There are two layers to Star Trek Into Darkness. One exists at the surface level and involves everything that we see, hear, and experience while watching it in a theater, and the other involves the efforts that occurred below the line, prior to the film’s arrival at the multiplex. Just like its 2009 predecessor, the former layer proves to be the sequel’s saving grace and the latter holds it back from being truly great; the marriage between star-making, charismatic, invested performances and ham-handed, hackish screenwriting ultimately yields the same results J.J. Abrams got with his last venture into Gene Roddenberry’s beloved sci-fi iconography, a movie that works in the moment as blockbusting…
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G-S-T Review…The Great Gatsby
High school students of today can breathe a sigh of relief: rather than bother reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic literary portrait of the Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby, they can simply head to the multiplex to have all of its themes and meanings pounded into their skulls for two hours courtesy of Baz Luhrmann. On the surface, which happens to be the only layer his adaptation concerns itself with, Luhrmann has taken everything about Fitzgerald’s novel and distilled it down to its most fundamental truths, and transposed those truths onto film in the most recklessly over-the-top ways possible. Here, disdain for excess is conveyed with the utmost of excesses and…
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G-S-T Review…Aftershock
Good news for Americans traveling abroad: you no longer have anything to fear from suspicious, secretly vicious locals. Now you just have to watch out for cataclysmic natural disasters and falling debris, which conveniently bring out the bloodthirsty maniac and paranoid xenophobe in everybody. Basically, if traveling to another country seemed dangerous before, it’s even moreso now, but that’s only because Aftershock has no idea what kind of movie it wants to be, or even how to be it. Is it about Americans being menaced in a foreign land, or is it about how much mankind lives at the whim of shifting tectonic plates? Either way, it’s not particularly good, so it…
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G-S-T Review…Iron Man 3
While we film fans, die hard comic aficionados and non, can thank Jon Favreau (and Robert Downey Jr.) for bringing Iron Man to life in an entirely fulfilling and believable way. That said, there were more than a few problems with its formulaic sequel. So, sometimes, it’s necessary to bring some fresh legs into the game to help the series go out with a win. For those of you not sure who Shane Black is, check out Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Monster Squad, The Last Boy Scout and of course Lethal Weapon…we’ll wait. There’s a common set of themes running though all his movies and without sounding like it’s…
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G-S-T Review…Drafthouse Films’ Graceland
Writer/director Ron Morales gives us a new spin on a familiar kidnapping yarn but tells a story that’s so believable and grounded you’d think it was a documentary. A superbly paced and intense flick, this is the kind of film we don’t get to see every day but would wish there were more of. In a world where we have films like Ransom and Taken, people walking out of Gracelandmight likely comment that Morales’ film is taken, er, taking its sweet time because this is a slow film. Yet that’s the point, it’s not about wiretaps, SWAT teams, a Tony Scott style of camera work, or an adrenaline-fueled rescue. Not at all. The focus of Morales’ film…
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G-S-T Review…Pain & Gain
What does Michael Bay unhinged look like on celluloid? That’s not a question most of us really need answered; eighteen years spent making glossy, lunkheaded action films, blockbusters based on toy lines, and useless horror remakes speak volumes on the subject of Bay’s auteurdom. But maybe the Transformers mastermind has been done an injustice. Maybe, beneath the frat boy wit and visual chaos of his cinema, Bay has kept his one Big Idea squirreled away for safekeeping, waiting for the right opportunity to unleash his unspoiled artistic vision on his audiences. Or maybe Pain & Gain is just an erroneous high water mark in bad taste filmmaking. Whatever the case may be,…
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G-S-T Review…The Angel's Share
Lest anyone form an early reaction to The Angel’s Share that unfairly paints the film as a riff on Alexander Payne’s Sideways, there are two characteristics present in the former that distinguish it from the latter: social drama and a heist caper. Put another way, Ken Loach’s twenty fifth picture (and also his latest production with screenwriter Paul Laverty) engages on a macro, political level instead of a micro, personal level while managing to disguise itself as frothy entertainment. For another comparison, let your mind wander back to 1997’s The Full Monty; that may offer a better idea of what The Angel’s Share has to offer in its mixture of legitimate…
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G-S-T Review…Oblivion
This year is rife with movies portraying the demise of Earth’s ecosystem and our departure from the planet. The news of NASA’s discovery of three inhabitable planets within one light year away will undoubtedly make these movies a lot more intriguing for some. The first movie in this year’s series of Earth’s demise films is Oblivion. We should probably expect a lot more movies with the same underlying theme in the not so distant future. With that being said, let’s talk about Oblivion. Is the movie as exciting as the trailer or does it come up short? Keeping reading to find out. The year is 2077 and Earth has been…
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G-S-T Review…'42'
If Jackie Robinson’s fate had seen him turn out an unsung hero, 42 might be more worthy of protest. Taken at face value, it’s strictly inoffensive; it’s the tale of how Jackie Robinson broke the glass ceiling in baseball, diluted into a series of uplifting bullet points before coming to an abrupt and all-too-convenient close (because nobody wants to end a feel-good movie with reality). There’s a blueprint to this sort of cinema, and Brian Helgeland follows it doggedly in his third- technically fourth, if you count Payback*- directorial outing, hitting beat after crowd-pleasing, expected beat. Maybe that’s not a crime worthy of filmmaker jail, but it’s certainly not a guaranteed path…
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G-S-T Review…To The Wonder
To the Wonder‘s very existence serves as a topic of conversation unto itself, never mind the wholly singular experience of watching Terrence Malick’s cinema. Since when does this man have the gumption needed to make and release two films in as many years? A cursory glance over his working history should prepare even a novice viewer to wait for at least twice that amount of time in between Malick projects, and yet here we are with 2011’s The Tree of Life barely in our collective rear view and To the Wonder looming right in front of us (and two more films, which Malick apparently shot back-to-back, lurking in the shadows for potential…
