Director Shane Acker, heretofore unknown, aside from his short animated films, gets a chance to bask in the limelight this week as his best-known and award-winning animated short, 9, hits the big screen revved up and strung from top-to-bottom with big-name Hollywood voice talent. And you know what? It works. From start to finish, 9 is taught, simple, exciting, not to mention lavishly animated with elaborate texture and detail. Better yet, this is all wrapped nicely into an hour and …
Category: Reviews
Shane Acker, director of 9*, has a problem. While his student film and Oscar-nominated short of the same name is mysterious, unconventional and wondrously imaginative, it’s also very narrow-cast—an avante guard project appealing to Acker’s sensibilities and a niche handful of others who enjoy dark, fantastical settings and Hot Topic shopping sprees. The theatrical release exudes the same vibe: too dark and mature for kids, too bleak and somber for mass audience appeal and too short to build an audience …
There’s no better way to enjoy a movie than to go in with lowered expectations. No matter how quickly a movie starts licking the drain, it will always fare infinitely better than if approached with a soaring expectation. Of course, that’s a terrible way to experience movies, but it may be the reason I’m not ready to light the rhetorical flamethrower and burn the house of All About Steve– with all the principle players in it, to the ground. All …
Better late than never… Tarantino did it. With promises of splattery, wet violence he lured the cap askew, “F”-dude lunk into seeing a layered and character-centric foreign language film. I’m not sure what percentage that mob of lowest common denominators makes up by way of the roughly 4,250,000 people who saw Inglourious Basterds this last weekend, but if the crowd I saw it with was a sample, shaggy energy drink swilling douchebags were at least 60% of it. Which goes …
Validation can be a sweet thing. With Neill Blomkamps’ name forever attached to the defunct Peter Jackson/Fox/Universal Halo project, the director may have had a little more to prove with his big-screen directorial debut. Blomkamp’s previously deft incorporation of realism and fantasy as played out in a wide variety of commercials and shorts shouldn’t have left any doubt to his skill, or at least an idea that he was a director to be on the watch for. As he expands …
District 9, the first-ever feature film from director Neill Blomkamp, is stunning, powerful movie that is equal parts sci-fi, horror and drama, all wrapped into a chaotic modern-day allegory that, if consumed correctly by a savvy viewer, should not only entertain, but cause one to pause and consider how we treat our fellow human beings, especially the ones who look, talk and think differently than we do. It is without a doubt one of the best films of the year …
I’ve been to New York City twice in my 35 years, once for business and then again last November to run the 2008 ING New York City Marathon. Both trips to the city did nothing but foster my fondness and awe for The City that Never Sleeps. From running through Brooklyn and Queens on a crisp autumn morning with 50,000 other runners, to looking down from the Empire State Building at the sea of stars that is Manhattan, to eating …
Surely you’ve heard the buzz and outcry surrounding Paramount Picture’s decision to withhold G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra from the bulk of film critics this week, instead giving a few web mainstays like Devin Faraci of CHUD.com and Harry Knowles from Aint’tItCoolNews.com the chance to see the much maligned Stephen Sommers movie in advance. Frankly, I think it’s a great move by Paramount. They proved with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that a 20 percent fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com …