Week of « Prev | Next »
11 articles
Calling "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone" a Comedy is the Real Illusion
1 hour ago
This year we've had two movies from major studios about magicians, Don Scardino's comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and Louis Leterrier's crime thriller Now You See Me. While both follow-through on the entertainment factor, both were largely disappointing once the credits rolled, with The Incredible Burt Wonderstone being the more forgetful in the long run. A number of factors account for that, but the most pertinent is that the jokes fail to materialize most of the time, leaving the impressive cast of Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, Olivia Wilde, Jim Carrey, and James Gandolfini holding a very unimpressive and empty metaphorical top hat. Instead of laughs doing the heavy lifting, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone's cast is asked to carry most of the film's weight.
Read more...
»
- Lex Walker
"Syria" Can Help You Stop Lying When You Say You Know What's Going On In Syria
4 hours ago
As Americans, it’s all too easy for us to write off the entire Middle East as an unsolvable problem. To be fair, it certainly isn’t solvable by us, and the region as a whole is unlikely to be littered with olive branches any time soon, but there’s a complexity, a depth, and a genuine desire for change that it behooves us to appreciate. Enter Syria Behind The Lines, a Frontline special on the international humanitarian crisis of the moment. You might not walk away from this documentary with any more hope on the topic, but you might be hard-pressed to say that you wouldn’t be part of the problem were you placed in those circumstances.
Read more...
»
- Anders Nelson
Adding Villains and Subbing Out the Cast Couldn't Save "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers"
4 hours ago
Between the second and third seasons of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers occurred an event that arguably set the Power Rangers saga down its road of costume and title changes every few years afterward: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie. The movie saw the Power Rangers' zords and morphing abilities disabled and required them to seek out new powers and costumes, which followed them into the third season of Power Rangers (only to be replaced again quickly after that). As if in response to the movie's increased stakes, the show's writers evidently felt compelled to "up" the stakes, which in their minds translated to adding third and fourth bungling villains who call the shots along with Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd, meanwhile everything else about the show's formula stayed almost exactly the same.
Read more...
»
- Lex Walker
Wolverine's Traumatic "Origin" Comes Alive
11 hours ago
Like it or not, Wolverine remains the most popular character to come out of Marvel's X-Men universe, and even rivals the likes of Spider-Man and Captain America as its most recognizable hero (or anti-hero in Logan's case). That's pretty impressive considering that compared to those two, and many of Marvel's heroes (including many of the classic X-Men), Wolverine's a relative newcomer and has earned that popularity fairly quickly, even being named the most popular comic book character of all time in extreme cases. For a long time, part of the allure of the character was his generally unknown past with unnamed traumas that left him an outsider and generally unpleasant person to be around. Few people realize that some of the defining moments of who Wolverine is, like the Weapon X project and all that came before (as showcased here in Wolverine Origin) weren't even established until the character had been around for 17-some years. »
- Lex Walker
"Slugterra" Battles Against a Weary Kids TV Premise
11 hours ago
Creating a unique, futuristic world out of nothing takes a respectable amount of imagination, and so at the very least the animated series Slugterra deserves some credit for realizing a universe of varied backdrops and colorful characters. It's premise might not be the most original, as it essentially defaults to the still popular trend of a random youth on a personal quest to capture a bunch of unique creatures (in this case living slugs with elemental properties that double as ammunition). This time the story tosses in a sinister bad guy who wants to do the same but to use the slugs for nefarious gains, and so each episode becomes a trial to catch a new kind of slug before the evil competitor (or his lackeys) can get their hands on it. The animation is smooth, but the voice acting falls on the obnoxious clichéd side and the writing doesn't help it save any face. »
- Lex Walker
Good Ideas and Quality Acting Elude "Escapee"
12 hours ago
Escapee is the story of a high-security inmate who busts out of prison to go after the young psychology student he's obsessed with. A pretty simple story, for sure, but a classic one.
I'm a fan of Dominic Purcell. I think the man is an intimidating presence while also being badass enough to play a grounded, tough hero. Similar to Joel Schumacher's Blood Creek which is a smart, exciting movie, wherein Purcell delivers, he delivers in Escapee just the same, more or less. Even though the script suffers from some horrific moments of exposition, it's not entirely terrible. However, the movie is fairly by-the-numbers, which might be a problem for some, and it's also a tad ridiculous. The notion that a group of college students would just be lined against the wall while a dangerous prisoner is transferred from one cell to another is completely ridiculous. Granted, I don't »
- Robert Ottone
Get Lost in the African Tale of the "Great Zebra Exodus"
19 hours ago
In the Makgadikgadi salt pans of Botswana are a nomadic breed of zebras. These zebras are family-driven in their focus on survival. And with a title like Great Zebra Exodus it may seem that they are fleeing their habitat in search of a new world, but their “exodus” from the salt pans is merely part of their yearly cycle to find sustenance.
These zebras leave the salt pans when the drought season sucks up all available water. In this documentary we follow the zebras to the Boteti river where they invade the habitat of fellow animals. But their residence on the banks of the river is merely temporary, until the rains return and the zebras instinctually know they can return home.
Read more...
»
- John Keith
"Workaholics" is Sometimes Too Lazy to be Funny
20 hours ago
Comedies that center around ridiculous and moronic characters have the potential to be hilarious in their send up of social mores that are actually quite idiotic when put under the microscope, but they also have the potential to be tiresome in their indulgence of stupidity for stupidity's sake. Workaholics walks like a drunkard along a line somewhere between the two, passing from one side to the other with reckless abandon. The third season has episodes that seem like they try way too hard to be outrageous and off the wall, while others play out like a brilliant reimagining of classic sitcom tropes. If the episodic plots were all winners, then the show could effectively make up for its other serious flaw: out of its three lead cast members (Adam DeVine, Anders Holm, Blake Anderson) one of them can't discern the difference between obnoxious and humorous.
Read more...
»
- Lex Walker
"The Last Exorcism Part II" Soils the Bed in a Way That Would Horrify Even Regan MacNeil
21 hours ago
I never saw the first The Last Exorcism by Daniel Stamm, however; the sequel opens with a recap of the first film's final moments, and the strangest thing is how the original film, a found-footage type horror flick, has a sequel in Director Ed Gass-Donnelly's The Last Exorcism Part II that is, essentially, a straight-up, somewhat by-the-numbers horror film. I'm no found-footage fanatic, though I do enjoy the better ones, with The Last Broadcast, Chronicle, the original Paranormal Activity being some of my favorites. Working in favor of this follow-up, Ashley Bell is a pretty solid actress, starring in the original flick, and now reprising her role as Nell. She starts off quite meek, however about thirty or so minutes into the film, she begins exuding a strength that the character needs to endure the craziness ahead. And there's plenty of it.
Read more...
»
- Robert Ottone
"Animals Down Under" Has a Disappointing Shortage of Animals
21 hours ago
At first glance I thought Nature's deceptively bulky Australia: Animals Down Under DVD set might be a sizable collection of documentaries focused on the wondrous creatures of the outback, but upon opening it up, I have to say I was immensely disappointed. Not only were there only four features in the unnecessarily large set, but I'd already seen and reviewed two of them. Even if you haven't, that revelation of unexpectedly limited content is something of a killjoy for the fascination the set should trigger. After all, Australia has some genuinely unique and iconic animals and with each of the four specials only covering one animal each, the set hardly feels like an in-depth look at some of Australia's most recognizable inhabitants: kangaroos, koalas, and...pelicans. In fact, the fourth feature is more of a sweeping, vague piece on the impact of the huge brushfires that afflicted Victoria in 2009. Consequently »
- Lex Walker
The First Season of the Canceled "Red Widow" Will Deservedly Remain Single
21 hours ago
In the mid-to-late seasons of 24, the writers encountered a conundrum: with all the crazy things they'd put Jack Bauer through in the course of the various season-long "worst days of his life", it became harder and harder to increase the scale or intensity of the horrific moments to make them still shock the audiences. At which point, the already "anyone could die at anytime" nature of the show took a turn for the absurd that occasionally succeeded in shocking (like the fifth season's opening), but most of the time just became a caricature of what a taut suspense series should be. ABC's Red Widow apparently opted to skip the five seasons of build-up to that point and established that in place of good writing, it would just try to be unpredictable for the sake of attracting eyeballs. More often than not, it doesn't work, and about halfway through the first »
- Lex Walker
11 articles
company.