Archive for May, 2012

Short Take: Redeems the first sequel. A fun an fulfilling ride.

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld

Screenwriter: Etan Cohen; Lowell Cunningham (comic)

Cast: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Emma Thompson

Length: 1h 46m

Synopsis: Long before K (Jones) and J (Smith) became partners there was a nefarious alien named Boris the Animal (Clement), who by some stroke of luck was captured sans one arm back in 1969 by K and sent to a prison on the Moon. Now, forty years later, Boris has escaped and is looking to get revenge. His plan is to time travel back to 1969 and kill K, allowing himself to roam free and eventually lead his race to taking over the Earth. When J realizes K is missing, the MIB claim he had been dead for forty years. After traveling back in time himself, J must prevent K’s murder and help ensure the correct passing of events to protect the future. The trouble is, the younger K (Brolin) and ‘60s MIB have a hard time believing J’s predicament. In earning the trust of the younger version of the partner he’d known for years, J tries to take advantage of the opportunity to find out more about K than his older self would divulge. As it so happens, what he discovers changes their relationship forever.

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Short Take: If you open yourself to it, it’s a very interesting experience

Director: Zal Batmanglij

Screenwriters: Zal Batmanglij, Brit Marling

Cast: Brit Marling, Christopher Denham, Nicole Vicius

Length: 1h 25m

Synopsis: Peter (Denham) and his girlfriend Lorna (Vicius) are looking to make a documentary, and they find a prime topic in a secret cult that’s headed by a mysterious woman named Maggie (Marling). Intending to document the ins and outs of the cult the couple signs up to join, trying with clever equipment to video and tape what they encounter. Such recording efforts fail, but they continue to attend meetings to find out whatever they can. Maggie, as it turns out, claims to be from the future, and a far less bountiful one at that. She claims her mission is to help her followers prepare for her era, and doing so will take peculiar mental provisioning. Her story and methods arouse suspicion in Peter and Lorna, but they can’t help but be fascinated. However, that fascination looks to take them deeper down the rabbit hole than they were prepared to go, and the experience may even end up shaking them to their cores.

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Short Take: See things blow up a la ‘Transformers’, and Liam Neeson get a paycheck

Director: Peter Berg

Screenwriters: Erich and Jon Hoeber

Cast: Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Brooklyn Decker, Rihanna, Alexander Skarsgård

Length: 2h 11m

Synopsis: Alex Hopper (Kitsch) is a thick-headed, stubborn, undisciplined underachiever. Natural, then, that his brother Stone (Skarsgård) forces him to enlist in the U.S. Navy with him. While procured Alex has fallen for and wooed a fetching blonde named Samantha (Decker), who just happens to be the daughter of his superior, Admiral Shane (Neeson). Meanwhile, the U.S. government has secretly sent a signal to a distant planet that closely resembles our own. Only shortly after being sent its receivers send their own signal back in the form of spacecrafts which land in the waters near Hawaii during a Naval training exercise that the Hopper brothers are part of. Alarm spreads. The aliens close off the immediate area near Hawaii with a dome forcefield, and the battle begins. The aliens on the outside of this area try to usurp the same equipment used to reach them in order to contact home, which cannot be allowed to happen for fear of calling on more aliens. Will our heroes save the day and defeat the cosmic invaders?

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Short Take: Easygoing and palatable, but lacking that Tim Burton magic

Director: Tim Burton

Screenwriters: Seth Grahame-Smith, John August; Dan Curtis (TV series)

Cast: Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Helena Bonham Carter, Michelle Pfeiffer, Bella Heathcote, Chloe Grace Moretz, Johnny Lee Miller, Gulliver McGrath

Length: 1h 53m

Synopsis: Barnabas Collins (Depp) grew up an aristocrat in 19^th century New England, heir to a fishing enterprise and loved by the community that benefitted from it. In love with a gentle beauty named Josette (Heathcote), and hounded by the lustful Angelique (Green), Barnabas attempted to let down his physical admirer in order to marry his true desire. Unbeknownst to him, however, Angelique was a witch, and she would cause Josette’s mysterious death and give Barnabas an eternity of suffering by cursing him to be a vampire and burying him until the end of days. But on one day in 1972, he would be freed by excavators and able to return to his home. There he meets his descendants, Roger (Miller), Carolyn (Moretz), David (McGrath), new head of the household Elizabeth (Pfeiffer), and shrink in residence Dr. Hoffman (Carter). Low and behold, Angelique has survived the last two-hundred years better than the Collins’ name, becoming the town’s newest idol. As best he can as a vampire, and without inciting the townspeople as such, Barnabas must restore luster to his family name whilst also evading the frustrated assaults of Angelique. In his efforts he may also come to finally discover how the witch robbed him of his once true love.

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Greetings everyone! Although it has been a few weeks since its initial release, we here thought it a good idea to continue talking about The Hunger Games. Although The Avengers has taken the world by storm, Suzanne Collins’ movie adaptation still continues to impress with a worldwide gross of $635 million and climbing. Its RottenTomatoes score is a very respectable 84%, so this is a rare summer occasion when critics and audiences seem to agree wholeheartedly. The film’s popularity certainly intrigues us, but what has still been left unsaid about it interests us even more. So rich is the film, we thought, that even with our first Double Review covering a myriad of angles we still have plenty to discuss. Below is the latest Conversation between our writers Cliff Bugle and Marisa Carpico, which we hope you’ll join via the comments section below. For those of you who have been debating internally about going to see The Hunger Games we hope our musings give you the extra incentive you need to give it a go and experience it for yourself.

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Over the past four years, we’ve been witnesses to a pretty significant phenomenon. We’ve gotten to watch a studio endeavor to create several different films of a single universe in an effort to release a crossover film that collected these films’ main characters into a team. I’m of course referring to Marvel Studios and its efforts toward making The Avengers a reality.

The road to The Avengers has been anything but a smooth one. In the four years since Iron Man, the first film planned for this Marvel Movieverse amalgamation, its films have seen changes in cast and crew, which were often caused by internal power struggles, while they tried very hard to make the universe work as a whole. Did Marvel succeed in the end? In my opinion, the only way to really answer this is to break down Marvel’s efforts film by film.

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Short Take: Exciting, funny, and spectacular to behold. Like the team itself, it’s even greater than the sum of its parts

Director: Joss Whedon

Screenwriters: Joss Whedon and Zak Penn

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Renner

Length: 2h 23m

Synopsis: It’s all been leading up to this. Colonel Nick Fury (Jackson) of S.H.I.E.L.D. has begun to call into action the Avengers initiative after Asgardian god Loki (Hiddleston) teleports to Earth to steal a cosmic cube of unlimited power called the Tesseract. The adopted brother of Thor (Hemsworth) plans to use the cube to wield a celestial army afforded to him by the bloodthirsty alien order known as the Other so he can overtake our world, but naturally the likes of Iron Man (Downey Jr.), Captain America (Evans), Black Widow (Johansson), the Hulk (Ruffalo), Thor, and Hawkeye (Renner) have different plans. But our heroes are not very good at working together as it turns out, with their frictions causing them to battle each other before the gravity of Loki’s plot forces them to focus their attention. Will the suspension of their grievances come too late to win the day?

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Short Take: A far cry from the misery of "The Antichrist," but no less devoid of von Trier's signature despondency

Director: Lars von Trier

Screenplay: Lars von Trier

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Cameron Spurr

Length: 2h 16m

Synopsis: Justine (Dunst) is a young professional woman in the midst of celebrating her long-awaited wedding day, however it seems that not all is going well. The lavish reception is impeccably organized, but despite the perfection of the event she is succumbing to a deep-seeded depression that had been thus far lying dormant. The condition causes her to act out in strange ways, even to the point of rendering her temporarily enfeebled. Her marriage fails before it even really began, and she’s kept under the care of her sister Claire (Gainsbourg) and her husband John (Sutherland), who have a son named Leo (Spurr) and live on an expansive aristocratic estate. During all of this we are made aware that a newfound planet named Melancholia has meanwhile been fast approaching and may actually end up colliding with Earth. The anxiousness concerning our planet’s fate looms over everyone’s head, yet they try to carry on as normal. Soon, though, normality will become a long lost fiction.

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