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Movie Reviews, DVD Reviews, Television Reviews
George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
(Marco Chacon) 5/8/2008 11:40 AM EST All the cool kids are shooting video on their phones and using handcams these days so when Romero goes for a reboot of his moribund Dead franchise he picks up where Cloverfield left off: a bunch of students with digital cameras film the awakening of the dead as it directly impacts them.You can tell something about the ... |
Iron Man
(Marco Chacon) 5/3/2008 11:03 AM EST The Marvel Iron Man started in Vietnam where he was forced to construct his first version of the armor with the help of a Chinese genius. Later it was the Gulf War--and now Afghanistan. In the story Tony Stark, genius weapons-designer is captured and forced to build a super weapon for the bad guys. Instead, to escape, he builds a suit of armor and ... |
The Forbidden Kingdom
(Marco Chacon) 4/29/2008 11:43 AM EST You'd expect the first collaboration between Jet Li and Jackie Chan to be something special: together they're about as close as we come to a cultural icon on the scale of Bruce Lee. Indeed, filmed partially on location (the Gobi desert, not the temple of the heavens, alas) the film looks like a million bucks. Or, well, closer to 55-million--... |
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Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
(Nathan M Rose) 4/27/2008 10:25 PM EST It had been four years since filmgoers have seen Harold Lee (John Cho) and Kumar Patel (Kal Penn) grace the silver screen, but the crazy kids are at it again in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Their last adventure found them traveling across country to find a White Castle hamburger in order to satisfy a weed-induced case of "the... |
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One Missed Call
(Nathan M Rose) 4/17/2008 4:32 PM EST Japan has had a lot of imports over the years and the latest is in remakes of their often-startling horror movies. Japanese horror is visceral and disturbing to most westerners with its bleak sensibilities, spooky little girls, and often complete lack of what we've come to expect by way of rational explanation.It's also amazingly te... |
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The Ruins
(Marco Chacon) 4/10/2008 2:06 PM EST Horror has several elements that make it really sparkle. First, it has to scare you--this should be obvious but there are different kinds of "scared." There's the "Boo" effect when something jumps out at you--cheap slasher flicks go for that one. There's the creepy psychological horror of thinking about terrible or terrifying th... |
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Horton Hears a Who
(Marco Chacon) 3/24/2008 11:12 AM EST The live-action Dr. Seuss movies have not been kind to his legacy. I think that this isn't for lack of trying, I think it's because of the medium as much as anything. Dr. Seuss's locations aren't meant to be real: they exist in the imaginary landscape of our childhood minds. The fluid, flexible imaginary realms that Seuss's characters inhabit rende... |
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The Bank Job
(Marco Chacon) 3/21/2008 11:13 AM EST A year or so ago I watched a TV show about the daylight Los Angeles bank robbery where two psychopaths, carrying AK-47's with armor-piercing ammo in giant 50-round drums and clothed head-to-toe in custom body armor took on a bank and the entire LA police force. Incredibly, none of the police were killed (although, after walking through volleys of g... |
Vantage Point
(Marco Chacon) 3/19/2008 11:40 AM EST There are tricks you can use in film. You can show us re-winds, fast-forward, jump-cuts, and so on. You can use tricky camera angles to give us odd points of view on a situation. You can use framing to show us or not show us things the characters themselves can or cannot see. All of these tricks have an impact on the viewer. In the film The Rock th... |
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10,000 B.C.
(Marco Chacon) 3/19/2008 10:54 AM EST Roland Emmerich knows how to make a big film, I'll give him that. 10,000 clocks in at almost 1.3 million dollars per minute for its entire 109 minutes (this isn't absurd: Comparatively Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was 1.7). He gets his money's worth. On the screen, the stone age never looked so good.The story is simple: a tribe in the... |
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