former Monty Python member’s [...]
There are big movies, and then there are BIG movies. James Cameron’s technical chef d’oeuvre and decade-long undertaking, “Avatar,” is neither — it’s bigger. It occupies a category of colossal movie-making so unspeakably behemothic that taxonomy itself may take years to catch up. From the same director who gave us “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” and [...]
Count on Roland Emmerich, the Master of Disaster, to base an entire film on the (false) pretense that the ancient Mayan calender predicts Earth’s demise in three years, and then scarcely mention the source of the ensuing pandemonium. Less than a handful of sentences are spent on the pop-culture rumor oft-repeated about the so-called predictions [...]
The 1970s were to good science-fiction what the 1960s were to social and political unrest, and counter-cultural deviance. With genre classics like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Star Wars,” “Solaris,” “THX-1138,” “Logan’s Run,” “Silent Running,” “Star Trek: the Motion Picture,” and “Alien” all emerging in the same decade, fans have been longing for the [...]
Considering David Bowie’s longstanding and highly lucrative infatuation with all things celestial, e.g. Space Oddity (1969), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), Station to Station (1976), and Earthling (1997), it’s no surprise that his son’s directorial debut would likewise reach beyond the terrestrial. It is the near future [...]
2007′s “Transformers” was a mindless, tasteless, overly CGI-ed and under-plotted piece of explosion-driven schlock. Not a terribly good movie, but a reasonably good time nonetheless. It’s sequel, however, refuses to take its anti-intellectualism, anti-tolerance, anti-progress, anti-humanity, or anti-cinema lightly. “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is the most aggressively bad movie I have ever seen. There [...]
After Will Ferrell’s surprisingly adept foray into the realm of straight-faced cinema with Marc Forster’s “Stranger than Fiction” (2006), I had expected continued, and increasingly fruitful artistic diversification from the comic icon, much in the way that “The Truman Show” (1998) effected Jim Carrey’s escape into drama. Of course there would be missteps, e.g., “The [...]
