Archive for the ‘Drama’ Category
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
No joke, I never saw SAVING PRIVATE RYAN before. I’ve never been big on war movies and I think back when it was a recent movie I was real cynical and suspicious of any type of flagwaving. I thought movies like this were just brainwashing kids to join up in case they needed to blow up Iraq again.
But that’s stupid. This one’s about “the good war” and still makes it look like something to avoid at all costs. The famous Omaha Beach invasion sequence near the beginning is a total bloodbath, soldiers pouring off the boats into waves of machine gun bullets. They might as well just be jumping from a diving board directly into a giant fan, it seems like. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Goldberg, Barry Pepper, Bryan Cranston, Dennis Farina, Ed Burns, Giovanni Ribisi, Harve Presnell, Jeremy Davies, Leland Orser, Matt Damon, Max Martini, Nathan Fillion, Paul Giamatti, Steven Spielberg, Ted Danson, Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Vin Diesel, WWII
Posted in Drama, Reviews, War | 103 Comments »
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
With AMISTAD Spielberg brings his historical dramas closer to home, dealing with slavery in America through the story of an unusual court case. The case deals with a group of Africans captured as slaves and transported on a schooner called La Amistad. Cinque (Djimon Hounsou) leads an uprising and takes control of the ship, but they end up taken into custody along American shores. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Paquin, Anthony Hopkins, Chiwetel Ejiofor, court room drama, Djimon Hounsou, Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, slavery, Steven Spielberg
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 56 Comments »
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
You know what movie’s good? SCHINDLER’S LIST! Why did nobody tell me this before?
Would you believe this was my first time seeing SCHINDLER’S LIST? It’s getting toward 20 years old and I remembered I hadn’t gotten around to seeing it yet. It’s kind of a heavy decision to make one day: hey, I got 3 hours before I gotta leave for work, maybe I should watch SCHINDLER’S LIST? Never had the urge I guess. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ben Kingsley, Best Picture winners, Liam Neeson, Steven Spielberg, WWII
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 121 Comments »
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
ALWAYS is very cutesy and sentimental, it’s got some pretty weak comedic bits and it’s definitely the weakest full-length Spielberg I’ve watched in this marathon so far. But it’s still pretty good, and with some things nobody could’ve done as well as Spielberg.
This one’s about the pilots who dump the red stuff on forest fires, and the Tom Cruise of red-stuff-dumpers is former shark expert and Close Encounterer Richard Dreyfus. The Anthony Edwards is John Goodman and the Kelly McGillis is Holly Hunter. Actually, Dreyfus looks kinda like Paul Newman in this one, strutting around in aviators, leather jacket, baseball cap and grey mustache. The point is he thinks he’s awesome, and everybody else agrees. His girl seems to have when are we gonna settle down? type issues, but he makes her happy by buying her a nice dress, something you don’t see around the base much because she’s the only woman there. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Audrey Hepburn, Brad Johnson, Douglas Trumbo, firefighters, ghosts, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, Keith David, remakes, Richard Dreyfuss, Roberts Blossom, Steven Spielberg
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Romance | 48 Comments »
Monday, January 16th, 2012
“Excuse me everyone – I surrender!”
Wow – for some reason I never had any interest in EMPIRE OF THE SUN before. Turns out it’s great and sort of a beginning for alot of things. It’s Spielberg’s first WWII drama. One of Christian Bale’s first movies. The one that gave Ben Stiller the idea for TROPIC THUNDER. etc. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ben Stiller, Christian Bale, J.G. Ballard, Joe Pantoliano, John Malkovich, Steven Spielberg, Tom Stoppard
Posted in Drama, Reviews, War | 34 Comments »
Saturday, December 24th, 2011
Why do we gotta prequelize everything? We already know the backstory in THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, does it really gotta be spelled out for us who the guy’s mom was and what the tax rate was when he was born and all that shit? I mean come on.
THE NATIVITY STORY is the movie version of the Nativity story, from the director of TWILIGHT, adapted from the book by God featuring Luke and Matthew. Academy Award nominee, whale rider and Queen Amidala successor Keisha Castle-Hughes plays Mary, the mother of Jesus. Some baby plays Jesus. I’m not sure if it’s a baby that has done anything else. It wasn’t a particularly memorable baby or anything. I mean, it was fine, I’m not criticizing the baby. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bible, Catherine Hardwicke, Christmas, Ciaran Hinds, Jesus, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 39 Comments »
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
JUICE is an early ’90s “hood movie” about four young friends in New York who fall into some stupid shit. Tired of getting picked on by the Puerto Rican kids and the cops and not having money, they decide to get a gun (just one between them) and rob a little mini-mart where the guy is an asshole and yells at them sometimes. It’s not exactly The Thomas Crown Affair they’re trying to pull off, but they’re amateurs so they fuck up this small time crime and have to deal with the aftermath. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Doctor Dre, Ed Lover, Ernest Dickerson, Fab 5 Freddy, Hank Shocklee, hip hop, Omar Epps, Queen Latifah, Samuel L. Jackson, Tupac Shakur
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | 38 Comments »
Monday, November 21st, 2011
Oh, is this what “hipsters” are that everybody’s always worried about? I can never really tell. I definitely don’t think these are “geeks,” unless it’s the honorary kind that have to have somebody on the internet vouch for them, like “no, Vin Diesel really is a geek, he showed me he had Dungeons and Dragons dice in his glove compartment.” No, I get the idea these guys are hip, and therefore hipsters. But they might just be civilians. I’m not very good at this. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: post-apocalypse
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 47 Comments »
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
SLASHED DREAMS seems at first like it might have some interesting variations on the slasher formula. It’s obviously gonna be crappy, but that doesn’t always mean it’s not gonna be worth watching. It starts at a school (college I think, but you never can tell how old they’re supposed to be in these things). A girl has just received a letter from a friend who left school to live in the woods, and he says things are going swimmingly.
Class room discussions usually have some bearing on the horror that’s gonna happen later, either in explaining the mythology or setting up some kind of ironic parallel (see the works of Wes Craven for examples). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: rednecks, Robert Englund, Rudy Vallee, Slasher Search
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 10 Comments »
“You know what? I’ve never actually seen a Terrence Malick movie,” I admitted, embarrassed.
