Hoooo boy! It would seem the Transformers sequel, what seemed to be a surefire summer blockbuster, is now headed full steam ahead for ignominy and a Golden Raspberry award. As of this writing and today’s release, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” stands at 22% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.com. And the reviews are brutal. Here’s a sample of what some notable critics are saying about Michael Bay’s Autobots vs. Decepticons movie. A great grinding garbage disposal of a movie, “Transformers: Revenge …
Month: June 2009
Damn you Stephen Sommers. George Lucas has already sullied my childhood with the pooptastic “Star Wars” prequels, and now you come a long and fail miserably at bringing Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow, Duke, Cobra Commando and Destro to the big screen. How do I know this? Easy, because this second trailer you’ve assembled for “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” is just like the first – hollow, effects-laden, silly and ridiculous – and leaves me with zero desire or anticipation …
So the last few years haven’t been good for one Manoj (that’s “M.” for short) Night Shyamalan. The trouble all started with The Village, which was genuinely creepy but lost audiences with bait and switch marketing and yet another twist ending that deflated almost all of the preceding narrative. Lady in the Water, commendable for its intent, failed to connect with anyone but the actors, ego and monkey tree-things it cut paychecks for. The Happening… wince. So yeah, yeah, M. …
So, according to the Mayans, the poop is going to hit the fan for good on December 21, 2012 and everybody on Earth is going to get flushed down the giant doomsday toilet via some terrible catastrophe. What the Mayans didn’t predict is that director Roland Emmerich would get a second shot at a punch-the-earth-in-the-soft-parts movie after his “The Day After Tomorrow” was a critical and box office failure in 2004. No offense to Emmerich, but he hasn’t made anything …
I don’t think you can say Tim Burton is a bad director, but to call anything he does “visionary” any more is a big, fat overstatement. His stuff isn’t so much “visionary” as simply stamped “Tim Burton”– all the stripes and gaunt makeup and twisted architecture are variants on everything else he’s done to date and is expected. Of course, the whole conceit usually works, but I do have two nitpicks/requests: A) Give the hollow/red-tinged eyeball socket a rest and …
So everyone knows Inglorious Basterds is coming, but you may not know what it’s about beyond a bunch of hairy Americans putting Bowie Knife and baseball bat to Nazi noggin. Wonder no more. The new trailer reveals the alternate universe plot and has worked my heart over from brittle and jaded to warm and mushy.
I don’t think this trailer makes Zombieland look particularly great (the zom-com genre was played well and once with Shaun of the Dead and has grown a little sleepy since), but there’s no denying the joy found in Woody Harrelson’s impish and casual zombie annihilation skills and, as Andy and I just agreed, the poster is fantastic. Zombieland opens in October, which, thanks to a craptastically rain-soaked summer, doesn’t feel all that far away.
As we mentioned on The KVNU Movie Show a few weeks back, one of the best films to never hit a cineplex is HBO’s WW II D-Day to V-Day saga Band of Brothers– a 10-part series based on the late Steven Ambrose’s book of the same name. It’s companion piece, The Pacific (covering the Marines WW II Pacific theater and the fight against Japan), has been swirling in rumor and production ever since. Thankfully, production has wrapped up and we’re …
I’m usually loathe to hype anything TMZ puts out, but this item (a letter of concern from Michael Bay to Paramount Studio heads) was an interesting insight into the film-making process and the egos, concerns and collaboration that go into every production. Films are, after all, viewed by studios and distributors as a product being manufactured with the intent to make a profit, with “art” a secondary concern. At the beginning of May, the always passionate Michael Bay sent a …
I won’t lie. It’s hard for me to give “The Proposal,” the new romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, a bad review. In fact, it’s not even hard – it’s impossible. We’re not talking Oscars here, by any means, but I think thus far the movie is getting a raw deal from some cantankerous critics. As of this writing, the movie sits at 53% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.com, but I think anyone giving a bad review is a …