Heist movies are typically the black sheep of the industry. When they’re cool, they’re ultra-cool. When they’re not, they’re often painful to watch. So when you assemble a team like director Brett Ratner, 007 himself Pierce Brosnan, the luscious Salma Hayek and the perpetual jumping-white...
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This is what I like to call a “showcase film.� It’s when the story is definitely intriguing, but not exactly fresh territory. What really comes to bear, overshadowing all its seemingly familiar devices, is the superb acting and taught directing – a “Showcase.� If you’ve heard any...
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Taxi's dichotomy is pretty well spelled out by its cast. When you hear Queen Latifah, you expect something halfway decent. After all, she's proven she can carry herself in a comedy with the best of them – Steve Martin, Will Smith, Ice Cube (well, you get the idea). At first glance, you imagine ...
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If scientists want to see the ramifications of cloning they need look no further than the local box office. When a hit movie comes out, it's invariably followed by a string of knock offs whose only reason for being is to ride the coattails of its successful counterpart. Sometimes the results are l...
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You know, just when you think that Hollywood has completely sold its soul and any remnants of a desire to make a film of any depth or quality in an action movie have completely eviscerated, you get a surprise. Not only that, you get it in the most unlikely place – a sequel. Watching the trail...
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Some movies just have it. We can argue and speculate about what ‘it’ is until we’ve stripped it down to some tangible element or technical quality. You could write a book about why one film had it (and they’ve done it many times over.) But we don’t need to do all that. We just need to ...
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Reverse cutting! Acrobatic cutting! Action packed! These are just of few of the excitement-inducing taglines that permeated the trailers for the original movie series back in the 1970’s. And now that the late, great Shintaro Katsu has passed, does Beat Takeshi deliver on the bold promises of ...
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As a writer myself, I understand how films are always trying to top themselves. Bigger effects. Bigger budgets. More complicated stories. For the most part the results are good, chalking it up to healthy competition. But every now and then we just like to sit back and get swept away by a simple...
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