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Review: Avatar
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a ginormous corporation wants to strip a lush, beautiful (but primitive) environment of all of its natural resources, and the people who live there are none too happy about it. Or this one: a military man finds himself spending time with a beautiful (but primitive) civilization, falls in love with a woman from said civilization and eventually chooses to side with them against his own people. Add those two stories together and stir in quarter of a billion dollars of groundbreaking special effects, and you’ve got James Cameron’s AVATAR. More »
Other Cool Stuff
The one overriding triumph and tragedy of being a parent is this: kids grow up. If you do your job as a parent right, you train these amazing bundles of potential to be good, thoughtful, self-sufficient people and you push them out into the world to live their own lives and make their own way and just maybe do the same for their own kids someday. But that beautiful, agonizing process of maturation into adulthood necessarily involves the leaving behind of childish things, a development which tends to be harder on the parents than on the kids — and, Toy Story 3 argues, even harder on the childish things being left behind.
I have to confess that How To Train Your Dragon surprised me. I knew almost nothing about the movie going in — I mean, I knew there were dragons, and I supposed someone was going to learn how to train one — but I didn't know anything about the story or who made the movie or even who did the voices. But I was almost a totally clean receptacle for whatever this flick had to give me. And man, did it give me a lot.
Twenty-some-odd years ago, an alien spaceship parked itself over Johannesburg, South Africa, presumably because the alien intelligence knew that was the single best place to go if it wanted to make itself into a heavy-handed metaphor for apartheid.
Released twenty-five years and five versions after the original theatrical run, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: The Final Cut still feels almost incomplete to me somehow, as if it's still missing something essential — but is that simply me imposing my knowledge of the filmmaker and the number of times he's tweaked the film onto it?
I read a discussion of Up recently — I don’t remember where — which said that the movie was ultimately about acceptance of death, which is an awfully adult theme to find in a kids’ film. (Truth be told, of course: Pixar movies are family movies, not kids’ movies, and there’s a big difference.) I [...]
Revisit our special 7 Days of Serenity feature from 2005, in which we tried to pump up the 'verse for the big-screen return of Mal Reynolds and crew.
Trailer Park
The Green Hornet
I’m not sure the words “Green Hornet” ever made me think “action comedy,” but Seth Rogen‘s take on the pulp hero looks like it could be decently entertaining. Unless, of course, this is one of those “all the funny bits are in the trailer” trailers. What’s surprising is that the visuals don’t look particularly inspired — I’d expected a bit more idiosyncrasy from director Michel Gondry.
100-Word Review!
The Proposal
There’s not a shred of wit or originality to be found in The Proposal; this movie seemed less scripted than assembled from parts recycled from other Sandra Bullock movies (While You Were Sleeping and Two Weeks Notice). The studio was clearly counting on the charm and skill of Bullock and Ryan Reynolds to make it work, and damned if it didn’t almost. I won’t pretend that The Proposal was good — if I were feeling generous, I’d say it’s “okay” — but kudos for the fact that it wasn’t abhorrently wretched can be placed on the well-sculpted bodies of its stars. Grade: C
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