If ever you find yourself asked to participate in an experiment in which the goal is to summon an angry spirit from bad energy derived from an emotionally broken child, run away. I assure no good can come of it. It’s really too bad then that the students in Lionsgate’s The Quiet Ones were never…
Walt’s schmaltz, both old and new, is on display in the cute little period piece Saving Mr. Banks, which looks at a particularly bumpy stretch on the Disney-paved road to turning Mary Poppins into a cinematic classic. There’s a war over sentimentality being waged between Disney himself (a warm, welcoming Tom Hanks here) and Mary…
Ron Burgundy is an idiot. You would know that even if you didn’t see 2004’s “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” because in the push to get people to watch the sequel, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, he demonstrated his idiocy in Durango commercials and every late night talk show that would have him. Reporter,…
Like René Clément’s “Forbidden Games,” British director Brian Percival’s The Book Thief focuses on the effect of war on children who are forced by circumstances into coping with events beyond their capacity to understand. Written by Michael Petroni and based on the novel by Australian author Markus Zusak, it is a story told with power…
It’s going to happen some day. Computers will become so advanced they will become aware. How it will happen is anyone’s guess but in Wally Pfister’s directorial debut Transcendence it happens when the consciousness of a scientist is implanted into a machine. From the trailer released this evening by Warner Bros. even with the best…
It always seems like there is always another species trying to take over the world. It’s usually some alien race from some distant galaxy but in Twentieth Century Fox’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes it is home-grown apes. The genetically modified ones we saw get created in “Rise of the Planet of the…
When my children were young, we went to the killer whale (orca) shows at the Vancouver Aquarium. It was fun to see the 8,000+ pound whales doing tricks for the trainer while the audience was being splashed. We gave little thought, however, to how the whales felt about it. Today, millions who attend SeaWorld shows…
