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Allen Holt
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.
Review: Toy Story 3
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.
Review: How To Train Your Dragon
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.
Review: District 9
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.
Review: Hancock
Dear Will Smith: You’re a naturally likable guy. That’s why you’re one of the biggest movie stars in the world — because people like you. So why in the world would you want to appear in a movie in which you’re so not likable — especially in a disaster like HANCOCK?
Review: Gone Baby Gone
It’s easy enough to mock Ben Affleck after the downward trajectory into ridiculousness his career took, especially between 2002 and 2005 when he was conceptually inseparable from Jennifer Lopez and made a tremendous number of terrible, terrible movies. But I’m not going to mock him now: his directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone (for which he [...]
Life Moves Pretty Fast
If I were to take the time and figure out a list of my most very favorite movies of the 1980s, four John Hughes movies would be on said list. Four more would be on a further list of “not my faves but movies I really liked.”
Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The darkness that began seeping into the Harry Potter series of films with HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN continues to progressively deepen: never has the sense of menace felt as strong as it does in HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE. The ancient halls of Hogwarts have never seemed so confining or so dangerous.
Review: The Nines
A troubled actor under house arrest for arson. A television writer juggling both creative and political concerns trying to get his show on the air. A video game designer trying to find help for his stranded wife and daughter. What do these three men have in common? Well, they’re all played by Ryan Reynolds, for one thing, but the nature of their connections is the mystery at the heart of John August’s thought-provoking but maddening THE NINES.
Review: While You Were Sleeping
There’s a good reason Sandra Bullock took the title of “Queen of the Romantic Comedy” away from Meg Ryan in the middle of the 1990s. Bullock projects a naturally awkward adorableness which makes the audience feel very protective of her: we empathize with her romantic plight and we want her to succeed because she obviously deserves the attention she’s so desperately craving.
Review: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Shane Black, who wrote and directed the neo-noir comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, loves to throw together characters who really shouldn’t become friends but do exactly that — usually in spite of their better instincts. Take two characters with very little in common, stick them in circumstances which continue to throw them together when they’d rather be apart, and watch the fireworks pop and burgeoning bromance grow.
Review: I Love You, Man
More than once I’ve casually known — or even just known of — people (friends of friends, usually) who have made me think “That’s someone I need to be friends with.” Usually it’s a realization that we have similar interests, sometimes it’s a touch of envy because that person is already doing something I want [...]
Trailer Park: New Inglourious Basterds Trailer
The second full trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is out, and for those of you who remember my iffiness on the movie based on the extraordinarly levels of violence implied in the first trailer…well, this second full-length trailer looks much more like the kind of Tarantino movie I’d like to see.
Double Trouble
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — also known as the People What Give Out the Oscars — announced yesterday that effective next year, they’re expanding the number of Academy Award nominees for Best Picture from five to ten.
Review: Blade Runner: The Final Cut
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?
LINK: New Sherlock Holmes Posters
Empire Magazine has new one-sheets for the upcoming Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.
Trailer Park: 2012
Roland Emmerich, director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow,won’t rest until he’s virtually destroyed every significant landmark on Earth.
Three Rings Veterans to Return for The Hobbit
For those of you into such things — which is probably just about everyone reading this — The Hobbit director Guillermo del Toro has announced three cast members from the Lord of the Rings trilogy will be returning for the new prequels: Sir Ian McKellen will be back as Gandalf, Hugo Weaving will return as [...]
Link: The 10 Best Recut Movie Trailers
Via Cinematical: Way back before this site went on its unfortunate hiatus, I linked to a trailer for a “movie” called Shining — which was simply bits of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining re-edited so that it looked like a sweet family comedy-drama rather than the nightmare-inducing-in-impressionable-eleven-year-olds horror flick it really is. [1] Somewhat unsurprisingly, that [...]
Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gives its audience many, many bits and pieces of information which never connect, never quite come together into anything resembling a cohesive whole; in fact, the entire notion of causation seems to be almost entirely absent from the movie. Things happen, to be sure, but not for any reason. [...]
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