For as rambunctious as Future World is, it’s awfully dull. This disappointing joint effort comes from directors Bruce Thierry Cheung and James Franco, although considering how successful Franco has been as a director, I wonder if he was hired to guide Cheung. Nonetheless, both filmmakers fail at establishing this tattered reality, which falls somewhere between a hellscape and a subsisting rebirth. The survivors also seem to be an uneven mix of copied characters from other movies.
Sausage Party is a shock comedy that’s heavy on “shock” and light on “comedy”. The film is supposed to subvert clean-cut animated films with inappropriate dialogue and black humour, but ends up becoming a crass and awkward in-joke between the comic cast.
A little girl (Mackenzie Foy) is strictly structured by her all-business, all the time mom (Rachel McAdams). It’s summer time, and instead of playing she is to spend her days studying so she can impress her authorities at her oveestigious academy school, so she can get into a prestigious high school, so she can get into a prestigious university, so she can spend her adult life working hard and forcing her children to do the…
By: Addison Wylie If Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen are going to be filmmakers, they really should write their own material. Their directorial debut and sleeper hit This Is the End sustained itself because of their clever weisenheimer writing satirizing self-involved Hollywood socialites. With their highly anticipated and controversial second feature The Interview, the pair are responsible for the story along with Dan Sterling. However, this time, they’ve abandoned the screenwriting phase and let Sterling…
By: Addison Wylie It’s dangerous for a film like Palo Alto to have a character openly confess that movies nowadays are pointless. You expect that character to look straight into the camera and sigh. I was left sighing while I watched Gia Coppola’s feature film debut. I was also skeptically furrowing my eyebrows and skewing expressions in my stupor. Palo Alto could easily be resold as a workout video for voice actors. Coppola has taken…
By: Addison Wylie Every so often, a tall glass of ridiculousness helps break up moviegoing monotony. Some filmmakers have tried their hardest to makes escapist entertainment, and have instead delivered films that were too heavy on lunkheaded machismo. Gary Fleder’s Homefront had come in under the radar – or, so it seemed to me. Since it stars Jason Statham as the lead, it fell into that vaguely generic category most people seem to group Statham…
By: Addison Wylie When I reviewed Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers in March, I stated that “it may very well be this year’s most argued about film.” I still stand by that, and it’s bittersweet to do so. On the one hand, I’m right. On the other, there are still movie goers that react wildly negative towards Korine’s fever dream. However, just as many people are faithful to their opinion about Spring Breakers and even go as far…
By: Addison Wylie The apocalyptic comedy This Is The End is a pretty good directorial debut from screenwriters/producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and on top of that, it’s pretty funny. More notably, it’s just about the closest thing North American cinema will get to emulating the meta movies of UK filmmaker Michael Winterbottom – for now Winterbottom has made popular films featuring actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Their…
By: Addison Wylie I could say that Sam Raimi’s OZ: The Great and Powerful puts the ‘Z’ in OZ because of how sluggish and boring it is, but that wouldn’t make for much of a review. Instead, OZ: The Great and Powerful can be compared to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, another big budget fairy tale that shares the same strengths and weaknesses as OZ. Like Tim Burton’s hit, Raimi’s family film is far more interesting…
By: Addison Wylie Spring Breakers works in more ways than one. First of all, you can take Harmony Korine’s film at face value and perceive it as a lurid fever dream with a loose story integrating elements of the crime genre with a trippy punk rock attitude. The four roles played by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Korine’s wife Rachel Korine are charismatic enough in an entertaining train wreck sort of way as…