All the highlights of the news from yesterday with stories on Tribeca Film Festival announces 2015 competition lineup and Ruth Wilson not returning to Luther two-part event series.
All the highlights of the news from yesterday with stories on a familiar image from the set of Jurassic World and AT&T announces new cable package for $39/month.
In many respects, this is the X-Men film I’ve been waiting 14 years for. I’ve been an X-Men fan for nearly 25 years, read the comics in their 2nd or 3rd renaissance in the early 90s and watched the cartoon that was on at the same time. I will not, however, go on to document the many divergences from the Chris Clairmont original story because …
When a filmmaker’s stumbles—as inevitable as the seasons turning and spectacle-filled summers—he (it’s usually a he) will often return to the genre or franchise where he saw his greatest commercial and critical success. For Bryan Singer, two expensive and underwhelming…
I grew up enamored by the world of X-Men. While the comic die-hards will most likely fault me for this, the X-Men of my youth were not found on the page, but rather on the small screen. I tuned into FOX weekly for the latest installment of X-Men: The Animated Series. I lived in a world filled with purple Sentinels and muted violence …
The X-Men send Wolverine to the past to change a major historical event that could…
Look no further than Superman Returns, Bryan Singer’s (Valkyrie, Apt Pupil, The Usual Suspects) failed attempt to revive Warner Bros. moribund franchise, for a perfect example of how not to reboot a comic book superhero. Tediously reverential and dully respectful of director Richard Donner’s decades-old, over-celebrated contribution to the Superman mythos, Superman Returns was nothing more—or less—than over-long, over-indulgent fan service, albeit fan service with a $200+ million-dollar budget and the full support of Warner Bros. studio executives eager to re-launch one of their most important properties. They, like everyone else who stepped into a movie theater seven years ago, gave Singer—a hot director at the time thanks to X-Men and X-2: X-Men United—the benefit of the doubt. Sadly, Singer squandered all that good will and the result left moviegoers and critics alike frustrated that one of their all-time favorite superheroes had been, once again, ill served.
Alright, can we stop with all these fairy tale movies now? Snow White and the Huntsman was almost completely intolerable, and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters was a straight-to-DVD mess curiously allowed a theatrical release. Straight off the heels of these two great masterpieces comes Jack the Giant Slayer, a movie so uninspired and dull it makes Witch Hunters look like an unadulterated masterpiece.
It doesn’t sound kosher to smack a fantasy film for being unrealistic. I fully understand that Jack the Giant Slayer is a fantasy epic – one based on a child’s fairy tale, to boot. But watching the finished product, with its transparently fake landscapes and B-level effects and harsh green screen over-lighting, has the effect of watching a well-meaning but horribly produced high school play. Respected actors walk around playing dress-up and swinging daggers at discomforting fake stone creatures while surrounded by a giant beanstalk that looks like a slightly more sophisticated replica of a Sid and Marty Krofft practical effect. By the end, I was disappointed that H.R. Pufnstuf didn’t show up.
A modern day fairy tale in which the long-standing peace between men and giants is…