film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
The plastic terror of The Polar Express melded with the kooky charm of Forrest Gump is a bad, sometimes outright icky, way to tell a tale of trauma and recovery, and does a disservice to Steve Carell’s sensitive performance.
A lovely movie that warmly embraces a wide(ish) range of girls-and-women-as-people, one that doesn’t reduce its large heroine — the amazing Danielle Macdonald — to nothing more than her size. This should not feel so damn radical, but it is.
A flimsy treasure-hunt plot, a sexy song-and-dance number, and more of the same Elton John songs deployed with trite, lazy tedium. They mean to keep cranking out these dumb, dull movies, don’t they?
Sure, Ice Queen is the villain here. She’s the one who’s in the wrong for doin’ ALL THE THINGS she was supposed to do, and her promised man-prize was stolen.
[This post is not behind the paywall.]
[This post is not behind the paywall.]
[This post is not behind the paywall.]
The magazine that long ago decided that ogling women in skimpy swimsuits counts as a sport has found a new way to reduce women to objects.
Silly me. I always thought of SF as a genre that encourages freethinking and lets the imagination roam beyond the mainstream.
Alien on the Red October… though actually, this episode reminded me most of the Peter Davison-era Doctor Who story “Warriors of the Deep.”
