The immense popularity of The Walking Dead TV show didn’t begin the latest zombie craze in our culture, but it definitely contributed to the enthusiasm for which people embrace the undead. Well, maybe “embrace” is the wrong word. Still, those pesky undead are showing up everywhere, even in the whimsical and surprisingly entertaining bucolic historical setting of Jane Austen’s masterwork “Pride and Prejudice”. It’s the English countryside in the mid-1800s and Elizabeth Bennet (Lily James) is…Read More
Review: Jupiter Ascending
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: Noah
Let’s start with my creative retitling of the epic drama Noah from director Darren Aronofsky. I suggest that it makes more sense as Transformers: Revenge of the Righteous. Yes, somehow a film about a guy who gets a message from God that tells him to build a huge ship to rescue every animal because a storm of, well, Biblical proportions is on the way has been turned into a fantasy epic complete with 15-foot tall rock…Read More