film criticism by maryann johanson | handcrafted since 1997
The most fun straight-up action movie in ages: while it touches on concerns about terrorism and rogue nukes, there’s nothing too heavy. But what makes it so special is how up-close and personal it is.
If anyone had asked you, a decade ago, to predict who would be the biggest star of 2010, you might have said Jim Carrey. Or Tom Hanks. Or Tom Cruise. They headlined the biggest movies of 2000, after all (respectively, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas — yes, that was the biggest movie of … more…
Can it be a coincidence that both of the big new flicks this Memorial Day weekend — the kickoff for Hollywood’s first summer movie season of the twenty-first century — are basically Hong Kong action movies? The people who think about these kinds of things — current-events journalists, mainly — have already predicted that if the 1900s were the American century, the 2000s may well be the Asian century… but they were speaking economically and politically. I guess it’s probably inevitable that Asia would start to hold some cultural sway in the West, too.
