I might have felt slighted that Disney’s first 2D animated movie in a while was so derivative if it did not successfully remind me of the things I’d been missing from Disney animation for so long. Unlike the recent hit Enchanted, which up-ended the conventions of the Disney fairy tale movie and squeezed it into…
Category: Fantasy
New Moon – Movie Review
It’s difficult to be disappointed with a movie that gives you exactly what you expect. Going into New Moon (the second in the highly successful book, now movie, franchise known as The Twilight Saga) it was not surprising that half the movie would be spent on looks between attractive teens prone to longing and melodrama….
Where The Wild Things Are – Movie Review
I can’t say that I really understood Where The Wild Things Are when I read it as a kid. Sadly, 30 years later, I can’t say that I understand the new Spike Jonze directed big-screen adaptation of this children’s classic either. While the visuals were great, and the characters (especially the Wild Things themselves, of…
9, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, and Dragon Hunters – Capsule Reviews
Recently I’ve seen a few animated movies, and while they don’t have anything in common, I thought I’d present them together in a set of capsule reviews. 9 When Elijah Wood last played a diminutive hero courageously seeking to save the world (in Lord of the Rings), it took over 10 hours to tell the…
15 Flicks for Fall 2009
On the pop-cultural calendar, the climax of the year is supposedly the summer blockbuster season. Fall is when we begin the year again with new TV and more serious cinema (leading up to the Oscars). After a lacklustre summer (where even the stalwart Harry Potter franchise left me disappointed), we could really use some fresh,…
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Movie Review
It’s been a while now since I saw the movie (I’m on vacation) but I didn’t want to let an HP milestone go by without some comment on this blog. For those of you not Potter afficienados, Half-Blood Prince is the second to last book in the Potter series and (because they are making two…
Books come to life: Coraline and Inkheart – Movie Reviews
I really like the trend to bring books to the screen. I especially like it when they bring fantasy books to life because the technology has reached the point where they can really make magical elements look convincingly real. That hurdle out of the way, fantasy books (especially children and young adult fantasy) have so…
2008: The Year On Screen
2008 Favourite Movies With the after-effects of the writers’ strike, and the resulting string of mediocre disappointments, 2008 was not a great year at the cinema. Hollywood continues to play it safe, even in the highly-imaginative realm of sci-fi, and we were bombarded mostly by sequels, remakes and adaptations. It was difficult to pick favourites…
Twilight – Movie Review
I may not be one of the teenaged devotees of the original vampire romance novel, but having finished the Twilight book days before watching the movie adaptation, I surprisingly have a lot of issues with the film. (Be forewarned Twilighters, if you feel that nothing Twilight-related can be bad, please put away your claws and…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 