‘Looper’ brings some originality to a tired genre
Looper is just another time-travel movie, but it’s inventive enough to hold the audience’s attention. It’s also thankfully generally lacking the major plot holes that sometimes plague like films, for example 2009′s Terminator Salvation. Looper is a decent movie with good performances throughout, but it loses steam as the movie progresses. And despite some novel twists on the time-travel genre, [...]
‘End of Watch’ combines a good premise with characters we care about
I’m surprised nobody came up with the premise of End of Watch before now. Amateur, or “found footage” has been a popular way to weave a Hollywood narrative ever since The Blair Witch Project over a decade ago, and with police cruisers outfitted with cameras nowadays it would seem somebody would have decided to film a cop buddy [...]
‘Arbitrage’ review: haven’t we seen this somewhere before?
As defined in Wikipedia: In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. When used by academics, an arbitrage is a transaction that involves [...]
Week four NFL preview
So it is week four and we know our long national nightmare is over as the real NFL officials will be welcomed back into the league this weekend. I expect them to be greeted warmly in every NFL stadium and then the crowd will brutally turn on them as soon as they make a call [...]
‘The Master’ packs a serious punch
The Master is painful to watch and incredibly disturbing, but it is a true masterpiece. It is ‘cinema’ – not a movie. Clocking in at 2 hours and 17 minutes, the story unfolds slowly and with plenty of time for each impactful scene to unfold in excruciating detail. Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams–each [...]
‘House at the End of the Street’ is laugh-out-loud bad
I’ll confess, I’ve never been a huge fan of the PG-13 “horror” movie since The Ring spawned countless numbers of them ten years ago. But even for this notoriously mediocre genre, House at the End of the Street seems laughably bad. Jennifer Lawrence is ridiculously hot in Hollywood these days. At just age 22 she [...]
Week three in review, and a rant
I have to break with my usual format for this column and start off with a rant about the scab officials. I was frustrated enough with this idiocy after Sunday but after the Monday Night debacle that I am calling the Seattle Screwjob this conversation just cannot be avoided. At this point if you took [...]
The NHL blows it–again
In an announcement last week barely drawing any notice, the NHL cancelled its entire slate of preseason games in September. The start of the regular season (October 11th) appears to be in jeopardy as well, as no formal talks have taken place over the last few days. The NHL, coming off of some of the best TV [...]
The State Department’s shameful security lapse
It’s not particularly surprising the media is not keen on getting to the truth of what happened September 11th in Libya where we lost Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. After all the Fourth Estate, which used to pride itself on being a bipartisan watchdog, realizes that even a slightly embarassing blight on President [...]
‘Dredd’ is a remake done right (if you’re a guy)
The problem with this year’s Total Recall is that it was a remake of a movie that didn’t need to be re-invented. 1995′s Judge Dredd on the other hand was a movie that cried out to be remade. Based on a popular British comic strip with a solid concept–futuristic law enforcement operating in a crime-ridden [...]