Thor: The Dark World (2013)
[3] Movies like this bring out the valley girl in me. So, like, I just don't give a shit about Thor, okay? Watching a bunch of thee-and-thou types running around in nightgowns and armor is just silly, you know? And…
Starship Troopers (1997)
[8]
Director Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Basic Instinct) continues his knack for combining violence, gore, dark humor and social commentary in this loose adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s serialized novel about humankind’s future war against a race of insect-like aliens. I can almost enjoy the movie for the action alone. It escalates beautifully, with plenty of exciting sequences and spectacular visual effects. But it’s the satirical edge that helps distinguish Starship Troopers. The whole movie is designed as a recruitment film for a fascist society. When our ‘heroes’ win in the end, the movie has its tongue firmly in cheek, dressing them as full-blown Nazis while Leni Riefenstahl-like propaganda leads us into the closing credits.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)
[2] The short review: WTF? The longer review: From the first opening frame, you know right away this is a cheap, watered down, bargain basement Superman movie. (Thank you, Golan-Globus Productions!) But even if you can overlook the astonishingly awful…
The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
[6]
Director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) takes on the web-slinging superhero in this hasty reboot of the franchise (just five years after Sam Raimi finished his trilogy). Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, Never Let Me Go) stars as Peter Parker, a high schooler who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and… you know the rest. The approach here is more realistic than Raimi’s, which provides Garfield (one of the finest actors of his generation) the opportunity to sink his teeth into a surprisingly angsty role. I can’t think of another time when a superhero role provided an actor more dramatic range. Emma Stone (Easy A, Zombieland) is given far less to do as Parker’s love interest, Gwen Stacy, but she makes the most of it. Martin Sheen and Sally Field bring gravitas in the roles of Parker’s Uncle Ben and Aunt May, while Denis Leary plays the police chief who doesn’t appreciate Spider-Man’s vigilante antics. Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill) picks up the mantle of super-villain, playing Curt Connors, a sympathetic scientist who’s desire to rid the world of disease leads to risky, gene-splicing self-experimentation. He becomes Parker’s third-act adversary — a raging Lizard monster.
Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010)
[5]
This ultra-gitchy flick is probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and that’s normally cause for celebration. But if you’re not into playing video games (like me), the film’s rapid pacing and excessively kinetic style may just leave you plain bewildered. On the other hand, the narrative is so simple that without the quick rhythm and psychedelic interludes, the film wouldn’t be very interesting. Director Edgar Wright is consistently clever and inventive in his execution, and does a spectacular job keeping you interested throughout a plot line that could easily have been a snooze.
Pacific Rim (2013)
[8]
Pacific Rim is good, dumb summer fun. It’s beautiful, sexy, exciting, funny, and it kinda made me feel like a kid again. The premise involves Kaiju and Jägers… scratch that. Let’s call it like it is: this movie is about big fucking robots fighting big fucking monsters. The monsters come from another dimension, entering our world from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The robots, each manned by two psychically linked people (often blood relatives), are humanity’s last hope for survival. The concept sounds like the germ of another big, loud, stupid summer movie — you know, the kind Michael Bay makes. But director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) handily beats Bay at his own game with Pacific Rim, imbuing the film with more style and substance than any of Bay’s Transformers movies ever had.
The Lone Ranger (2013)
[5]
Armie Hammer (The Social Network) stars as the legendary masked man while Johnny Depp picks up the mantle of Tonto in this big-budget version of The Lone Ranger from director Gore Verbinski (The Ring) and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. It’s painfully obvious that the creative team is working very hard to rekindle the flame they ignited with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, complete with improbable action set-pieces that rise up out of nowhere and characterizations as broad as the old-fashioned melodramas the film is based on.
Man of Steel (2013)
[2]
I haven’t wanted to walk out of a movie I paid for in a long, long time, but I damn near walked out of this one. “Man of Steel” is ridiculously awful. At best (if I weren’t a Superman fan), it’d be “Transformers 4”, another busily boring, loud, emotionally bankrupt piece of nauseating, over-indulgent, digital miasma. But if you are a Superman fan, this film is downright offensive and insulting.
Iron Man 3 (2013)
[6]
I wasn’t a huge fan of the first two Iron Man movies. A little snarky Robert Downy Jr. goes a long way with me. I like him better when he’s part of an ensemble (like in The Avengers). So while it may be faint praise, I did enjoy this third film in the series most of all.
District 9 (2009)
[9]
Neill Blomkamp’s stellar directorial debut is an unpredictable blend of intelligence, emotion, and cinematic whoop-ass that defies convention and leaves you breathless. It begins like a documentary, outlining how a race of stranded aliens (the space kind) came to be ghettoized in South Africa. We follow a character named Wikus, a bumbling government agent who is tasked with herding the aliens to a new camp (the concentration kind) further away from Johannesburg. The aliens aren’t pretty, but you’ll be surprised how emotionally invested you’ll get in a couple of them — a father named Christopher, and his tiny young son, who are desperately trying to find a way back to their home world. When Wikus subjects himself to a dangerous alien chemical, he begins a Kafka-esque transformation into one of the aliens, or “prawns” as they are called derogatorily.