With robots and aliens dominating Summer 2009’s film offerings for the young and 13-year-old boys at heart, it’s refreshing to return to the relatively innocent world of history and magic in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.
Viewers older than 13 might find that “history” here is similar to that in Time Bandits (1981) [...]
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
May 30th, 2009 by Karen · No Comments
Terminator Salvation
May 24th, 2009 by Lauren Hutchison · 3 Comments
Like the indestructible constructs it features, Terminator seems to be a franchise that just won’t die. The Governator appears only as a cameo in “Terminator Salvation”, which systematically destroys at least half the reason for the series’ existence. “Salvation” still serves as a passable action movie, but the horrendous script and too-serious tone render the [...]
Star Trek
May 13th, 2009 by Karen · No Comments
They boldly go, but not where they haven’t been before.
Expectations for a new Star Trek film have not been this high since the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, the first since the TV series’ cancellation a decade earlier. That film certainly laid bare Gene Roddenberry’s ambitions, since he was no longer [...]
X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Drinking Game
May 4th, 2009 by Lauren Hutchison · 2 Comments
Instead of doing a traditional review of Wolverine, I thought I’d highlight my feelings for this piece of work by writing a drinking game.
TAKE 1 DRINK:
- Each time claws or swords emerge from someone’s skin in slow motion
- Each time a new mutant is introduced
- Each time an exotic locale is revealed in an an [...]
City Without End by Kay Kenyon
March 18th, 2009 by Sam Hutchison · No Comments
Kay Kenyon is in a hurry, and it shows. Her first book, Bright the Sky, was like reading a thousand-year-old Persian rug. She created an amazing artificial world, the Entire, crafted by the mysterious alien Tarig and kept habitable only through the profligate expenditure of colossal amounts of energy. All her characters are richly developed, [...]
Watchmen
March 7th, 2009 by Lauren Hutchison · 1 Comment
Creating a movie from a cultural icon is tricky business. Do you please the fans, or do you create a good movie? The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but it’s a perilous tightrope. I’m not familiar with the Watchmen comics, and coming out of the movie, I felt like someone’s guest at a work party: politely [...]
Repo: The Genetic Opera
February 23rd, 2009 by Karen · No Comments
If you are a regular reader of blogs, you might have noticed the proliferation of “punk” suffixes in recent months. A December 2008 entry on Boing Boing spoke of “atompunk”, a Dutch movement fetishizing the atomic space age of the 1950s and ’60s. The entry was posted at a time when steampunk - a style [...]
Coraline
February 12th, 2009 by Karen · No Comments
Imagine you’ve just moved into an apartment in 150-year-old house - in murky Oregon, all weird angles and Gothic decay. Upstairs lives a limber Russian, Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), who’s training mice to perform a circus, while downstairs are two retired actresses, Miss Sprink and Miss Forcible (Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French) for whom life is [...]
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
January 1st, 2009 by Karen · 1 Comment
During the holiday hustle and bustle, many moviegoers might wish to take a step back and watch life unfold before their eyes: be it the life of Benjamin Button, or their own lives while watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. At nearly three hours, the film makes a bid for “epic” that has seemingly [...]
CJ7
September 26th, 2008 by Karen · No Comments
Cynics have long contended that in Stephen Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the titular alien could be replaced with a dog and the fable would remain intact. In CJ7, schoolboy Dicky jubilantly shouts “an alien dog!” when first setting eyes on his new pal. While it remains a mystery whether CJ7 - with its Ewok [...]
