There is no genre in the medium of film as cliched, as boring, or as insipid as the romantic comedy. In theory, blending the element of love with humor should be a much more interesting, enlightening experience than what modern audiences are generally being offered these days. But charmless, humorless, generally boring scripts are often [...]
Nicholas Sparks makes teenage girls cry for a living: Look no further than the films inspired by his books, ‘The Notebook’ and ‘Walk to Remember’ for shameless tearjerkers. The latest film based on one of his novels, ‘Dear John’, pulls some fairly decent performances out of its young lead actors. That said, its a dull, [...]
Hollywood has had a slight obsession with the apocalypse in recent months, with ‘Zombieland’, ‘2012′, ‘Knowing’, and ‘The Road’. Denzel Washington stars in the thriller ‘The Book of Eli’. In it, he portrays Eli, a man who walks across a post-apocalyptic America with only cannibals, thieves, and beggars left. He carries the last surviving copy [...]
Before ‘Leap Year’, Amy Adams had never been in a bad film. Sure, the parts ‘Julie and Julia’ starring her sucked, but the half with Meryl Streep was exceptional enough to lift it up. Sure ‘Underdog’ was an epic fest of crap, but she technically only voiced a character, and didn’t fully appear in it. [...]
Director Peter Jackson has, in the past several years, basically conquered Hollywood. He’s made some of the highest-grossing films of all time, including an 11-hour fantasy epic. His last 4 films have won a combined total of 20 Academy Awards and over $3 billion. Yet somehow, Peter cannot direct a cohesive story on a [...]
Jason Reitman’s new film, ‘Up in the Air’, is hard to categorize. Romantic, intelligent, hilarious, heartbreaking. I think that it’s above all, relevant. The film stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a man who travels the country frequently, firing people whose bosses don’t have the guts to say it to their face. He also is [...]
‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ has such personality, such boldness, such heart, that it’s somewhat impossible not to love it. Directed by Wes Anderson, who’s done ‘Rushmore’ and ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’, ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ was made with stop-motion, a pain-staking process of making a clay environment and moving it slightly for each frame of film.
Based on [...]
‘Invictus’ is the newest film from director Clint Eastwood. In the past 6 years Eastwood has given us not only his finest performances as an actor (Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby) but also directed some of the decades’ best films (Letters From Iwo Jima, Mystic River). ‘Invictus’ is somewhat unique in that it has a [...]
‘Avatar’ is, according to some reports, the most expensive film ever made. Records say the film cost $350 million, and every penny shows on screen. This may be the first film that creates a fictional, but living, breathing, new world that you entirely believe in. Not one moment of the film looks fake.
This is [...]
‘The Blind Side’ is one of the most conventional, bland sports film ever made. And in a genre as cliched as sports movies, that’s something of an achievement. (Mind you, not a good one) There is absolutely no scene in this film that has not, in some form, been made before. There is no emotion [...]