If you were making a movie based on a famous toy line and you had no choice but to cast Dolph Lundgren in the lead, you probably couldn’t do much better than Gary Goddard did with Masters of the Universe. The screenplay by David Odell (The Dark Crystal) transplants the action from He-Man’s homeworld to our own planet. I’m sure this was a cost-cutting measure more than anything else, but seeing these larger-than-life characters as fish out of water is probably one of the reasons this movie ends up cutting the mustard… barely.
Disney’s Frozen borrows ideas from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and follows closely in the footsteps of Tangled before it, but it’s also a bit more. For one thing, there’s an interesting sister dynamic at play here. One royal daughter, Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell), is the care-free sort, while the older daughter Elsa (Wicked‘s Idina Menzel) is born with a curse – the power to turn things into ice. After a childhood display of her magical powers nearly kills Anna, Elsa hides herself away for fear of hurting anyone. That’s all prelude. The story proper takes off when Anna inadvertently upsets Elsa on her coronation day. When the citizens of Arendelle discover their queen is a sorceress, they freak, she freaks, and a hard snow comes to fall. Elsa flees the kingdom and builds an ice castle for herself on the side of a mountain, leaving it up to little sister to later beg her for a return to warmer times.
Cate Blanchett stars as the real-life Irish journalist who paid the ultimate price for exposing the burgeoning drug problem in mid-90s Dublin. Outraged after discovering children playing in streets littered with used needles, Veronica Guerin decided to bring the epidemic into the national limelight, risking the life and safety of not only herself but her family as well. Blanchett, always reliable, does a great job portraying Guerin as a woman with a brave public face, even after a shot is fired into her home and a drug lord punches her repeatedly in the face for daring to step foot on his property (the film’s most brutal and disturbing scene).
For a movie that was no doubt jumping on the E.T. and Star Wars bandwagon, The Last Starfighter manages to carve a niche for itself. Teenager Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) wins the high score on a mysterious video game and is suddenly recruited by an alien to defend the universe from some cosmic bad asses. What counts here is charm. The Last Starfighter oozes with the stuff, and it’s not forced. I love the trailer court setting and the depiction of the tight-knit community that live there. Casting “The Music Man” himself, Robert Preston, as a charlatan recruitment officer named Centauri is a stroke of genius. You can’t help but love Preston, even when he’s peddling bullshit. Dan O’Herlihy also does a commendable job acting through heavy prosthetics as Grig, Alex’s lizard-like trainer and shipmate.
