It feels like we were reviewing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey only yesterday, and yet here we are, staring down the first full trailer for the next installment of Peter Jackson’s intentionally, gloriously obtuse adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Audiences and critics drew some pretty significant dividing lines in their reactions to An Unexpected Journey (opinion was split even on this very site), but I have a feeling that The Desolation of Smaug will be more universally pleasing; with the set-up out of the way, the film should just be nothing but pure adventure, and if nothing else, the trailer seems to confirm that suspicion. Check it out below: Dwarves in barrels, spider attacks, orcs and…
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G-S-T Review…The Prey
The Prey can be best described as puzzling. That’s not to say that the film is complex; it’s actually remarkably simple and woefully boilerplate, so much so that every so often as you watch it, you may feel as though you’ve watched it already. The real mystery here is how the film managed to avoid being released straight on home video despite being just at the level of DTV quality. If The Prey does one thing well, it’s meet the physical demands of its numerous action scenes handsomely- you won’t be completely bored even while you experience deja vu- but it doesn’t have an original or intelligent thought in its…
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G-S-T Review…What Maisie Knew
How does a child endure the trauma of a volatile custody battle? What Maisie Knew, loosely based on Henry James’ 1897 novel of the same name, answers that question by putting central emphasis on the titular character, a precocious young girl caught between her two warring parents in the final days of their poisonous marriage. Sometimes, Maisie (Onata Aprile), is nothing more than a bargaining chip alternately used by her father, art dealer Beale (Steve Coogan, affecting his finely-tuned persona of self-absorption), and her mother, has-been rocker Susanna (Julianne Moore), in their legal and social skirmishes; at others, she’s a silent witness to the selfishness of grown-ups and, to a…
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G-S-T Trailer Roundup: Alien Conformity, Hot Guidos, & Psychotic Hobbits
So many trailers, so little time. Truthfully, enough teasers and preview clips have dropped this week that I could fill out three different roundups and still have some leftovers; sometimes, studios just want to inundate the web with their collective chunks of promo footage. Marketing’s gotta market, after all. The good news is that there’s so much to choose from that sheer variety alone makes the effort of gathering and watching each spot worthwhile (and if there’s one thing we appreciate here at Go, See, Talk!, it’s variety). Comic book flicks, retro sci-fi throwbacks, gruesome horror remakes; even a concert movie made the cut here, and that’s saying something, since…
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G-S-T Review…Stories We Tell
Seven years after Sara Polley’s directorial debut, Away From Her, and only two in the wake of her follow-up, 2011’s Take This Waltz, the actress-filmmaker’s latest offering feels like something of a capstone at this juncture of her career. Limited as her body of work may be, Stories We Tell explains, or rather clarifies, her efforts as a narrator; it’s the film that elucidates her pursuits as an artist and even allows us to view them anew through a fresh lens. If her forays behind the camera raised any questions about the thematic drives and interests of her cinema, then Stories We Tell, both gracefully and bravely introspective at the…
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G-S-T Review…Star Trek Into Darkness
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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Sweet Trailer…'Berberian Sound Studio'
How do you make a movie about sound engineering creepy? Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck have each succeeded in making aural surveillance and the act of listening suspenseful and exciting, and Peter Strickland looks to be following in their footsteps with Berberian Sound Studio, his second feature film. Regrettably, I missed the screening held at IFFBoston this year, but IFC has me- and everyone else- covered, as they’re going to release the Toby Jones horror vehicle next month. In the meantime, they’ve offered a trailer (the second one cut thus far) for our viewing consumption- have a look below. If Berberian Sound Studio spent…
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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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Sweet Trailer…'Ender's Game'
There’s a lot to like about the first trailer for Ender’s Game, Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s beloved, iconic, and utterly important science fiction novel; it’s big, it’s grand, and it looks to appropriately capture the gravity of the narrative’s scope. Maybe the most awe-inspiring note here isn’t in the footage itself, but from the story surrounding the project. It’s hard to believe that after years of being told that Card’s book- which focuses on gifted children being trained by the military to combat an alien menace- is unfilmable, audiences of both fans and the uninitiated alike are finally going to get to see his vision on the big…