A self-taught critic and genuine movie geek
I don’t know if this movie will make you believe in reincarnation, but it will certainly make you marvel at what can be done by a good makeup artist. As with Sucker Punch, I’m afraid that trying to explain will only confuse everyone, most of all me, but I’ll give it a shot.
Themes involving the Christian religion? Check. Filmed largely in the brownness of New Mexico? Check. Denzel Washington? Negative. I guess two out of three isn’t bad, but it isn’t good, either. Not that Paul Bettany is a bad actor — far from it. I like him. But there wasn’t much even an angel could do to save this flick.
A Jumper jumps. That’s simple enough. Paladins are regular people who want to kill Jumpers… which is also simple enough, as long as you don’t want to know why, because I can’t tell you. I never manage to get around to reading the novels these movies are based on, it seems, and usually I suspect that’s for the best. This time, though, I have the feeling that if I had read the book, I wouldn’t still be sitting here wondering exactly what all that jumping was really about.
Face it. Victorian England is perfect as the setting for a monster movie — any monster movie. It’s lit at night only by candles and lanterns, it’s often foggy, the sun doesn’t show up for days at a time, and nearly everyone is superstitious enough to believe in things like ghosts and, yes, werewolves. You fully expect to find a mad scientist around every corner, a curse on every crumbling manor house, and a terrifying creature lurking behind you every time you turn around. Late 19th-century England is the birthplace of every horror movie cliche, basically.
For some reason, when the sequels hit four, they tend not to put the number in the title anymore — probably a way to try to avoid the usual view of sequels as getting worse and worse. But the Terminator franchise is doing okay, really, maybe because they don’t rush. Four movies in twenty-five years isn’t exactly churning them out, but they’re still managing to attract the fans in droves. And the continuity people don’t even have to worry about what’s come before, because they keep time traveling and changing everything around.
Continue reading “Terminator: Salvation”
Who watches the Watchmen? Well, it made just over twenty-five million at the box office this weekend, but I’m not sure how many watchers that makes. Lots, anyway, and still not even quite as many as predicted, actually.
I feel like it should really be called Australia!. Because it’s big! And epic! And just over two and a half hours long! And exhausting!
So, yeah. Saw the movie, liked it okay… but I’m now having trouble writing about it, and that’s usually a bad sign. I’m not an Alex Cross fan, not having read any of the books, which might be part of the problem, but since I’ve heard that actual Alex Cross fans weren’t thrilled with the casting here, maybe that isn’t a problem. Having never seen Tyler Perry before, I had no comparisons to make, unflattering or otherwise.
Now I’m wondering if they rushed out Death Sentence so they could get it released before this movie. Because this film is like Death Sentence, but better. Much better. Jodie Foster is a better actor then Kevin Bacon, in my opinion, but this one also has a real script to go with the violence.
It seems to me that Labor Day weekend here in the states was always kind of a big deal, movie-wise, like any three-day weekend. But somehow, this year, we didn’t exactly get a good crop. There was the remake of Halloween (yeah, right, like I was going to go see that) and that terrible Balls of Fury debacle that makes me wonder what’s happened to poor Christopher Walken’s career. He’s turned into some kind of parody of himself.