Andy and Lana Wachowski haven’t been able to match the brilliance of their cultural touchstone movie The Matrix with anything else they’ve done. Not with the increasingly banal sequels to the film, and certainly not with the visual f/x abomination Speed Racer. The recent Cloud Atlas was their closest effort, a thoughtful, engaging but ultimately overreaching film based on a twisty book by David Mitchell. Into this troubled oeuvre comes their latest movie, Jupiter Ascending, a…Read More
Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pt 1
It all started with a juvenile fiction novel about a teen boy with hidden magical powers and a grand wizarding destiny that he finds by leaving his non-magical “muggle” family and attending an English boarding school with a magical twist, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. That book was published in 1997 with the title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and a film version followed in November, 2001. Since then the seven Harry Potter…Read More
Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Six films into the Harry Potter series, it seems like Harry, Ron and Hermione are old friends and family members. Between the books and the films, it seems that they’ve been part of contemporary culture for decades, certainly in my household. Turning the books into films has been a tricky task, however, and each film has had its own distinctive personality. It’s no coincidence that a number of different directors have been involved too, from…Read More