Were you a fan of 80s “creature features”? Y’know, B-movie horrors like Gremlins, Ghoulies, CHUD, Arachnophobia or even more serious ones like Alien? Well, this movie is a great throwback to those kinds of scary, fun flics. It all takes place on a single night in a south London housing project nicknamed “The Block”. As…
Category: (4.5 out of 5)
The Avengers – Movie Review
When I heard that Marvel Entertainment was planning to do individual superhero movies that would culminate in The Avengers bringing all the characters and cast together in a superhero team movie, it seemed ambitious to say the least. Thank goodness they got a capable director like Joss Whedon, who’s also a genre/comic book fan himself….
Cabin In The Woods – Movie Review
Most of the hype around this movie is about two things: how it defies (or plays with) conventions of the horror movie genre; and how it took (courtesy of the fall of studios) three years to see the light of movie screens. I don’t have much to say about the second topic, but the first…
The Hunger Games – Movie Review
Happy Hunger Games! In adapting a book to screen, living up to the expectations of readers about how the characters look and act is not the only challenge. If you can make viewers tear up when a scene is moving, or jump when a scene is surprising even though they already know what’s coming, that’s…
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 – Movie Review
As a total fan who has lost all objectivity when it comes to anything Potter-related, the biggest surprise about the seeing the final movie was how it wasn’t a sad experience. I don’t want to use cliches like “the end of an era”, but reading seven un-short books and watching eight un-short movies is quite…
Super 8 – Movie Review
I have really missed those “family” sci-fi films of the 80s–the kind that put Steven Spielberg on the map–and it’s like a warm cup of Nestle’s Quik to be enjoying the nostalgic comfort and thrill again in JJ Abrams’s new movie, inspired by those films. It’s virtually impossible to watch Super 8 without thinking of…
Kung Fu Panda 2 – Movie Review
As much as I loved the first Kung Fu panda movie, I was always a little bothered by the fact that it wasn’t really a very Chinese story. The theme of finding one’s destiny and believing in yourself is more of a western idea. One other thing that irked me was that it made no…
Rango – Movie Review
Rango is weird. He has surreal dreams, wears a Hawaiian shirt, puts on little dramas in his terrarium with a windup toy fish, and has a chorus of mariachi owls singing a lament of his demise. The animated movie from Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski is quirky to say the least. Nevertheless, the…
Oscar, Schmoscar 2011
When I first started my “Oscar Schmoscar” posts a few years ago, I was tired of the kinds of nominees that Oscar was coming up with. I lumped together some mini-reviews to let readers know what I thought of some of the nominated movies, but it was meant to be kind of dismissive. A few…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 