Category Archives: Film
Futurama: Bender’s Big Score
Few television series’ have been saved from the jaws of cancellation by viewer outrage alone. Star Trek is the most famous example of that. Letter writing campaigns to NBC prolonged the classic series’ life by a season, but was ultimately unable to keep it from fading into syndication. Conversely, efforts to raise money and write [...]
Cloverfield
Monster movies are a genre all their own. They aren’t quite horror films. They aren’t quite action films. Traditional monster flicks like Godzilla or The Blob are now considered camp, and have been supplanted with more human-sized creatures like Predator or Aliens. The reason for this switch out is simple. As far fetched as those [...]
Superman: Doomsday
The Death of Superman was one of the seminal moments in comic book history. This wasn’t because Superman died. As most people figured, his death was a marketing ploy to bolster sagging comic book sales and to possibly reinvigorate the demand for Superman films, which had been dormant for nearly a decade. The story, which [...]
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
The National Treasure series has largely been about uncovering antiquities which tie the past in with the present. In the first film, this lead the main character– Ben Gates (Nicholas Cage) and his friends on a quest for a golden treasure trove left behind by the Founding Fathers. The adventure brought the audience and the [...]
Young Frankenstein
The brilliance of Mel Brooks is that while his jokes are off-color, sexual, racist, and crude, they are never used merely for the sake of being offensive. His jokes use sensitive topics to make clever, silly, slapstick gags which entertain while making a cultural statement or observation. This brilliance extends into the way he makes [...]
The Bourne Ultimatum
This latest film in the Bourne series ties up both the present and the past for Jason Bourne. As a character, Bourne is flat, almost always emotionless, and he moves and functions like an automaton. While in most cases this creates a two-dimensional character, in the Bourne series it helps to reinforce the character’s background, [...]
The Simpsons Movie
One of the ongoing debates over The Simpsons refers to the location of Springfield, the city in which the series and film take place. The name of the town was chosen by series creator Matt Groening because during his childhood in Oregon, Springfield was always the “next town over.” The name is common enough that [...]
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
One of the promises of the Harry Potter series from the start was that the text would grow with its initial fan base. This didn’t mean that the text would become more prolific, although it did. It meant that as the audience grew more mature, so too would the story. This becomes very clear in [...]
Transformers
For many loyal fans, Transformers is one of the most highly anticipated films of 2007– on par with Spider-Man 3 or Harry Potter And the Order of the Phoenix. This film is the first big screen venture for the venerable franchise of shape-shifting robots in more than twenty years. This film is based upon the [...]
Ratatouille
I’ll admit it: I’m not exactly the target demographic for computer-generated animated films. As a mid-20s American male, the movies that are marketed to me contain partial to full nudity, violence, swearing, and a general sense of adolescent bad-assery that, studio executives have determined are what I must like. I pride myself however on my [...]
