There’s something inherently epic about this greatest of showdowns, between an alien creature with superhuman powers and a man so full of rage that he pushes himself to the very limit of physical endurance, then adds innovative technologies to make him superhuman. Each has his origin story, with Batman being born out of the horror and pain of a young Bruce Wayne seeing his parents gunned down by a street thug in Gotham City, and Superman traveling…Read More
Review: 300: Rise of an Empire
If you’ve seen the 2006 surprise hit 300, you’ve basically seen 300: Rise of an Empire. This time, however, it’s not Greek King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) who is sacrificing everything for Sparta against the evil Persian god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) but Greek battle commander Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) sacrificing everything against, yes, Xerxes and the invading Persians. 300: Rise of an Empire basically takes place concurrently with the original 300 movie, where early in the film…Read More
Review: Man Of Steel
A superhero that’s a product of his era, Superman showed up in the common culture back in 1938. It was World War II that highlighted the tension inherent in his super-human character, as Nazi Germany proclaimed the superiority of its own super-human race, Aryans. An über-patriotic American who even dressed in red, white and blue, Superman and his alter-ego Clark Kent was an idealized American in an era where it was becoming hard to identify…Read More
Review: Sucker Punch
Imagine a building where one side is a dark, dreary insane asylum populated by sadistic guards, doctors and attractive female inmates, and the other side is a popular brothel and speakeasy. Sounds like the heart of a b-movie exploitation film and that’s what Sucker Punch, the new computer-graphics filled cinematic graphic novel from Zack Snyder, turns out to be. Unfortunately, the film is also painfully juvenile with a target audience of adolescent boys who define…Read More
The Best Films of 2009
I’ve spent the time to rant about the films I saw last year that I thought were the worst of the bunch, not just middling experiences, but genuinely “how on Earth did they ever raise the money to make this abomination?” movies where they either started out okay and slowly collapsed on their own weight (like Knowing) or were daft from the get-go (like Transformers 2). The worst of the bunch, though, must have been…Read More
Review: Watchmen (The Director’s Cut)
It wasn’t until about 75% of the way through the original Watchmen graphic novel (written by Alan Moore, with art by Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins) that I started to really understand what was going on. Once I could see where they were going, however, I was hooked and ultimately found it to be a terrific story about the ambiguity of morality and the difficulty of being gifted with unusual abilities and the concomitant expectation that you’ll use…Read More