Django Unchained Movie Review

Quentin Tarantino likes to make movies that he would like to watch. Well, shouldn’t every filmmaker do the same? It’s widely known that Tarantino came up on movies by working in a video store and devouring all the trashy B-movies he could get his eyes on. All of his movies are basically slicked up versions of those same midnight and drive-in classics that were his film education. Spaghetti westerns have served as one of the largest influences on his movies, particularly the Mexican standoffs that tend to occur in the climaxes of films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. In the last decade he has specialized in revenge pictures, with Django Unchained being the latest, this time an American slave revenge fantasy in the style of a cheap spaghetti western.

Rio Movie Review

Several studios have tried to horn in on Disney’s virtual monopoly on feature animation, usually by trying to do things that Disney does not do. DreamWorks has created more grown-up oriented fare in the Shrek series and the little remembered Antz while Blue Sky Studios, best known for its Ice Age series, has tried to build its reputation around lovable animal characters. With Rio they’ve tried to branch out a little bit by including several prominent human characters in the story and by giving the film a rollicking musical score by John Powell (who also provided the wonderful score for How to Train Your Dragon) and some big musical numbers featuring singing characters and animated dance sequences.

Miami Vice Movie Review

If there’s been a common theme running through the films of Michael Mann it’s been the presence of hard-working men determined and expert in their professions. Think about Russell Crow and Al Pacino in The Insider, Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat – the cop and the criminal – two sides of the same coin facing off against one another. “Miami  Vice,” the hit TV series for which Mann served as executive producer, though a bit lighter and more freewheeling than his feature films, contains the initial germinating seeds of the same theme. These seeds are brought to fruition in Mann’s feature film update of that same series, this time with a hot new cast including Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx.

Due Date Movie Review: Missing the Mark

The road movie as a sub-genre is one of my favorites. The possibilities are great, with endless opportunities to mine the situation for both great comedy and high drama by putting two (or sometimes more) different personalities together on a journey can feel contrived when done poorly or expertly precise in the hands of a skilled writer and director. Todd Phillips, whose first movie was Road Trip, has returned to the road with two of the hottest ticket actors of the moment – Robert Downey, Jr. and Zach Galifianakis – for Due Date, a road movie modeled on John Hughes’ Plane, Trains and Automobiles with a man (Downey) trying to get home to his family while continually being tied to and hamstrung by an oafish buffoon (Galifianakis).