As was a clear case in point with the Saturday Night Live bomb MacGruber, trying to stretch recessed story elements into a feature length film can be a disaster in guise. In Get Him to the Greek eccentric rocker Aldous Snow, who had a scene-stealing supporting role in 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, is now the star and thanks to Russell Brands’ hilarious turn and a great supporting cast this is a rare spin-off that works.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is considered one of the finest examples of children’s literature to come out of the Victorian period. It has been a staple of popular culture and been adapted many times, including the popular Disney animated version from 1951. Because of the novel’s enduring popularity, Disney saw fit to commission a remake with the great Tim Burton directing.
There once was a zombie from Nantucket…ok not quite, and it’s not that famed island but rather Plum Island
If you’re Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer, how do you go about finding your next “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise? Well, you start by keeping the whole cast in long hair and eyeliner only you relocate them to the desert. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a familiar swashbuckling adventure only transplanted to the Middle East and outfitted with turbans, swords with even bigger curves, snakes and lots and lots of sand.
One would think that with a ghoulish approach to monster movie making, that Splice would either be a mindless gore fest or an over-predictable snore fest, but that’s not the case with Vincenzo Natali’s latest.
The challenges awaiting Joe Penhall and John Hillcoat in adapting and directing (respectively) Cormac McCarthy’s The Road were numerous. This post-apocalyptic father-and-son story about whether struggling to survive as long as possible is worth the pain is a bleak tale and one that grinds along much of the time. It doesn’t have more than a handful of eventful or visually stimulating scenes. They manage, however, to not only be faithful to McCarthy’s elegy, but also add great details to make The Road,now on DVD and Blu-ray, into a solid film.
Fully criticizing a movie that revels in its own inherent idiocy is a somewhat insincere path to take. The promotional material for this Saturday Night Live sketch adaptation never attempts to deceive the potential audience with its intentions; you will get exactly what you expect. The conundrum with getting what you expect is you rarely get more than what you expect.
After three films of diminishing quality, more than anything, Shrek Forever After begs the obvious question: why? Unfortunately the answer is also all too obvious with the franchise having grossed one billion dollars domestically and oodles more overseas. For what it’s worth, this installment is better than the last but fails to hold a candle to Shrek 2 and pales to the point of apparition when compared to the original.
I think there’s actually a proverb somewhere that says “On one of three things a film contends for Oscars: Clint Eastwood directing, Morgan Freeman acting and a compelling historical figure as the lead role.” The person who first uttered this saying would take one look at Invictus and say: “well that’s not fair.” But the film, which arrives on DVD and Blu-ray today, only boasts a couple Oscar-contending performances and amounts to a simple feel-good sports and human interest story in the hands of exceptional talent.
Riding the most recent wave of monster-dom, Daybreakers hits DVD shelves and is yet another entry in the endless parade of vampire films to hit the market since the arrival of a little film called Twilight (which I hear is somewhat popular). Breaking with recent trends however, Daybreakers is by far the best of the bunch; high concept and high reward.
