As a film fan, it is one of the great pleasures in life to get to see the intersection of your favorite person producing entertainment and your favorite genre of entertainment. As a reviewer, it’s kind of hell. Fan girl gushing does not make for well reasoned, thoughtful pieces of criticism, and despite my over-reliance […]
While American politicians abjectly deride the Scandinavians for being ‘pinko commies’, Hollywood has been taking notice of their considerable cinematic talent, finding every opportunity to import some of their best films for American remakes. David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Matt Reeves’ Let Me In are excellent examples, but no Scandinavian film […]
When you sit down to watch a buddy cop film you know what to expect; two mismatched partners find friendship as they solve an important case and involve themselves in each other’s lives. The paradigms of the genre have been set, our expectations skewed, and as an audience we have been emotionally conditioned to react […]
It’s finally here, that big colossal movie that brings all the heroes from the past half a dozen Marvel films together for one epic motion picture. This is the project Marvel fans have been dying to see come to light ever since Samuel L. Jackson made his first cameo in the original Iron Man. When […]
Having devoured the books in a matter of days, I was more than excited about the film adaptation of The Hunger Games. With the inevitable elimination of that all-too-troublesome first person narrative, thoughtful and promising casting, a director who is a sworn fan and oh-so-welcome authorial input on the screenplay, I was pretty convinced that […]
There are many ways that 21 Jump Street could have- and maybe even should have – been a failure. The Hollywood flameout bin is filled with attempted remakes of goofy eighties shows. Aside from those of us who have watched She’s The Man so many times their eyes want to fall out, who would have […]
I was extremely excited when I got a special sneak preview of Act Of Valor, the highly promoted film starring actual Navy SEALS and based on “real life” scenarios they may face in the field. I have a number of friends who served in the armed forces and a few who, while in active […]
There are many, many things that do not work about This Means War; check out Rotten Tomatoes, where the film is currently getting a 26% fresh rating. The movie is home to enough clichés to power about fourteen thousand post-modern comedies (like Friends with Benefits) about how clichéd romantic comedies are. The ending you can […]