In preparing to write this review I struggled with how I wanted to approach the movie and the review. For those of you that know me, I am a Baltimore native and a first-generation fan of the Baltimore Ravens. When the Ravens drafted Michael Oher in the recent 2009 NFL Draft it was all over [...]
New Moon: Introducing Team Jacob
For fans, the Twilight saga has become a sort of sporting event pitting one team against another. Team Edward was crazed upon the release of last year’s Twilight, and while New Moon is definitely geared toward “the other team,” there is more than adequate sexual tension and angst to satisfy both.
New [...]
The day of the screening I was joking around with some friends at my day job and came up with this snazzy catchphrase regarding the new movie 2012: “Only John Cusack can outrun disasters of massive proportions but not be able to stop the disaster that was his character’s marriage.” I knew that Amanda Peet [...]
There’s more human suffering on display in Roland Emmerich’s 2012 than any other film I’ve seen. Emmerich raises the stakes of his own game, creating a level of destruction that outdoes anything seen in Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow. Where he succeeds most brilliantly is in forming a perfectly satisfying piece of coherent [...]
Seven out of ten times, I’m going to come out enjoying a film that operates on its own terms. It’s the first and best thing I can say about Michael Mann, which just adds to my fanboy nature when it comes to his work. As a more recent example, the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man [...]
It is up to you to decide.
That’s about as far as the creators of The Fourth Kind are really willing to go in confirming the ‘truth’ behind their new film. Ultimately, that’s probably as far as they should go considering all of the events and ‘footage’ presented in this 90-minute treatise on alien abduction and extraterrestrial paranoia. [...]
If you push the button on the titular box in Richard Kelly’s new sci-fi opus, two things will undoubtedly happen. The first is that somewhere in the world, a person you do not know will die. The second is that after pushing the button, you will receive a briefcase filled with 1 million U.S. dollars [...]
I sit in my seat and look about to see my surroundings; I start to hear clicking sounds getting louder and louder. I start to fly around the city of London, looking around I see people having snowball fights with each other, singing Christmas songs. This might sound like the Star Tours “The Christmas [...]
Is it possible to hold a film like Amanda Gusack’s In Memorium in a truly objective, critical light after seeing Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity? I would have to say probably not, considering that’s the first question I asked myself when sitting down to write this.
But here’s the thing: In Memorium, a haunting film that spans [...]
The London penal system has no idea what to do with Michael Peterson, famously on record as its most violent criminal. If the film Bronson can be believed, their solution was to beat him intensely and often. Strangely, that’s also director Nicolas Winding Refn’s answer to his subject. Bronson, so named because Peterson adopts the full [...]
Here now, a brief four months after his untimely death, is the vindication that Michael Jackson’s fans have been waiting for. This Is It, for better or worse, is the last word on Jackson as a performer and it’s presented here as the ‘dream’ of a concert that no one will ever get to see. [...]
If the balletic and elegant fighting styles of Jackie Chan and Jet Li are the tap and swing of the martial arts world, then Tony Jaa and his Thai cohorts are practicing the Lambada. Jaa, who rose to international popularity in 2005 with Ong Bak, introduced the mainstream to the brutal and direct art of [...]
