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.
In the opening moments of Walk the Line, Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) gently thumbs the edge of a buzzsaw in the wood shop of Folsom Prison moments before his infamous concert before its inmates. The blade of this saw, an instrument which altered the course of Cash’s life when he was eleven years old, sums [...]
One of the things I most admire about Steven Spielberg is his ability–and his willingness–to balance his desire to make his deepely personal Films with his desire to make big-budget crowd-pleasing popcorn-chomping Flicks. He’s equally adept at making both kinds of movies and has created classic examples of each, though I have to admit I [...]
Joan Allen does staid-and-proper so well, she seldom gets the chance to play sexy. In fact, I can’t remember ever finding her particularly sexy in any movie I’ve ever seen her in. I don’t mean that as a knock against Allen; so many of the parts she’s played have called for Frosty Joan or All-Business [...]
Calling the 1961 comic debut of the Fantastic Four groundbreaking would no doubt elicit a cry of “It’s clobberin’ time!” from super-hero historians and rabid comic fans worldwide. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s vision of a super-powered team filtered through the dynamic of an otherwise normal “family” not only broke new ground, it forged a [...]
One thought kept bouncing through my head over and over as I watched Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan‘s magnificent reconceptualizaion of the Batman mythos: “They get it.” Director Nolan (Memento, Insomnia) and co-screenwriter David Goyer understand that audiences don’t want to see the primary-color pap of Joel Schumacher‘s last two Batman travesties. We don’t want superhero [...]
I found myself experiencing the same problem trying to decide on an approach for this review that I’d imagine the creators of Serenity faced: how to gear the movie/review so that it pleases both the rabid fanbase of the “Firefly” TV series from which the movie spawned and people who’ve never seen the show. It’s [...]
So at least we’ve seen the whole story; the ends of the circle finally meet in the middle. We’ve seen how innocence (well, angry and whiny frustrated innocence, anyway) finds itself corrupted by absolute (and a bit melodramatic) evil and becomes the face of the devil for a generation of consumers. We’ve seen enough poor [...]
Some thoughts on the best sci-fi western based off of a cancelled TV series ever!
I don’t consider myself a die-hard Adams junkie, at least not anymore; I haven’t read any of the books in years. They’re pretty much fondly-remembered relics of my nerdy adolesence at this point. And given that I hadn’t read “Hitchhiker’s” in so long, I thought I’d be able to separate what the movie was trying to accomplish from what the book set out to do, to judge the movie on its own merits instead of simply judging how faithfully it aped its source material. But that proved more difficult that I’d anticipated.