Posts Tagged ‘Miles Millar’
Monday, June 23rd, 2025
June 22, 2005
HERBIE: FULLY LOADED is the sixth motion picture in Walt Disney’s Herbie i.p. franchise saga (following THE LOVE BUG [1968], HERBIE RIDES AGAIN [1974], HERBIE GOES TO MONTE CARLO [1977], HERBIE GOES BANANAS [1980] and DISNEY’S THE LOVE BUG [1997]). It’s a sequel, not a reboot like BATMAN BEGINS, because the opening credits feature clips from some of those movies as backstory.
The story proper starts like a normal Herbie movie, with the lovable anthropomorphic (but not talking) Volkswagen Beetle with the #53 on his side causing trouble at the junkyard he’s been dumped off in. When Ray Peyton Sr. (Michael Keaton, FIRST DAUGHTER), leader of the Bass Pro Shop NASCAR team brings his daughter Maggie (Lindsay Lohan a year after MEAN GIRLS) there to buy a fixer-upper as a college graduation gift she ends up owning and restoring Herbie (due to wacky Herbie mischief). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Gough, Angela Robinson, Breckin Meyer, Cheryl Hines, Jimmi Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Mark Perez, Matt Dillon, Michael Keaton, Miles Millar, NASCAR, Robert Ben Garant, Scoot McNairy, street racing, Thomas Lennon
Posted in Reviews, Family, Sport | 7 Comments »
Thursday, September 26th, 2024
A sequel to BEETLEJUICE was first announced when part 1 was still in theaters. Director Tim Burton started developing it in earnest, went through a couple different ideas, it seemed like it was really gonna happen in the early ‘90s until he and Michael Keaton shifted their focus to BATMAN RETURNS. In my opinion that’s one of Burton’s best movies and one of the great sequels – it’s a continuation but reinvents so much of the first movie’s approach that it feels completely fresh and even more potent.
A bit of the song “Macarthur Park” echoes hauntingly over the production logos of the BEETLEJUICE sequel we finally got 36 (!) years later: “I don’t think that I can take it / ‘cause it took so long to bake it.” But after all that time in the oven, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is no BATMAN RETURNS. It’s more of a getting-the-gang-back-together type of sequel, not as much of a shift as it probly would’ve been back then, or that it would need to be to be a new classic. To me it feels less aggressive about nostalgia than most of these types of things, but I gotta admit it’s built more on “remember this?” than “hey, check THIS out!” It returns to the afterlife but mostly just the same bureaucracy/waiting room stuff as the first movie. We get another sandworm, another non-consensual lip synch, another wedding. All fun stuff, but wouldn’t all-new stuff be better? I bet younger, hungrier Burton would’ve brought us somewhere totally different. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Gough, Catherine O'Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Michael Keaton, Miles Millar, Monica Bellucci, Sami Slimane, Santiago Cabrera, Seth Grahame-Smith, Tim Burton, Willem Dafoe, Winona Ryder
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 25 Comments »
Thursday, January 27th, 2022
Raimi started work on SPIDER-MAN 2 immediately after the first one, and had it ready to go two summers later. Since it really is about following up on the events of the first film, it starts by running the credits over some of them, as depicted in paintings by Alex Ross. (He’s celebrated for his realistic portraits of comic book super heroes, which are more impressive when they come from his imagination and not photography we’ve already seen, but still, it was cool that they got him). The end of the sequence reminds us that in SPIDER-MAN Peter chose not to be with Mary Jane, who he loves, so that he could be Spider-Man.
Which does not seem to be working out great so far. The painting of Mary Jane dissolves into a closeup of her face on a perfume billboard that Peter has to walk under every day, reminding him of his pain. Though he tries to hide it, it’s clear his world crumbles when she is not near. He’s in college now, and living on his own in a small apartment. Much like part 1’s opening about all the ways Peter can be humiliated on the way to school, this one piles it on real thick about what a shit sandwich life still hands to him every day. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Ross, Alfred Gough, Alfred Molina, Alvin Sargent, Bill Nunn, Bill Pope, Brent Briscoe, Bruce Campbell, Christopher Young, Dan Bradley, Daniel Gillies, Danny Elfman, David Koepp, Dion Lam, Donna Murphy, Dylan Baker, Elizabeth Banks, Emily Deschanel, J.K. Simmons, James Franco, Joel McHale, John Dykstra, Kirsten Dunst, Michael Chabon, Miles Millar, Rosemary Harris, Sam Raimi, Ted Raimi, Tobey Maguire
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 19 Comments »
