Imagine you’re in a script development meeting at Perfect World Pictures and decide that you really like certain elements of Frozen, The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Maleficent, Time Bandits, Game of Thrones and other big fantasy productions and just toss all your ideas in the blender. You then send the entire script to the special effects house, along with a big check, and figure that with so many cultural touchpoints and a stellar…Read More
Review: Prometheus
I so wanted to love this movie, I’m such a big fan of director Ridley Scott. How can a film that purports to offer the backstory behind the blockbuster 1979 film Alien not be amazing? I rank Alien as one of the ten most influential science fiction films ever made, and getting its director back behind the camera to make another epic when his last sci-fi flick was the equally superb Blade Runner seems like…Read More
Review: Snow White and the Huntsman
Disney aside, fairy tales are supposed to be dark, scary stories that impart a moral to children and adults, generally by scaring the heck out of them. Kids get tortured, imprisoned and eaten, benign animals turn violent, grandparents turn into monsters, blood, madness and mayhem rules! Sheesh. But sweet fairy tales where the evil is mild and there’s a unrelieved overtone of sweetness and light? What’s the point? That’s always why the recent “nice” version…Read More
Review: Astro Boy
I like animation in just about any form, whether it’s the stop motion brilliance of Coraline or the computer graphics gleam of Toy Story or Shrek. I’m not a huge fan of manga, however, Japanese comics,though I am a definite fan of graphic novels and probably buy a dozen or so every month (which my kids definitely appreciate). Astro Boy was a mixed bag, therefore, because it’s animated (good) but based on a very Japanese…Read More