The Movie Critic Next Door

Somehow -- I hesitate even to guess on the details -- Hasbro persuaded Universal Pictures that it would be cool to base a movie on the Battleship game. Hasbro gets 5%, which I guess makes sense since all they provide is a little name recognition, really. Either that or they didn't bother to bargain much. I couldn't find anyone who was interested in going along to see this flick, though, which is usually a bad sign.

Image: 

Dark Shadows is no longer a Dan Curtis Production, not by any stretch of the imagination, and that's really a shame. I rented some of the original series on DVD from Netflix, and it was absolutely fun to watch. It was often melodramatic, sometimes the acting was so ridiculously over the top you wanted to giggle, and sometimes you could shake your head as a microphone drifted into the shot, or wince as someone struggled with a line. But somehow it still pulled you in, and while you didn't quite forget all the rough edges, they just don't seem especially important.

Image: 

You probably know the basics already: An impossibly powerful energy source, a Norse god or two, the original 1940's superhero, a noted assassin, a narcissistic billionaire playboy inventor, and the world's best archer. Okay, that last one ends up sounding a little lame summed up in so few words, but the effects of a well-placed exploding arrow should not be underestimated. Oh, and there's an alien invasion. I almost forgot.

Image: 

As the movie's opening helpfully informs us, Edgar Allan Poe was found in a bad state in October, 1849, in Baltimore, and died not long thereafter. "In a bad state", for Poe, was very likely code for "falling down drunk", but no one's absolutely sure of that, or even exactly what he died of, though it certainly might have been liver failure. The movie has him found on a park bench, though some sources claim he was found in the gutter, while others say it was in a pub, but hey, I don't think anyone's shocked at the idea that a Hollywood movie dramatized the facts a little too much.

Image: 

I saw this at a film festival, so let me steal something of the way it was introduced there. The host first asked the audience, on the count of three, to shout out the title of their favorite zombie movie. (I went with 28 Days Later.) Then he asked us to shout out the title of our favorite werewolf movie.

Image: 

I don't usually notice a lot of the behind the scenes names, I have to admit. There are the big ones, of course, that lots of people notice, like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, but for the most part I have a hard time keeping track. This is perhaps a side effect of being an utterly untrained sort of movie critic. But I do remember the name Luc Besson, the writer-producer who came up with the idea for this flick.

Image: 

Ancient Greece's most dysfunctional family is back, and there's going to be trouble. A few people are back from the Clash of the Titans, namely Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Danny Huston, and of course Sam Worthington, playing Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, and our hero Perseus respectively.

Image: 

In the post-apocalyptic future, when Donald Sutherland is president, which I always suspected would happen someday, they have this thing called the Hunger Games. Even if you're like me and haven't read the books, you've heard of it, unless you've been living under a rock. And it's a good, solid premise, because these days you can't get away with writing just any old thing for teenagers to read, or even tweens. These days they're fussy about those things.

Image: 

I couldn't work up any enthusiasm to go see 21 Jump Street. The previews made it look like a mass of pratfalls and dubious physical humor, and I didn't really want to take the chance on it. And, of course, I've never seen the show it was based on. If I had, maybe I would've wanted to try to catch all the in-jokes or maybe just see how badly they ruined the whole thing. But, typically, no one ever seems to remake anything I've actually watched.

Image: 

The movie 79 years in the making! That's usually a very bad sign, of course. As a general rule, the longer a film lingers "in development", the worse it gets. Apparently it resets after three-quarters of a century or so, though, since this one doesn't seem to have suffered much.

Image: