‘Doctor Who’ blogging: “A Christmas Carol”
Doctor Who has been doing amazing things with TV since 2005, but this may be the best example yet of how gonzo and how simultaneously emotionally satisfying TV can be these days.
fantasy
Gulliver’s Travels (review)
If you’ve been possessed of a burning desire to behold Jack Black’s belly flab in 3D, then I am delighted to announce that your moment has arrived. What’s that? You say it’s Black’s buttcrack you crave the sight of, rendered in three glorious dimensions? This, my friend, is your lucky day.
Tron: Legacy (review)
This totally superfluous and eminently forgettable sequel to the groundbreaking 1982 flick Tron will make a bloody fortune, not because it embodies any qualities deserving of such, but out of compelling nostalgia and, well, not much else.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale movie review
You simply need to see this to believe that anyone would conceive of such an outlandishly demented Christmas fantasy. In playing with the creepy roots of the story of Santa, Rare Exports finds the grim awfulness in the supposedly pleasant fantasy…
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (review)
More like Voyage of the Yawn Treader, actually. Little kids will surely find this collection of fantastical geegaws enthralling — look, a talking mouse! hey, a minotaur! — but as a grownup fan of the magical and the mysterious, I was almost totally bored by this third, and perhaps most tryingly pious, installment in C.S. Lewis’s fanciful spin on Christian mythology.
The Nutcracker in 3D (review)
You already know the score — duh da-duh-da-duh! duh da-duh-da-duh! — but in case you’ve forgotten, The Nutcracker in 3D will attempt to mainline it into your brain, fuel-injecting sugar-plum fairy juice into your festivus lobe at the drop of, um, a sugar plum. If you think that’s a horrendously mixed metaphor, it’s got nothing on this polar-express train wreck…
Tangled (review)
Between the title change and writing in a male character who appeared to be taking over the film, Disney didn’t seem at that interested in making a Rapunzel film that was actually about Rapunzel. But I should have trusted. Because if there’s one thing Disney has in spades — besides pink princesses — it is a capability to transform simple cartoons into cinematic magic.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (review)
I’m almost entirely sure that no one who has not read The Deathly Hallows will be able to grasp what’s going on. The film is damn nigh impenetrable without the background of the novel, and all the previous novels in the series. It was almost impenetrable to me, who has read all the books, at least on an emotional level.
Megamind (review)
I like superhero stories that play with the tropes… and if such a story can take us to new places within a genre that seems like it must be totally played out by now, even better still. It turns out that Megamind is, in fact, just that kind of movie.
Hereafter (review)
I sincerely cannot help but worry, with no snarkiness intended whatsoever, whether Clint Eastwood has gone senile. He is 80, after all. I hope this not the case, of course, and I certainly don’t wish it on the guy, but I can’t imagine what else explains this utterly baffling film.
