You’ve been woken up from your cryopod 90 years early on a 120 year journey from Earth to the distant colony world of Homestead II. And you’re alone. No crew, and none of the other 5,000 passengers on the spaceship are conscious. What do you do? Denver-based mechanic Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is the only conscious person on the massive deep space ship and he has no idea why his pod decided it was time for…Read More
Review: The Magnificent Seven
Let’s get this out of the way first: The Magnificent Seven is a remake of an iconic 1960 Western of the same name and featuring splendid performances from Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner, among others. And that film is itself a retelling of a classic Akira Kurosawa film called Seven Samurai, which is eminently watchable with a powerful lead performance by the great Toshiro Mifune. Each brings its own sensibility to the core story of a…Read More
Review: Jurassic World
It’s impossible to talk about dinosaur movies without mentioning the ground-breaking 1993 film Jurassic Park, a fun, exciting summer blockbuster about a mad scientist who extracts dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber and then creates a theme park around the resurrected beasts. Based on one of the many books written by the remarkably prolific Michael Crichton, it remains one of director Steven Spielberg’s best movies. Two decades after the Park’s disastrous shutdown, a new dinosaur-themed amusement park called…Read More
Review: Guardians of the Galaxy
I really liked The Avengers, but there’s something inherently a bit dry about a group of self-important goody-goody characters. It’s the problem of Superman and Captain America (and yes, I know that Superman isn’t one of the Avengers. And never shall DC and Marvel overlap at the cineplex, alas). In fact, the only character who was any sort of relief from the tone was Tony Stark / Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr), but his was…Read More