A self-taught critic and genuine movie geek
You can tell I’m not a real movie critic. I missed the extravaganza of Shrek the Third, carefully avoided the craziness that is the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which I’ve never liked, and ended up reviewing Bug.
Talk about out of the frying pan, into the fire.
This movie makes it look depressingly easy to take over the White House. Well, “easy” presuming that you have access to a fair amount of high-tech weaponry, a master tactician, detailed blueprints of the building, and a large group of heavily armed fanatics. But as main bad guy Kang (Rick Yune, The Man with the Iron Fists) points out, it took them just thirteen minutes, so they still make it look easy, at least.
Or, the Pang Brothers, Sam Raimi and Co. Try to Do for Sunflowers What M. Night Shyamalan Did for Corn.
The other day, I mentioned to someone that this movie was coming out, explaining that it was a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. The reply I got: “Isn’t that Wicked?” Research shows that Wicked is in fact a prequel of sorts, so I guess now there are two, because there’s certainly no continuity between movie and musical / novel, not even in the names of the characters. Someone needs to take charge of this mess and decide what’s canon and what isn’t.
The opening credits helpfully inform us that the movie is inspired by true events. This means about what it usually means in a Hollywood movie, which is to say that they took five or six basic facts, shook them around a little, and put them into a general outline that probably actually does have a little something to do with the actual circumstances. What really happened is that a Soviet submarine on maneuvers in the Pacific sank under doubtful circumstances in 1968.
Continue reading “Phantom”