The biggest problem with The Grey, Liam Neeson’s new movie about fighting wolves in the Alaskan wilderness, is simple, really. It’s the fact that you just walked into a movie theater expecting to see Liam Neeson fight wolves in the Alaskan wilderness – you’re ready to watch Neeson take out our lupine brethren using the […]
I recently saw Ralph Fiennes’s labor of love—his adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—and I fully loved it. The movie is beautiful, gritty, unadorned, and truly unique in its interpretations of the characters and the play. It’s also a real war movie, with things to say about human nature, politics, and violence. Fiennes directed and stars […]
Haywire, the recently released directorial effort by Steven Soderbergh which Jason nicely reviewed here, also marks the first starring role for Mixed Martial Arts fighter, Gina Carano. As anyone who’s seen the film can attest, Carano is a certified badass. She made the erst-while Magneto, Michael Fassbender, look like a little boy in way over […]
Few modern directors have the skill and precision to nail both large budget genre film and tiny indie projects. Steven Soderbergh embodies the concept of versatility with his second released film in under a year, Haywire. With his twenty-fifth film in twenty-two years Soderbergh branches out from his norm to the world of high action […]
Steig Larson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a fast-paced, utterly engrossing, reactionarily feminist mystery novel, with a charismatic leading man and a fascinating lead female. But Larson’s novel falls off when you start thinking about writing style, thematic brilliance, or overall writerly aptitude. David Fincher’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, in contrast, is almost […]
Brad Bird, the man behind such films as The Incredibles and Ratatouille, shifts from the realm of animation to live action for the fourth installment of the Mission Impossible franchise. For those of you who haven’t seen the other three, fear not. MI4 is about as stand-alone as any sequel can get. If you’re looking […]
One of my non-obnoxious Film Studies TAs was struggling to explain to us the basics of plot. We were first year film students, dying to do avante-garde and unique things, and the idea of using standard structural elements to construct our opuses felt confining and uncomfortably like selling out. Then, she walks in one day […]
The official Hunger Games trailer hit the world like a flaming District 12 tribute today after Josh Hutcherson (who plays fan favourite Peeta Mellark) introduced it on Good Morning America. The superb, pulse-pounding teaser kicks off with the serene Jennifer Lawrence as heroine Katniss Everdeen meeting her tried and true best friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) […]