I really liked The Avengers, but there’s something inherently a bit dry about a group of self-important goody-goody characters. It’s the problem of Superman and Captain America (and yes, I know that Superman isn’t one of the Avengers. And never shall DC and Marvel overlap at the cineplex, alas). In fact, the only character who was any sort of relief from the tone was Tony Stark / Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr), but his was…Read More
The Star Trek TV show was an important step in the evolution of science fiction, a post-Cold War series that offered a hopeful future, a future where race, creed, religion and gender were irrelevant and that even aliens from other planets were accepted as equals. The TV show spawned additional series, along with ten feature films, but things had become rather grim and the campy humor and brash personalities of the Star Trek universe had…Read More
The premise of Takers couldn’t have been better tailored to my cinematic interests. A team of criminals who engineer and pull off perfect robberies, with timing down to the fraction of a second, deciding to do one last job, even as they’re suspicious of the source of the information, while an obsessive cop is hot on their trail, determined to break the case. Unfortunately, the film itself was so sloppy and riddled with clichés that…Read More
Is there something written that good, enjoyable films have to make sense, be internally consistent and not have dumb continuity gaffes? I hope not, because that perfectly describes my reaction to The Losers, yet another Hollywood film based on a graphic novel. This time it’s from Dark Horse comics and it’s about a group of CIA “black ops” bad boys who are left for dead in Bolivia after what appears to be a drug lord…Read More
Avatar is a movie about manifest destiny and second thoughts, a sweeping epic retelling of a classic theme about a soldier “going native” as he learns that the enemy isn’t a faceless monster, but an intelligent race. The most obvious parallel is Dances with Wolves, but director James Cameron has taken the basic storyline and created a visual masterpiece that’s almost a perfect sci-fi film. Avatar takes place 150 years in the future, on the…Read More
Note: My full Avatar review can be found in a different entry, this is just a writeup from when I saw the 15-minute preview of the film in mid-2009. For the full review of the movie, please go here: Dave On Film Review: Avatar Along with what was apparently a smaller number of film geeks than was expected, I dutifully showed up at the local RealIMAX “quasi-IMAX” screen (see my earlier article on RealIMAX versus…Read More