I’m tempted to say that I, Frankenstein was doomed from the get-go due to bad casting, but let me build my case before I kill the baby and toss its cinematic corpse on the pile. Really, though, who thought of pretty face Aaron Eckhart as the monster assembled from “dozens of parts from eight different corpses”? My first thought when I walked out of the theater after an afternoon 3D matinee was that I’ll never…Read More
Review: Olympus Has Fallen
The previews looked cool. I mean, it’s an audacious concept to have terrorists storm the White House and take the President of the United States hostage. What could go wrong with a fast-paced action movie that has that as the main plot device? The answer is everything. In fact, Olympus Has Fallen has no redeeming qualities at all. From acting to dialog, set pieces to special effects, exterior shots to the pace of edits, just…Read More
Review: Battle Los Angeles
Another year, another unrelenting attack by hostile aliens on our planet. Who knew that Earth was such a valuable commodity? As we’ve learned to expect from the genre, Battle Los Angeles is a lot of action loosely woven together by a semi-comprehensible storyline, a bunch of Marines and a few painfully insipid scenes where The Deeper Meaning of Being Human are discussed. The film starts out with the invasion and there’s no question, the aliens…Read More
Review: Love Happens
Imagine having a tragic loss and coping with that by writing a heartfelt journal that, through a series of coincidences, turns into a national best selling book on dealing with grief. Before you know it, you find yourself a self-help guru running workshops throughout the United States, even as you still have a niggling feeling that you haven’t really dealt with all the emotions related to the loss itself. That’s the situation that Burke Ryan,…Read More