A late-2010 picture delivered by the DreamWorks animation factory, Megamind can best be described as Pixar’s The Incredibles meets Despicable Me. See, Megamind is a clever dissection of superhero movie conventions which functions as a character study of the supervillain. In the realm of superhero movies, there is always one given: The hero always wins….
“Vintage Woody Allen” would be the most appropriate label for 2009’s Whatever Works, because that’s never been truer. Woody initially wrote this film back in 1977 as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, but the screenplay was set aside when Mostel inconsiderably died before the film could be made. However when Woody’s one-movie-a-year output was placed…
The premise for 2008’s Kung Fu Panda was conceptualized by a DreamWorks Animation executive, Michael Lachance, and has been around since the early ’90s. When it finally released, the production (directed by John Wayne Stevenson and Mark Osborne) slowly became a financial and critical success for the studio. In fact, the story of Po (voiced…
The wolfpack is back in Todd Phillips’ sequel to his 2009 smash-hit “The Hangover.” Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, and Ed Helms all reprise their iconic roles as Phil, Alan, and Stu. This time in The Hangover Part 2, however, the team assembles in Thailand for Stu’s wedding. But when he, already on poor terms with…
While there have been some great films of the alien invasion genre, many of the biggest have been the most lackluster — from the mediocre Independence Day to the horrid Battle: Los Angeles. Instead, the best invasion films that come to mind are usually those that depict isolated incidents in small towns or at remote…
20th century author and poet, Raymond Carver, is oftentimes recognized for his impact on short story writing. In the 1980s, when the medium first began to falter, short stories had become a tough sell for publications because of their briefness, however, that did not stop the author, who had admitted to being “inclined to brevity…
To begin this review, let’s get one thing straight: despite the misleading name, Titanic II is not an official sequel to James Cameron’s big-budget retelling of the Titanic disaster. Nevertheless, a film entitled Titanic II is sure to seem like a bad joke, even after watching the official trailer or spying the DVD cover at…
