James Cameron’s AVATAR is a bold and imaginative vision brought low by a script that plays it very, very safe. Timely and environmentally apt, the rich creativity that is evident in the imagining of Pandora, the planet that is Earth’s last, best hope for survival, is juxtaposed with stock characters from Cameron’s playbook, including the… Read More »
IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS, THE
THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS is a massive sprawling explosion of a film, rife with hyperbolic visuals, and a story that dares to consider the contradictions of good and evil as played out in the hearts and minds of every human being on the planet. Co-writer and director Terry Gilliam, through the mouth of one… Read More »
MOON
Duncan Jones’ debut feature, MOON, is a sharp and intelligent consideration of reality itself. An engrossing tale set in the near future on the dark side of our planet’s satellite, it probes the equally dark side of the human condition and in the process does what the best science fiction ought to do, which is… Read More »
LEGION
LEGION is an incoherent flick positing, amid all the apocalyptic mayhem, that the Almighty is out of touch with His/Her inner Deity. It may be a juicy mystery that passeth all understanding to make theologians quiver with the delight of unraveling it, but as a premise for a movie, it’s incoherent. That it also attempts… Read More »
PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS — THE LIGHTNING THIEF
The classical Greek myths has persisted in the collective imagination since they first sprouted in ancient Hellene. That they have infused themselves into popular young adult fiction in the Percy Jackson series is no surprise, nor is it a surprise that a cinematic rendering should spring from it. The only surprise is that it took… Read More »
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS
Spaghetti has never been more terrifying, Gummi bears more menacing, nor the pleasures and perils of exploring the frontiers of science more vivid than in CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS. Based on the novel of the same name by Judi and Ron Barret, and brought to glorious animated life, its got clever dialogue and… Read More »
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Tim Burton, wanting to put his own stamp on ALICE IN WONDERLAND, has wandered not just far from the story, but from the very essence of what Lewis Carroll created. Rather than a Wonderland full of terrifying adventures and deliciously absurd whimsy, he has created the Underland, a place of terrifyingly, yet lugubrious, bad filmmaking.… Read More »
REPO MEN
REPO MEN, not by any stretch of the imagination to be confused with the similarly monikered Alex Cox masterpiece of a few decades back, is a bewilderingly awful concoction that seems to have been written by committee. A committee whose individual members were forbidden to contact one another and who seem, collectively, to be ignorant… Read More »
CLASH OF THE TITANS
It takes about 15 minutes to realize that the remake of CLASH OF THE TITANS is an irredeemable loss. Unfortunately, there is still another 105 minutes or so to endure until the ordeal is over. Where the original, no masterpiece to be sure, had a cheesy sort of charm, this offers only the irritation of… Read More »
SHREK FOREVER AFTER
The magic is back. SHREK FOREVER AFTER has recaptured everything that made the original so great, including the attitude of William Steig, the author of the original Shrek book, while keeping those elements that worked in the subsequent installments. Which is to say, there is nothing of the third to be found here. Shrek (Mike… Read More »
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