Imagine if you will that North Korea, with the help of Soviet Russia, uses an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) weapon against the western United States and then takes advantage of our downed defenses to invade Spokane, Washington. That is the premise […]
Continue reading »Month: November 2012
Lincoln (2012) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Every new Steven Spielberg movie is an event for me; I consider him to be the greatest American filmmaker of our time. Spielberg’s best films have an immediacy that brings magic to our mundane reality, and which bring the unbelievable […]
Continue reading »Wreck-It Ralph (2012) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
Disney studios’ newest animated movie is a loving tribute to the video arcade games so popular twenty and thirty years ago. It is nostalgic but not overly sentimental, preferring to update its old-time protagonists into the more modern universe of […]
Continue reading »Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012) ☆ ☆ 1/2
The end has finally arrived for The Twilight Saga, in a fifth film that brings the story to a crescendo of decapitating action before freeing its vampires and shape-shifters to follow their dreams. If, indeed, vampires and shape-shifters dream, since […]
Continue reading »Skyfall (2012) ☆ ☆ ☆
Skyfall is a strange, atypical James Bond adventure. It doesn’t look, feel or sound like a Bond film at various points, and yet the overriding feeling at the end is that the series has restarted, and in a good way. I […]
Continue reading »The Sessions (2012) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
It would be easy to label The Sessions as Helen Hunt’s sex movie, since she portrays a sex surrogate and is naked for much of her performance, but that would be a disservice to the potency of Ben Lewin’s movie. The […]
Continue reading »October Sky (1999) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
Movies about astronomy, space exploration and the wonders beyond our own planet rarely fail to inspire me; one of the finest is October Sky (1999). Based on NASA engineer Homer Hickam’s recounting of his formative years in West Virginia’s coal […]
Continue reading »Teachers (1984) ☆ ☆ ☆
Teachers (1984) is not the freshest or most original movie about the difficulties modern educators face in an urban public school setting, but it has a lot to say about those difficulties. Furthermore, it does so with clever, dark humor, […]
Continue reading »Hooper (1978) ☆ ☆ ☆
Hal Needham had worked as the stunt coordinator on Hellfighters before finally climbing into the director’s chair in the late 1970s. His second film, Hooper (1978), a loving tribute to stuntmen everywhere and Jock Mahoney in particular (Jock was co-star […]
Continue reading »Hellfighters (1968) ☆ ☆ ☆
Not all of John Wayne’s contemporary dramas stand up to the passage of time, but I revisit Hellfighters (1968), his oil well-firefighting movie, every few years because it does. Hellfiighters is a fictionalized version of real-life fire-fighter “Red” Adair’s adventures […]
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