Who wouldn’t want to travel to the wondrous and imaginative worlds we’ve seen grace the silver screen? Chief among the most magical candidates has to be the Land of Oz. In this prequel to the 1939 classic, Sam Raimi shows us how the “Wizard of Oz” became so Great and Powerful. Usually it’s with extreme hesitation that one would chose to add to the mythology of property as legendary as The Wizard of Oz. Others smartly leave well enough alone. After all, the sequel and TV spin offs have yielded results paling in comparison to Victor Fleming’s film. Since going back has been done before the only place to go is back to the beginning, right? How very contemporary. The film…
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G-S-T Review…Jack The Giant Slayer
There’s so much that’s so wrong with Jack the Giant Slayer that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Once upon a time, Bryan Singer actually made a pair of good movies in the 90s before churning out mediocre superhero movies and historical thrillers in the aughts. Somewhere in that timeline he also fell in with Peter Jackson, but you don’t need to pay attention to history to figure that one out; you just need to watch Jack the Giant Slayer, although I wouldn’t recommend it. Maybe the worst crime here, or at least the hardest to fathom, is that somebody in a boardroom actually thought that the concept of a fantasy reinterpretation…
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G-S-T Review…The Sweeney
Gritty cop yarns aren’t what they used to be, literally. Nearly forty years ago, the notion of depicting law enforcers as imperfect was almost unthinkable, but fast forward to now and that’s suddenly become the standard. That’s the expectation. Police procedural stories no longer demand that their central characters be squeaky clean and pure to a fault; today, we want our television and movie cops to have pathos, to be flawed, and sometimes– maybe oftentimes– do whatever they have to in their pursuit of a crook. Maybe that’s a reflection of modern society, or maybe audiences just grew bored with archetypal goody two-shoes hero cops. Either way, ours is a…
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G-S-T Review…Snitch
The nicest thing that can be said about Snitch, the film that commences Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s movie year, is that it’s no The Tooth Fairy. If we search for a silver lining, too, we can also rationalize that it can only be uphill from here. (And then we can cross our fingers.) Several years ago I might have opined that nobody really knew how best to utilize Johnson’s myriad talents, from his sense of humor to his obvious physicality, but even then I would have been lying; if you need to see the People’s Champion at his best, just watch The Other Guys or The Rundown and marvel at…
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G-S-T Review…A Good Day To Die Hard
Confidence in critiquing a film is often fleeting. You feel inspired to write about certain points, but are unclear of the intangible things that make a film ultimately enjoyable or flat. That’s part of the process of reviewing and being able to adequately touch on those aspects. A Good Day to Die Hard makes it easy to pick apart. The villains are flat and ultimately unworthy. The highlight of the film, a car chase showcasing an enormous military vehicle and various others through crowded Russian streets, utilizes seemingly endless camera angles to thoroughly confuse you before settling into a zany rhythm five minutes later. We are provided action sequence after action sequence, as both star Bruce Willis…
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G-S-T Review…Beautiful Creatures
If Warm Bodies is a sly mockery of everything Stephanie Meyer started when she wrote Twilight and assisted in its transition from novel to screen, then what can we make of Beautiful Creatures? The lesson here, I think, is that not every post-Twilight YA movie will improve on the formula; in point of fact, some of them will wallow in it. Beautiful Creatures, lacking all of the heart and wit Levine brought to his own spin on the young adult blueprint, blithely tumbles into the latter category; it’s almost impossible to enjoy even on a trashy, so-bad-it’s-good level, though bless Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson for trying to bring the film to that sort of plateau.…
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G-S-T Review…Side Effects
Medication and depression these days go hand-in-hand. However, it wasn’t always this way. If you were unhappy, you often put on a brave face and dealt with it. If you were over a certain age, you couldn’t sit and pout. Nowadays, medication has taken away the fear, anxiety, and depression from everyday life for a lot of people. Are we better off with being in a medically-induced euphoria? At one point a character in Stephen Soderbergh’s latest—and possible last—film, Side Effects, tells their patient that these drugs simply allow us to be our real selves. That’s a tricky idea to grapple with. What is our true selves? The one aided by a pill to be more…
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G-S-T Review…Identity Thief
Despite a decent trailer that manages to deliver a few laughs, Identity Thief in its entirety fails to live up to it’s potential. Finding comic relief in stories about stolen identities is far from an original concept, one that’s managed to work fabulously well in films like the Coen Brothers’ 90’s classic, The Big Lebowski, but left in the hands of Director Seth Gordon, whose other comedic ventures include comedies Horrible Bosses and Four Christmases, the familiar comedy of errors scenario is nothing but a chaotic mess. The film opens with accountant Sandy Patterson, played by Jason Bateman, who is duped by Melissa McCarthy’s Diana – con woman and said…
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G-S-T Review…A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
There’s no good way to approach A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (henceforth referred to as Charles Swan for brevity’s sake). In large part, that’s a byproduct of the film being a complete disaster, but an alluring, charming sort of disaster, and this is where Charles Swan becomes a complicated beast. I’m not sure what else could reasonably be expected about a Roman Coppola film starring Charlie Sheen that’s so firmly about Charlie Sheen; at best that’s a recipe for rampant weirdness, and at worst for catastrophic cinematic failure. Somehow Coppola’s aim lands Charles Swan squarely in between, and what we’re left with is a bizarre Sheen…
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G-S-T Review…Bullet to the Head
As you may or may not already know, January is the dumping ground for mediocre movies. We have summer blockbusters, then we have holiday movies in the Nov/Dec timeframe. When January hits, if you have already seen all of the Oscar nominated movies, then all you have left are the January movies. Well, Bullet to the Head is technically being released the first day of February so it is on the cusp of the dumping grounds. With it being so close to January, which side of the fence will it fall (failure/success)? Keep reading to find out. James Bonomo (aka Jimmy Bobo) is a hired gun living in New Orleans…