Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, while not a faithful adaptation of the books on which it is based, captures the essence of those books and translates it to the big screen with flair.
It’s impossible to discuss Unfortunate Events without pointing out that, as mentioned, it doesn’t really follow the books. It takes […]
Despite the love I felt at the time for Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc., I was not at all enthused by the early previews that I saw for The Incredibles. Much of that early ad campaign (including the first teaser trailer) did not look promising, focusing on the comedy of a fat super-hero. […]
I found Troy to be a great movie from a lot of different angles. It is beautifully shot. The performances were much better than I expected, and I was particularly impressed with how the filmmakers had a healthy disrespect for the story as it previously existed, and instead told the story they wanted […]
I love Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. It does something that I always admire in a film: it builds its own take on reality and blindly holds onto it no matter what. The world of Anchorman is a specific take on the 1970s: male chauvanist, environmentally unfriendly, yet harmlessly naive (despite the […]
Viewed December 29, 2006
Hellboy is a film adaptation of Mike Mignola’s cult comic book series. It tells of a demon brought forth by Nazis to be the key to a worldwide apocalypse, but is instead captured by American military forces and raised as a force for good.
When we meet up again with Hellboy (Ron […]
Viewed December 24, 2006
The sleeper hit of late 2004, The Polar Express was the latest example of director Robert Zemeckis’ fascination with computer imagry (following the toon/human work in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the history-melding in Forrest Gump). Here, he usues motion capture technology to record the movements of his actors (mostly Tom […]
Viewed December 9, 2006
Having established the characters in the first film, Shrek 2 gives a sense of how extendable they are, that is, how much the characters can stand up to continued adventures. Now, I had been told that Shrek 2 was better than Shrek, despite its review being more negative. I certainly […]
Viewed December 7, 2006
King Arthur ’s subtitle is “The Untold True Story That Inspired The Legend”. By taking that stand, the film claims to portray the truth. And yet it gets an awful lot wrong. You can divide the wrongness into three distinct areas: failure against the Arthurian Myth (the least important), […]
Viewed November 10, 2006
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie takes the exitable ocean dweller and brings him to the big screen for the first (and, to date, only) time. While much of SpongeBob’s comedy translates well to a larger canvas, there are aspects that just don’t come up to snuff.
The plot is no more or less […]
Viewed November 5, 2006
One of the biggest hurdles that most Disney straight-to-video sequels have to clear is maintaining the tone of the original film. Some fail spectacularly (The Lion King 2), while others are surprisingly strong (Alladin and the King of Thieves, Bambi II). Of course, some ignore the original tone completely and […]
Viewed November 4, 2006
Okay, this is another one of those circumstances where I really should like a film, but somehow it just doesn’t connect with me. I expected to like Kung Fu Hustle, since it plays into a lot of things I enjoy, yet it somehow missed the mark.
For one thing, it’s not nearly […]
Viewed September 24, 2006
What dooms Catwoman is straying from the source material. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times (and will say it a thousand times more): stick to the source mateial and you’ll be fine. There’s a reason that characters like Catwoman have stood the test of time. […]
Viewed September 19, 2006
Connie and Carla is actress/writer Nia Vardalos’ follow-up to her surprise hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It’s not as solid as her first film, but it still packs plenty of laughs and is well worth seeing. The big time movie studio pitch would go like this: “Some Like It […]
Viewed September 14, 2006
Okay, that’s two overrated Bill Murray vehicles I’ve watched this year. (I’m sure you understand that dissapointing though it may be, Garfield cannot be considered overrated by any means.) Despite the best efforts of the cast, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou lacks any kind of cohesion that could make […]
Viewed September 6, 2006
I treid. I swear I tried to go a week without watching an animated film, but I just couldn’t do it. I needed a relatively short film to watch (it ws late and I was tired) and there was a DVD of Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers just sitting […]
Viewed September 5, 2006
OK, right off the bat, twenty points to Martin Short for kicking off his film Jiminy Glick in Lalawood with an impersonation of David Lynch. I mean, who does David Lynch? Who knows film well enough to know what David Lynch is like? Martin Short, that’s who. In […]
Viewed September 3, 2006
The idea behind Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda is a simple one. Depending on the teller, the same story can be a tragedy or a comedy. It all depends on the point of view.
Allen frames this conceit with a device he has used before: people sitting around talking. He […]
Viewed August 30, 2006
Garfield attempts to bring the classic comic strip character to the big screen in live action form. And that’s where the troubles start. The biggest problem with Garfield is the visualization of the animals. Now, Garfield’s world is filled with talking animals, but the only one in Garfield that […]
Viewed August 24, 2006
A Dairy Tale: The Three Little Pigs is a short that is included on the Home on the Range DVD and features the characters from that film. The style is much more simplistic than the original film, not much more detailed than typical Flash cartoons found on the web. It […]
Viewed August 18, 2006
Home On The Range at one point looked to be the last traditional animated film fom Walt Disney Feature Animation. Then CEO Michael Eisner, stung by the relative failure of the last few Disney animated features, declared that, starting with 2005’s Chicken Little, all Disney animated features would be computer generated. […]
Viewed July 30, 2006
Eurotrip is another in a long string of “wacky” teen comedies that have been foisted on us since the arrival of American Pie. As these things go, it’s not that bad, but it ultimately fails to really stand out from the pack or stand on its own.
Okay, so a young guy […]
Viewed July 18, 2006
What a strange film to have as my 200th. Oh well, it was my decision to watch fanfilms this week. And anyway, James Bond: Killing In The Name, is certainly not the worst one I’ve seen, even if it does fail to live up to its potential.
The biggest problem for […]
Viewed July 18, 2006
So, like, I was totally going to avoid watching the “Pink Five” series, because what little I had seen of it was, like, so stupid but then, I, like, thought that maybe I’d better watch them because they’re, like, really well known and people would wonder why I hadn’t seen them and […]
Viewed July 16, 2006
Now, just about everyone knows Mark Hamill from the Star Wars saga. Some may be aware that he has a flourishing career in voice-over work (Batman, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Justice League). Some might even know that he is a huge comic book fan. All of these elements […]
Viewed July 11, 2006
I don’t care that it’s comedy. I don’t care that he’s a cartoon walking around in the real world. I don’t even care that the material is basically advertising for American Express. The two short films that make up The Adventures of Seinfeld and Superman portray a viable, legitimate […]
Viewed July 5, 2006
Artifact from the Future: The Making of ‘THX-1138′ is the “making of” documentary available on the DVD release of director George Lucas’ first feature film, THX-1138. It follows the development of the film from its earliest incarnation as Lucas’ school USC school project Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB (1967). It then follows […]
Viewed June 26, 2006
The Punisher is the second attempt to bring the hard-edged Marvel Comics character to life. The previous version of The Punisher from 1989 starred Dolph Lundgren in the title role and was a decent, if not exactly original, effort. This new version had a much larger budget and, after the […]
Viewed June 2, 2006
The Characters of Star Wars is a documentary on, well, the characters of the Star Wars trilogy. (Wasn’t that obvious?) I’ve seen many of these kinds of featurettes and documentaries over the years (my favorites: From Star Wars to Jedi (1985) and When Star Wars Ruled The World (2005)). […]
Viewed May 26, 2006
G.I. Joe: Ninja Battles is little more than a promotional film for the G.I. Joe line and the commercial DVD release G.I. Joe: Valor vs. Venom (2004). It’s “animation” is limited to mildly animated still drawings and occasional clips either lifted from Valor vs. Venom or done during that production. […]
Viewed May 17, 2006
Word of the passing of Paul Marco, noted member of Ed Wood’s stock company, came through on the 17th, so I felt I shoudl watch something Ed-related. The only thing I had that I hadn’t actually watched yet was Night of the Fools, a fan-made film that portrays Ed putting together […]
Viewed April 30, 2006
Okay, so this is the first time we kind of bend the rules a little bit. I’d been wanting to watch a fanfilm or two as part of this project, but I found them all to be so trite as to not be worth the time. There certainly didn’t seem […]
Viewed April 11, 2006
What a surprise 13 Going On 30 turned out to be. While I was hoping to find it mildy amusing, I certainly didn’t expect to see such a strong, well though out film. It wasn’t marketed as anything more than “Big with a girl”, but I think it’s somewhat deeper […]
Viewed March 26, 2006
Monster Island, an made-for-MTV movie, tries to re-create the mystique of the classic B-movie. Although it hits the right marks superficially, it still falls short.
The plot is properly simple: kids brought to an island for a party start being attacked by giant insects. When someone is captured by one of […]
Viewed March 2, 2006
To many people, The Village is damaged by writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s penchant for the twist ending. They see it as an Achilles Heel, meaning that if the twist doesn’t pay off, the movie fails. Well, the big twist inThe Village (which I will admit to knowing ahead of […]
Viewed February 13, 2006
There’s always an interesting dynamic when you watch a film that has already built up a strong cult following before you get to see it. Such was the case for Withnail and I, and such is the case with Napoleon Dynamite. I was already aware of the “Vote for Pedro” […]
Viewed February 12, 2006
Star Wars is my favorite film of all tme and the Star Wars Saga is pretty much the touchstone for everything I enjoy from comics to video games to toys, etc. etc. But Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith came out last year and there are no Star […]
Viewed January 19, 2006
Apparently, playing Bobby Darin on screen was a long-standing dream of Kevin Spacey’s. He finally realized this ambition with his turn as actor/director/co-scripter on Beyond The Sea. I must admit that my love of Darin’s music combined with a relative malaise concerning Spacey’s recent work made me more than a […]