I had high hopes for Green Zone. I really did. I’m a big fan of the Bourne movies and thought the sullen, slightly dazed but explosively violent character that Matt Damon played in the trilogy was perfect, a breakout role for him and a chance for us to see him as a cool – and different – sort of action hero. Matt Damon stars as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller and with an occasional nudge…Read More
Review: Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll’s immortal story Alice in Wonderland has been brought to the big screen many times, notably 1951’s animated Disney classic that memorialized the different characters in the story for many adults. With 61 title matches in the Internet Movie Database, it’s safe to say it’s a popular starting point for movie makers. That’s an intimidating challenge, especially for a director like Tim Burton who generally tackles stories that haven’t been shown in film before and…Read More
Review: The Messenger
What does it take to be a soldier on the Casualty Notification Team, the “Angels of Death Squadron”, traveling the United States and letting spouses and parents know that someone has died while in the Army? And at what cost personally? That’s the question underlying The Messenger, a stark film that follows decorated and troubled Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) as he joins with Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) on this detail. “Captain Stone…Read More
Review: Shutter Island
The film version of Dennis Lehane’s creepy psychological thriller Shutter Island has taken a while to get on the big screen, but it was worth the wait. With Leonardo DiCaprio in the starring role as US Marshall Teddy Daniels, it’s one of the best psychological thrillers in quite a while. With its leisurely pace, moody ensemble and positively sinister exteriors, it’s also a nice reminder that intense movies don’t need to involve massive explosions, zombies,…Read More
Review: Creation
Charles Darwin was one of the most profound thinkers of the modern era, with his groundbreaking theory of evolution and idea that rather than being created by God in “his image”, we evolved from monkeys. But who was Charles Darwin and where did he get this radical idea? That’s the story behind Creation, as it explains in the opening titles: “Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, first published in 1859, has been called the single…Read More
Review: From Paris with Love
With a story from action wizard Luc Besson and a comfortable, if detached performance by bald, tattooed John Travolta, you can easily imagine what the actioner From Paris With Love is going to be like, and you’d be right. It’s fast-paced, only makes sense some of the time, has nice visual effects, and zooms along its 92 minute running time, an entertaining bit of cinematic fluff. The film centers on awkward wanna-be spy and US…Read More
Review: District 13: Ultimatum
Six years ago a highly athletic sporting event burst on the scene from France called “Parkour”. It was a bit hard to describe, but agile participants would leap off buildings, slip through tiny spaces, bounce from wall to wall, race down staircases a flight at a time and generally fly through urban landscapes, miraculously not slipping or injuring themselves. The activity was captured in a mediocre French action film called Banlieue 13 (District B13 in the…Read More
Review: Edge of Darkness
Mel Gibson has made a lot of films where he’s the simple-minded tough guy, notably the Lethal Weapon series, but the last few years have seen his personal life overshadow his career, as he careened from one gaffe to the next. Edge of Darkness represents him trying to get back into the groove, to recover his acting career, and it’s an exciting but distressingly formulaic film. The film, based on a mid-80’s BBC drama also…Read More
Review: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
If you’ve never seen a Terry Gilliam film before, you’ll be baffled and likely frustrated by the storytelling style and visual exaggeration that are trademarks of his weird and wonderful movies. A former member of the comedy team Monty Python, a peculiarly English sense of humor suffuses his films too, from Time Bandits to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to Brazil. In the spirit of disclosure, I am a big fan of Gilliam’s work and have looked…Read More
Review: A Serious Man
When does a dark satire about life transition into a marathon of bad luck and suffering by a hapless, spineless man? Though I’m sure that’s not what the Coen Brothers intended when they created A Serious Man, that’s the experience I had when I watched the film. A Serious Man is about the trials and tribulations of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), and it’s an ostensibly retelling of the story of Job from the Old Testament. Bad…Read More
Review: The Lovely Bones
When someone is murdered, their spirit lingers on, observing and trying to influence the course of justice, a ghost seeking revenge or simply to experience the karmic balance that we hope will transpire. But what of the ghost during this period of time, what’s their experience and what if there is no peace, no justice, nothing but someone who refuses to let go, who refuses to accept that they have died? That’s the basic story…Read More
Review: The Book of Eli
The 23rd Psalm of the Bible, in case you haven’t memorized the entire Old Testament, goes like this: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies… The 23rd Psalm is also the inspiration for the dark, moody film The Book of Eli, and though…Read More
Review: The Spy Next Door
Modern writing is all about disclosure, so in that spirit, let me disclose that I’m a lukewarm Jackie Chan fan. He’s been in some terrific action and comedy films, notably Rush Hour and The Forbidden Kingdom, but he’s also been in a lot of dreck, movies that are just downright stupid, like the Rush Hour sequels, Shanghai Knights, and the worst of the lot, Around the World in 80 Days. He’s a successful action star,…Read More
Review: Armored
Ever wonder what kind of guy drives an armored car full of thousands – if not millions – of dollars worth of cash, securities, checks, credit card transaction receipts, etc? Yeah, I never did either, but that’s the environment that Armored presents us with: a bunch of edgy, tough-guy losers who somehow have ended up as employees of Eagle Shield Security. Chief tough guy is Baines (Lawrence Fishburn), whose first on-screen scene has him lovingly…Read More
The Best Films of 2009
I’ve spent the time to rant about the films I saw last year that I thought were the worst of the bunch, not just middling experiences, but genuinely “how on Earth did they ever raise the money to make this abomination?” movies where they either started out okay and slowly collapsed on their own weight (like Knowing) or were daft from the get-go (like Transformers 2). The worst of the bunch, though, must have been…Read More
The Worst Films of 2009
2009 was a big year: I started out as a film fan who went to the theater maybe once every 2-3 weeks and otherwise lazily waited until movies made it onto the premium cable channels before I saw them. Not a lack of motivation, just a busy life. Early in 2009 I started to write a series of columns for Linux Journal on how to create a Twitter queueing system and my example subject was…Read More
Review: Green Lantern: First Flight
[Guest film review by Steve Oatney] DC Comic’s Green Lantern character may not be as well known as Mickey Mouse, but then again, how many people who never read comic books had ever heard of Iron Man? Truthfully, I have friends who were as jazzed about Ozzy Osbourne’s song being part of the original Iron Man trailer, as they were about it being a superhero film. No joke. The Green Lantern Corps falls into the…Read More
Review: Sherlock Holmes
I’ve been a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detail-oriented detective Sherlock Holmes for as long as I can remember. As a young child I devoured the stories and as recently as last week was watching a classic 1944 Holmes movie, The Scarlet Claw, starring Basil Rathbone as the eponymous detective and Nigel Bruce as his bumbling medical sidekick John Watson. I also greatly enjoyed the BBC series of Holmes stories that starred Jeremy Brett…Read More
Review: Nine
Films are dreams, whether the director is aiming for hyper-realism or whether we’re allowed to fly through the odd, the dreamy, the troubling of their imagination. Director Rob Marshall recognizes this and his Nine is a sexy, engaging, stylish and enlightening journey through the imaginative life of Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his many loves. At the beginning of the film, Guido, a famous Italian film director clearly modeled after the brilliant but eccentric Federico Fellini,…Read More
Review: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
Those three mischievous CG chipmunks are back in Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel though their “parent” and guardian Dave (Jason Lee) is surprisingly absent from this sequel, getting a total of about ten minutes of screen time. The boys guardian is supposed to be Aunt Jackie (Kathryn Joosten) but she has even less screen time, just enough to have a pratfall and then remain offscreen (and out of mind) in the hospital recovering for…Read More
Review: Avatar
Avatar is a movie about manifest destiny and second thoughts, a sweeping epic retelling of a classic theme about a soldier “going native” as he learns that the enemy isn’t a faceless monster, but an intelligent race. The most obvious parallel is Dances with Wolves, but director James Cameron has taken the basic storyline and created a visual masterpiece that’s almost a perfect sci-fi film. Avatar takes place 150 years in the future, on the…Read More