‘Caprica’ blogging: “Rebirth”
Lots of spoilers! assumes you’ve seen the episode!
epic
‘Caprica’ blogging: ‘Pilot’
(lots of spoilers! assumes you’ve seen the episode!) So, the Cylons are basically spoiled teenaged girls. Actually, that kinda makes sense. I’m sorta stunned to see that Caprica’s opening gambit is what I assumed would be the finale it would build to over the course of the series. I mean, we knew that the show … more…
2012 (review)
It’s kind of awesome, the film’s self-involvement. This isn’t really a movie: it’s more director/FX-mad wannabe supervillain Roland Emmerich calling out every other disaster film that has ever come before… including his own. Aliens blowing up the Empire State Builder? What piker came up with that?
Australia (review)
If director Baz Luhrmann had decided to shoot in black-and-white, you’d hardly be able to tell this wasn’t made around 1939 or so. Sure, all those gorgeous helicopter shots of the wild and dangerous and beautiful Outback would be a dead giveaway, so they’d have to go. But otherwise…
There Will Be Blood movie review: Citizen Plainview
There Will Be Blood slaps you in the face. It’s Joe Pesci in Goodfellas raging, “Do I amuse you? Do I entertain you?” in that way that suggests that it could not give two figs what you think of it.
300 (review)
The first person who uses any aspect of this flick to justify the American debacle in Iraq is getting a swat across the nose with a copy of *My Pet Goat.* Which King Leonides of Sparta does not sit reading while his country is threatened and attacked.
Happy Feet (review)
Fluffy baby penguins dancing and singing and waddling around their world with wide-eyed wonder? You have to have a heart of stone not to be a puddle of goo after coming in contact with that.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (review)
The words I keep coming back to, the ones that seem to fit this most astonishing of films best, are ‘terrible’ and ‘awful.’ The old-fashioned senses of the words are what I’m talking about: Peter Jackson has given us a grandly eloquent film that inspires more terror and more awe than anything I’ve seen in a long time. I can compare my reaction to it only with the moviegoing experiences of my childhood, when the hugeness, the all-encompassing-ness of movies in all ways — emotionally, viscerally, visually, aurally — first astounded me, when ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ and Darth Vader’s stormtroopers horrified me to such a degree that I can still feel it.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (review)
Other critics have already dragged out the $10 words to describe this film — some of the ones I’d chose myself are ‘seductive,’ ‘masterful,’ ‘majestic,’ and ‘elegant’ — and you must believe what they say because they say True Things. But the one thing that strikes me most about LOTR: FOTR, besides its seductively masterful and majestic elegance, is simply how utterly right it is.
Gladiator (again) (review)
I’ve seen Gladiator half a dozen times now — thrice on a big screen and thrice on DVD — and it gets me deeper in the gut every time: By the time Maximus whispers his final words, assuring Lucilla that “Lucius is safe,” I’m starting to sniffle. By the time Juba is reverently burying Maximus’s totems of his wife and son, I’m bawling.
