It would be relatively easy to wring sentiment from a story about a horse and the young man who raises him, and War Horse certainly exploits that relationship about as fully as one would expect. Yet the film is so much […]
Continue reading »Month: December 2011
We Bought a Zoo (2011) ✰ ✰ ✰
While most of us would never have the gumption, the wherewithal or the ability to try to bring a failed zoo back to life, it’s a neat dream, and it’s very cool that somebody actually did it, and now there’s […]
Continue reading »New Year’s Eve (2011) ✰ ✰ ½
This holiday star-fest is a cute little cupcake of a movie, light and frilly-looking, with just enough icing to leave a sweet taste (or be sickening, if one doesn’t care for so much Hollywood icing). This is the second of […]
Continue reading »The Help (2011) ✰ ✰ ½
Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, The Help chronicles the writing of a book meant to tell the stories of African-American domestics working in the homes of whites. Based on a popular novel, The Help follows three white […]
Continue reading »Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol ✰ ✰ ✰
Long-time Filmbobbery readers may recall that I have not been a big fan of the Mission: Impossible film franchise with Tom Cruise. I even wrote a diatribe about the first two films in my fourth issue, titled “Missions Ridiculous.” Well, that tide […]
Continue reading »Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) ✰ ✰ ½
The second of Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” adventures is, on the whole, about the same as the first. Its story is darker than the first, pushing the brilliant but eccentric private detective (before there was such a thing) across Europe […]
Continue reading »Scrooge (1935) ✰ ½
The earliest sound version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Henry Edwards’ brief adaptation Scrooge is nothing if not strange. Multiple versions exist and this review refers to the 60 minute edit. Seymour Hicks opens the movie as the grumpiest […]
Continue reading »Paranoid Park (2007) ✰ ✰ ✰ ½
Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s adaptation of a youth novel by Blake Nelson, is at its heart a mystery. A teenaged skater, played by amateur Gabe Nevins, drifts towards the toughest skating park in town, Paranoid Park. He meets an […]
Continue reading »The book
The Korean experience changed the way Americans viewed war. The lack of a clear-cut victory inspired filmmakers to try to make sense of fighting another country’s civil war and risking American lives for an unpopular cause. In many ways the […]
Continue reading »An Industry Losing its Viability?
Doomsaying has become popular sport in America, from the extreme of that crazy California radio prophet being wrong about the end of the world not just once, but twice in 2011, to technology pundits predicting that DVDs will disappear within […]
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