While watching The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, I tried to keep track in my head the number of other — better — movies this one “borrows” from. It wasn’t easy to try and follow the ridiculous plotline AND count, but a few of the obvious ones were: “Alien,” “Carrie,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Brave,”…
Sutter is brash. Sutter is funny. Sutter has charisma. Sutter comes from a nice home and has a part-time job. Sutter is popular. Oh, yes. Sutter also drinks too much. Based on a novel by Tim Tharp and written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (“(500) Days of Summer“), James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now…
The “Cornetto Trilogy”, as people started calling it when the prospect of a third film reared its head and we all patiently sat through “Paul,” is surely something to be studied. If you don’t like “Shaun of the Dead,” people treat you like you’re some soulless homunculi poorly imitating human opinion, and with good reason….
While I am not crazy about a director including his own name in the title of a film (after all, we never saw a movie called “Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane” or “David Lean’s Great Expectations” or “Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver”), I can sort of forgive Lee Daniels (who directed the equally obscurely titled “Precious: Based…
Let’s face it, the sheer existence of the numeral “2” behind any film title automatically relegates said picture to the garbage heap of cinematic experiences (see “The Hangover Part 2” and “The Smurfs 2” as recent examples). Of course, there are rare exceptions where the sequel is better than or as good as the first,…
While watching Jobs one cannot help but think back on the 1999 TNT made-for-TV movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley,” starring Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. Well, at least I could not help thinking about that film. It certainly told a much crisper, tighter story of the beginning of…
When one titles a film using a human emotion or condition (i.e., “Frantic” or “Frenzy” or “Psycho” or “Vertigo“), the bar needs to be set fairly high. In the case of Paranoia, however, that bar could not possibly get any lower. And despite starring several Academy Award-caliber performers (previous nominees Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman,…
