A self-taught critic and genuine movie geek
They keep jamming more and more into these movies and making them harder and harder to summarize. Someday I’m going to give up on discussing the plot and just list all the things I thought about and discuss what the audience did, sort of a meta-review, but that day is not today. I’ll do my best to hit all the high points.
Unlike last week, I know exactly where this movie went wrong, and at least it wasn’t until the very end, but it is kind of a letdown when things go awry so close to the finish line. But it wasn’t all bad news, which can happen all too often this time of year, so could have been a lot worse.
Yep. I went to see a horror movie. That’s spooky right there. It’s based on a Stephen King short story of the same name, which I’ve never read, because to be on the safe side, I’ve always assumed Stephen King was too scary for me. He’s even scary in real life, apparently — I once knew a guy who grew up with Stephen King, and it sounds like that whole town was seriously creepy.
Continue reading “1408”
It will shock no one when I mention that I haven’t seen the original Robocop movie, or indeed any of the sequels or TV series it inspired. One of these days I’ll sit down with a list of all those movies you’re supposed to see before you die and my Netflix account and see how far I can get. I am informed, however, that this version is both less bloody (it’s PG-13, after all) and less cyberpunk than the original, and Detroit actually doesn’t look like such an awful place to live even before Robocop is on the job.
In a way, I feel like I just watched The Man with the Iron Fists again, so maybe that should count as a real Quentin Tarantino film after all. Heightening the illusion was the fact that I brought along the same friend to provide a male perspective. This time, however, we might almost have been watching different movies.
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.
It’s only sort of a terrace, and there’s no lake around anywhere that I could see, but that’s the name of the place. And the movie isn’t actually the action-packed, how-will-they-survive thriller the previews imply, either. But Samuel L. Jackson lives on Lakeview Terrace with his teenage daughter and pre-teen son, his wife having died some years earlier. He’s an LA patrol officer, and he aims to keep his street clean if it kills you. Other than that, it seems like a nice place to live.
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.
You’ve seen the trailers (probably). You’ve read the comic books (maybe). Now Iron Man hits the big screen!
By some strange coincidence, Captain America looks exactly like the Human Torch. I’m making fun of Marvel just a little — they’d promised a while back that they would have complete continuity among all their movies, probably in preparation for all the Avengers tie-ins, so it amuses me that they cast the same actor as two utterly different major Marvel characters. I have no idea how they’ll explain the coming debacle that is The Amazing Spider-Man. They showed previews, and the entire audience looked vaguely uncomfortable and/or confused. I know I was.
Continue reading “Captain America”