Rango is the very first animated film from the magicians at Industrial Light & Magic who’ve raised the technology bar in Hollywood so many times over the years that they’ve made it seem commonplace to do so. This first effort has first effort written all over it. The look is typical ILM. In other words […]
Disney‘s 50th animated movie, as the pre-show credits point out, is their latest film Tangled. This is essentially a Disneyfied re-imagining of the Rapunzel fairy tale most popularized by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Disney has a long tradition of taking the basic elements of these stories and recreating them as more interesting family fare as most […]
While traveling for business I managed to catch the new animated sensation, Despicable Me. I saw it last week and just never got around to writing it up which, pretty much, foretells how that’s going to go. Despicable Me is another in a growing list of major animated films in 2010. This one focuses on an aging […]
During the first 15 minutes or so of Inception I was completely lost. The film bounced around like a super-ball in a metal box. Finally, as it starts to unfold you begin to figure out what’s going on. The bottom line is that the story involves a leap of faith that I simply didn’t buy […]
Toy Story 3 does a superb job of tugging at your heart more than once.
This week I was a bit nonplussed to see Robin Hood. The reviews were lukewarm and it just all seemed to be getting very little buzz. Thankfully the movie deserves a better fate than that. The first thing to know is that the previews are entirely misleading. If you’re expecting a re-telling of the classic 1938 Errol […]
Last week I caught Iron Man 2 and it was so good that I couldn’t find the words to describe my feelings. Actually, it was just so boring that I couldn’t bring myself to bother. I loved the first Iron Man. I liked it so much that I had a hard time keeping it out […]
A young viking befriends an injured dragon to the dismay of most of his village in How to Train Your Dragon. Animated films are often a challenge for many adults — especially those without children. Some are clearly meant for a younger audience, while others offer a much wider appeal. When I saw the previews for this […]
This past week I got around to seeing Tim Burton‘s incarnation of Alice in Wonderland. As a child I’d read the stories and found them a bit lacking. Maybe it was the female heroine. Maybe it was the goofy characters but I mainly felt they just weren’t very interesting stories. More to the point I […]
As the blizzard of 2010 approached us I decided to go check out the new movie Frozen. It’s a lower-budget independent film that reminded me at once of Open Water—a no-frills movie shot almost entirely in a single oddly claustrophobic set with people you’ve never seen before. Let me say that I’ve enjoyed similar films […]
This past week I caught my first official film of the 2010 season and it was quite memorable. The film, A Town Called Panic, is quite a strangle experience but well worth the risk. I’ve come to realize that there’s no way to adequately explain the film as it all sounds absolutely ludicrous on the […]
I have to be honest and say that everything I saw about Avatar before it came out made me think it’d be a complete letdown if not a total disaster. The only hope I had was that it was being handled by James Cameron. Cameron has been through such concerns before. People may not recall, […]