Big greetings to all the readers out there. You might have been a little troubled and possibly emotionally scarred by the disruption in service yesterday, so for that I humbly apologize. I’ve been working on a new blog design over the past couple months and it finally reached the point where I needed to turn it all on and see it work in action. There were a few bumps in the road along the way, but everything seems to be in place now. There will be more design changes to come, but hopefully they will not interrupt service at all. Continue reading →
I’m going to change up my tactic for you. I’m going to make an effort to increase your enjoyment of this movie without giving away any type of spoilers. Great debates have been held inside my head about the formation of this review, so let’s see if I can get them all to come together in print and actually make sense. If I get lost along the way, please send a search party and ask them to bring Nerd Rope. Continue reading →
There is always a line in the sand drawn between the movies and the people who go to see them. The line represents how seriously the movie is meant to be taken, on one side stands the production company and director who set the tone, while on the other side is the audience who chooses how they want to receive the film. The main battle seems to surround the idea of taking lessons or supposed “truths” learned in the film and applying them to the outside world. Most of the time this line is cut and dry (if the movie is not classified as a documentary, take it with heaping grains of salt; if it is a doc, take with slightly less salt). Yet when a movie has the audacity to delve into the world of religion, you can bet people are going to flood out of the woodworks to take the film and its creators to task for even the possibility of misrepresenting some aspect of their faith. The precursor to this film, The Da Vinci Code, was hounded by protests all over the world, some even authorized and organized by the Catholic church, but the film still trucked on and made over $758 million dollars worldwide. Now, with some water under the bridge, the church has decided to take a different tactic with the release of the new Dan Brown thriller, Angels and Demons. The furor started to bubble up, but word came down from on high that the film was seen as “silly” in the eyes of the church and protest and calls to ban it from theaters were wholly unnecessary. I could go into a whole different discussion about the over blown reactions to movies with religious subtexts, but I’ll save that for another day. For now, let’s take a look into the newest effort from much-acclaimed director Ron Howard and one of the members of the Hollywood royalty, Tom Hanks. Continue reading →
Forty three years ago, Gene Roddenberry created the legendary universe of Star Trek and the realm of Sci-Fi was forever altered. Thirteen years later, George Lucas unleashed Star Wars onto the world, proceeded to become a one-man space behemoth and a long standing feud was born between the two franchises. For the last thirty years Trekkies and Jedi Warriors have battled over which universe was better and more futuristically accurate (as if that debate is somehow winnable). In Hollywood the feud took on a different form, the face on the dollar bill. Star Wars cranks in with six films, while Star Trek has racked up eleven (including this latest effort), but I would wager Star Wars still holds the title for most money earned. So, do the Trekkies have to crawl back into their pods and weep in defeat? I think not, because there is one other fight to be had and that is in the realm of quality. While the original Star Wars trilogy is a stunning achievement, with Empire Strikes Back as the shining jewel in that crown, the recent prequel trilogy lacked almost everything that made the originals worth watching. On the other hand, Star Trek has stumbled back and forth in quality throughout their run, with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan setting the bar in the minds of many Trek fanatics, but this new reboot by uber-director/producer J.J. Abrams does exactly what it sets out to do. Star Trek introduces the franchise to a whole new audience, while simultaneously giving the die-hard fans new faces to attach themselves to, on top of managing to not ruin any of the previously cemented rules and storylines in the Star Trek universe. Trekkies all over the world can hold their heads high, prick up their ears and say, “Hey Lucas, that’s how you make a real prequel!” Continue reading →
Bring on the over-buttered popcorn, the obscenely large sodas and the amazingly radiated hot dogs…the blockbuster season is upon us! Every summer the world rushes into the theaters daring the movie studios to try their best to blow us out of our seats. CGI masterminds and real life stuntmen pull out all the stops in a yearly effort to make us drop our jaws once more at something we believed we would never see. Amazement and imagination collide inside a brilliant torrent of big-budget action flicks for the next five months and most studios bank their entire year on these “tentpole” films. The money made or lost on these cinematic feats can determine whether a studio will even be in business the following summer. With all that pressure, being the first one out of the gate is a big deal and this year that incredible honor is bestowed upon a familiar face, Wolverine. Continue reading →
At the end of every year there is a wonderful, insane, intentionally over-hyped flood of films known as “Oscar Season”. This is when all the major studios release their heavy dramatic fare, which they hope will garner numerous nominations and armloads of awards. Those accolades not only boost the notoriety of the studios, but usually the critically acclaimed films get a much needed bump in the box office. So it is no wonder that the movie calendar gets incredibly crowded and sometimes a film gets yanked from the slate in order to not find itself dueling with other preening examples of award-bearing cinema. Last year this was the fate of the much anticipated film, The Soloist. Four months later, it sweeps into theaters as the only critical drama in town, looking to round up the reviews in a much quieter time, but it still has to answer the eternal question: Is it any good? Continue reading →
