A self-taught critic and genuine movie geek
At one point, Will Smith says something about having been K’s partner for fourteen years. My first thought: “No way. It cant have been fourteen years already! That can’t be right.” And it isn’t. It’s actually been fifteen years since the first MiB flick. On the other hand, waiting ten years between sequels has produced a movie in the series at least twice as good as the one that they produced after five years, so it works out in the end.
As soon as I heard the phrase “Extreme Tourism,” I knew I was in trouble. Tourists from the U.S. have enough of a reputation for doing stupid things as it is; we don’t need to add a reputation for doing stupidly dangerous things on top of that. At least this particular group of extreme tourists is only two-thirds American idiots, but still. The point is, a large Russian man named Yuri saw a chance for a new sort of business exposing visitors to his country to radiation, and jumped at it.
Continue reading “Chernobyl Diaries”
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.
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 would 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.
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.