Editor’s Note: The following review was originally written back in December by our guest contributing editor, Mark Walters of BigFanBoy.com and is topped off with some final thoughts from our own Grady May. As 2012 drew to a close, there were several films trickling out in the final months which studios hope will be fresh in everyone’s minds come Oscar voting time. One of the more talked-about contenders is director Kathryn Bigelow’s factually based Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt and eventual discovery of Osama Bin Laden. Bigelow already took home Oscar gold for her work on another military film, The Hurt Locker, and has re-teamed with screenwriter Mark Boal on…
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G-S-T Review…Promised Land
Subtlety, when making a strong point, is never easy. In Promised Land, the heavy-handed apparition rears its ugly hand at the end and wrecks most of what proceeded. Despite this, the film works as a tool to make you question things openly and refrain from becoming emotionally attached to the people making the arguments for or against. Matt Damon’s character Steve is a confusing character first and foremost because he is real. He’s a man we aren’t often used to. He will go off on verbal tangents after working up to something, but if he is faced with someone that has the upper hand in information or personality, he becomes flustered. At one point, Steve gets…
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G-S-T Review…The Impossible
There’s a line spoken to a young boy in the middle of Juan Antonio Bayona’s film The Impossible that brings a lot of gravity to the events he and his family are currently experiencing. It really captures the theme of the story and comes in a scene where one of Ewan McGregor’s sons talks to a woman as they discuss the stars in the nighttime sky. He’s fond of star gazing (as evidenced by the gift of a new telescope he received for Christmas at the beginning of the film) and in their conversation the woman tells him that some of the stars he’s looking at have been dead for a long…