film criticism by maryann johanson | handcrafted since 1997
An electrifying style lights up this geek adventure of the intersections between science, culture, and capitalism in the 19th-century battle to power our world. Cumberbatch and Shannon are brilliant.
The devastating cultural experience Spielberg’s masterpiece presented to us 25 years ago felt then like a piece of history. Today, from the bowels of 2018, it feels like a warning, a premonition, a harbinger.
A nightmare of nothingness, of empty, soulless wankery, that serves only to reassure male dorks that their pop-culture obsessions make them special, and will make cute girls like them.
There isn’t an authentic human motivation or emotion to be found here. The bar has been raised too high on comic-book movies for us to accept junk like this.
The world would look very different without Steve Jobs, and I hope the movie captures this.
In The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg invents Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, only to have all his friends and enemies sue him claiming he stole their ideas. This flick sprang from (among other films)…
In *Middle Men,* Luke Wilson invents porn on the Internet and then thinks it’s a bad idea, but no backsies, he’s stuck with the Russian mobsters who want his money and him dead… This flick sprang from (among other films)…
There’s a lot of typing in Antitrust, and when there isn’t typing there’s a lot of running up and down stairs. It’s very soothing, in an altered-mental-state kind of way, like banging your head rhythmically against a wall.
License to Shill Explosions. Babes. Gadgets. Exotic locales. Nasty bad guys with German accents. A lovely, tuxedo-clad good guy with an English accent. Tomorrow Never Dies (starring Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Pryce, Michelle Yeoh, and Teri Hatcher) is a Bond movie. Nuff said. What it does, it does well. But it’s cinematic junk food that you … more…
