Author Dan Brown had a blockbuster success with the book “The DaVinci Code” back in 2003, but even with celebrity power of star Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard, the 2006 film did poorly and isn’t very well considered. Part two of the trilogy featuring Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon is “Angels & Demons” and its 2009 cinematic adaptation was a distinct improvement over the first film. Enter “Inferno“, the third Langdon adventure. Named after the hell as portrayed…Read More
Review: Bridge of Spies
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: Self/less
Such a great idea for a movie. Such a dull, uninspired film. Here’s the premise: what if you could transfer your consciousness to another body and add decades to your life? The catch: you can’t interact with anyone from your old life, you have to start over with the new body. Would you do it? The central deceit of the story is that the new body isn’t actually a perfect human grown in a laboratory, as…Read More
Review: Fury
War is inherently cinematic. The stark comparison between good and bad, the grey areas of moral or amoral behavior, the stripping away of the thin veneer of civilization and civilized behavior, and the historical replay — or reinvention — of heinous situations. It’s no wonder that for any given war there are dozens if not hundreds of films. No war has been covered more thoroughly than World War II, however, with its deep and profound…Read More
Review: Saving Mr. Banks
When my children were younger, we must have watched the Disney classic live-action film Mary Poppins dozens of times. It’s light, it’s sweet, it has some great songs, and even now I find myself referencing the “practically perfect in every way” scene with my teen. It also had a ghastly performance by Dick Van Dyke too: his Cockney accent is atrocious, just painful to hear, but that’s another discussion entirely. What people who watch Mary…Read More
Review: Captain Phillips
We read the stories in the newspaper, about Somali pirates boarding a cargo ship or tanker and holding the crew for ransom. But it’s always been implausible. Pirates are like Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) in Pirates of the Caribbean, foppish, overdressed and certainly not particularly dangerous or even relevant in modern times with automatic weapons, GPS navigational systems and live satellite surveillance. The remarkably gripping film Captain Phillips goes a long way to explain why…Read More
Review: Cloud Atlas
Storytelling in our culture is in a bit of a rut. We’ve become far too accustomed to narratives that start before a precipitous event, have something dramatic transpire, then have it all resolve such that the protagonist overcomes obstacles both external and internal. Elapsed time? 90-100 minutes total. Simple. Boring. That’s why when a film like Inception comes along, it generates so much discussion: It forces us to question the very nature of dreams and…Read More