Modern warfare is all about ambiguity. Who’s the enemy? Who are the combatants? It’s one reason why the simple morality of a movie lends itself more to the clarity of WWII, the Cold War or similar, where it’s easy to figure out who to root for and who’s the bad guy. From our vantage point in the 21st Century, it’s hard to imagine the anti-communist fear that helped define the 1950’s and 1960’s, with Soviet Premier…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: Earth to Echo
There’s a clear innocence about the family cinema of previous generations that seems to have been lost in the current crop of movies. In older films, families work together, albeit with some struggles, and children are pleasant and get along pretty well with each other. It’s not all peaches and cream, of course, because there’s some dramatic tension needed to propel the story forward (bad parenting in Mary Poppins, a child who has to recognize…Read More
Review: The Monuments Men
I’m a sucker for films set in World War II, whether the European front or the Pacific front. The list of good WWII films is endless, but I’ll highlight some of my favorites, including Saving Private Ryan, Flags of our Fathers, and Tora! Tora! Tora! along with a few comic films set in the same era: Catch-22 and How I Won The War. What they all have in common is a certain gravitas, even the comedies….Read More
Review: Cowboys & Aliens
There’s something timeless about a good Western, even if the genre has generally fallen out of favor with modern filmgoers. Sprinkle in some scary aliens, stunning special effects, and a terrific cast and the mashup film Cowboys & Aliensturns out to be a terrific and highly entertaining summer tentpole adventure. Set in sparsely populated New Mexico around 1875, the film starts with bad hombre Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) waking up in the middle of nowhere,…Read More
Review: Super 8
With the rush to special effects and computer graphics, too many filmmakers have forgotten that the core of every good film is an interesting story, which is why the Steven Spielberg/J.J. Abrams collaboration Super 8 was such a joy to watch. Yes, there were splendid special effects, but the characters were all delightful and the story slowly unfolded, letting our curiosity build as we tried to figure out why people were acting as they were…Read More