I, like Jonathan Liebesman’s Wrath of the Titans, am wracked with indecision. On the one hand I want to go to bat for the film on the virtues of its better elements– excellent eye candy, including, but not limited to, some eye-popping creature design– but Wrath’s tonal incongruity holds me back. There’s a place in the Hollywood ecosphere for fantastical sword and sandal films boasting either serious or silly makes, but Wrath can’t decide which of the two models it wants to follow and ends up existing as an unsatisfying halfway point between them; it’s silly, but not silly enough. It’s epic, but it’s not epic enough. If the film needs anything, it’s direction,…
-
-
G-S-T Review…Mirror Mirror
Forget the story you know, or think you know. Tarsem Singh (The Fall, Immortals) takes the famous Brothers Grimm fairy tale and looks at it through his insanely stylized goggles. Add to it an Oscar-winner, a dash or two of campiness, some wonderful set designs and the result is something that even the happiest fairy tales couldn’t come close to. While the trailers looked to contain off-putting levels of saccharine laced kid friendly material, there’s actually a lot of fun that won’t necessarily cause parents’ eyes to continuously roll. Simply put you don’t have to go in with low expectations to have a good time. Snow White is the fairest maiden in…
-
G-S-T Review…The Hunger Games
Film fans have seen various visions of dystopia and its many hypothesized forms for decades. From Brazil to Equilibrium, from Logan’s Run to The Running Man, there’s no shortage of dismal looking futures. Yet as bleak as those titles paint their depicted worlds, The Hunger Games lets us know that hope and heart are still part of the human condition. But very much like our own society the aftermath still yields the ‘haves‘ and ‘have nots‘. In The Hunger Games the socioeconomic divides between The Capitol and The Districts are likened to the serf system of the medieval times. Yet the class split is much closer to home than some may realize. The next…
-
G-S-T Review…21 Jump Street
Phil Lord’s and Chris Miller’s 21 Jump Street shouldn’t be as brilliant as it is. In fact, on paper, it’s a film that seems ripe for evisceration at the hands of critics and cineastes for whom kvetching about Hollywood’s modern culture of property recycling has become as much a pastime as actually watching movies. Maybe 21 Jump Street is an easy target; its premise is so hopelessly cheesy that it could only be a product of the late 80s, while Jonah Hill’s comedic stock has been wavering since 2010’s Get Him to the Greek. Tack Channing Tatum on and you have a project that reads like a fake film-within-a-film from Entourage. Who gave a…
-
G-S-T Review…Casa de mi Padre
In his latest comedic venture, Will Ferrell plays the lead in a feature-length Spanish language telenovela…yes, you read that right. Casa De Mi Padre is the pitch perfect alchemy of Austin Powers level self-awareness and the gritty, over the top, filmed on a shoe-string budget films that inspired the Rodriguez/Tarantino Grindhouse revival. Casa de mi Padre is most definitely a film for movie lovers and a mixed bag of cheesy elements ripe with heavy doses of satire that pay homage to films of that era. Beyond that, Casa skillfully shoe-horns humor into every literally frame. From sight gags to awkward humor to pure WTF? sequences it impossible to catch all the loose-n-fast humor and in-jokes on…
-
G-S-T Review…John Carter
Today’s science fiction has a debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs. The man created what is widely considered one of the first alien worlds that leaved and breathed outside of our own realm. He gave them their own language, religion, culture, and feuds. And he did all of this with the first appearance of John Carter in 1912. Before Star Wars, before Avatar, before Star Trek, there was the Barsoom (what we call Mars) adventures and it was pulpy, light, fantastic fare. They inspired hundreds, if not thousands, of writers to dream big. Now, 100 years later, a big budget film version finally exists and I think it’s a worthy showcase…
-
G-S-T Review…Being Flynn
A story about family and coping with the unavoidable bonds between us, Being Flynn is, in short, about accepting who you are so you can try to fix your own problems. Adapted from Nick Flynn’s memoir “Another Bulls**t Night in Suck City” the film is about Nick and his father going a very long way to come to terms with one another. You can try to run from your family but you can’t run from DNA and being family means they butt heads…a lot. That tends to happen with movie families but these are real people with real problems. It can be morbidly funny and Nick’s writing/personal experiences yield a more bitter than…
-
G-S-T Review…Silent House
I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to peg Silent House as the latest horror film to engage in gimmickry through its apparent adoption of the found footage conceit, and they’ll be completely incorrect to do so. In the first place, it’s not a found footage film whatsoever. Marketing for the picture seems geared toward presenting it as another entry in that engorged horror sub-genre, and maybe the very presence of Chris Kentis and Laura Lau– the duo behind 2003’s effectively nerve-wracking Open Water— hints at a shared ancestry with the likes of Paranormal Activity. But Silent House is closer to movies like The Strangers, and certain contemporary French gore fests, and while…
-
G-S-T Review…The Lorax
You would expect a film called The Lorax to feature a healthy amount of the eponymous creature. The lack thereof in the latest animated feature to take on the whimsical world of Dr. Seuss ended up as my biggest complaint. Having no recollection of ever reading The Lorax, I’m not sure if the fault lies mainly with the source material or the filmmakers but creative liberties are a given considering the book is a mere 45 pages and mostly filled with pictures and small blurbs of text. Yet within this 94 minute romp is a gorgeous setting with a quality voice cast but an ultimately disappointing story. The main quibble…
-
G-S-T Review…Act of Valor
Before Act of Valor begins we are shown a short intro narrated by the directors (Mike McCoy, Scott Waugh) explaining why they chose to cast real active duty Navy SEALs. These elite soldiers have hard-learned skills, mannerisms, muscle memory and a language that can’t be handed over to an actor to exhibit with the same conviction. Like watching Michael Jordan dunking or Muhammad Ali in the ring the SEALs are the very best at what they do. Watching them in the movie it’s clear that McCoy/Waugh made the right choice. Act of Valor follows a team of soldiers sent who carry out a covert mission to recover a kidnapped woman. The person in question is…