Unlike many, I didn’t find myself falling head over heels for X-Men: First Class; it’s decent, but I can’t praise a movie wholesale for being a few rungs higher on the ladder than X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Taking my sustained indifference toward the series into account, I may be utterly the wrong person to report on any news coming from the set of the latest picture in the X-franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past. Except that Bryan Singer has piqued my interest in the project courtesy of his Twitter-originating casting announcement this past Saturday. It’s already been revealed that the film will see Ian McKellen and…
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On Second Thought, Bill's Take: G-S-T Review…The Hobbit
Bagginsis? What is… Bagginsis? Is it chewy? Is it crunchy? There’s a sense of familiarity throughout The Hobbit that never quite plays in its favor. Whether it is the musical cues we are so familiar with after his first three Lord of the Rings films, the insertion of characters that never appeared in the source material to help us remember the other films, or the painfully similar arc The Fellowship of the Ring has to The Hobbit, director Peter Jackson is giving us exactly what we expect. Which is precisely why I’m so disappointed with his latest journey into Middle Earth. While it never rings of phoning it in because of the production values and the…
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G-S-T Review…The Hobbit
Nine years, eleven Academy Awards, and two massive cinematic disappointments. Since wowing the world in 2001 with The Fellowship of the Ring, the first entry in his adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy series The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson has amassed an impressive tally of goodwill and squandered the lion’s share; as a consequence, his return to Middle Earth, a similar treatment of Rings precursor The Hobbit, has been speculated over with alternating degrees of trepidation, iconoclasm, anticipation, and blatant excitement. Given Jackson’s previous artistic and commercial success playing in this particular fantasy sandbox, as well as his subsequent failures (2005’s King Kong, 2009’s The Lovely Bones), it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where…
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“The CineMagic 8-Ball” – In Theaters 12/14/12
When so many movies are released each weekend and trailers often seem better than the movie itself, what should one do? In this precarious situation, we consult the The CineMagic 8-Ball (TM) to help us see through the nebulous marketing haze. Doing so just might save us all a disheartening trip to the cinema and spare us unnecessarily springing for $7 popcorn. See what the 8-Ball says about this week’s releases… ——————————————————————————————————————————————- ANY DAY NOW In the late 1970s, when Marco, a teenager with Down syndrome who has been abandoned by his mother, is taken in by committed couple Rudy and Paul, he finds in them the family he’s never…
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Bryan Singer Reveals Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart Will Return For 'Days of Future Past'
Bryan Singer thrilled the film (and comic) world when it was announced that he would step up for the next X-Men film after Matthew Vaughn bowed out. All things considered, X-Men: First Class was an amazing success and Vaugn would have probably done just a good a job with his second at bat. But that was then and now that Singer is back he’s going to try on even bigger pants than he started with more than a decade ago. As the premise for the latest X-Men film is quite a departure from the grounded narrative with social commentary that Singer started the series with, the themes are still familiar and relevant.…