Short Cut Movie Review: Rush

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

It’s a result of severely reduced expectations that Ron Howard’s Rush managed to earn more than a little critical praise last year. As an example of its kind – the race car movie – it’s better than you might expect, but as an example of its kind more broadly – the sports movie – it’s sorely lacking in inspiration and spiritual uplift. The greatest sports movies draw their spectators in and make them stand squarely behind the hero so firmly and with such emotional investment that you can’t help but be overcome with emotion. I think of examples like Rocky or Breaking Away. Alternatively, they set up a tragic figure and become more a study of character and loss like in Raging Bull or Million Dollar Baby. Of the two protagonists in Rush – James hunt, the lothario playboy played by Chris Hemsworth, and Niki Lauda, the cautious and meticulous champion played by Daniel Brühl – neither one achieves either of those apotheoses necessary for greatness of character.

Cowboys & Aliens Movie Review: An Interesting Melding of Genre Films

What a fascinating concept, the mixing of genres in Cowboys & Aliens, director Jon Favreau’s latest action spectacular with enough brains to rise slightly above the usual mediocre dreck. Why must it be inevitable that every science fiction film about alien invasion has either a contemporary or a futuristic setting? If you’ve ever wondered how men on horseback with six-shooters and rifles would fend off technologically superior alien invaders, Cowboys & Aliens is a mash-up that might satisfy your thirst for knowledge. At any rate, all alien invaders are by definition technologically superior to humans.

TRON: Legacy Movie Review

I’m not really sure there were legions of fans or even the box office pedigree from TRON to warrant a sequel nearly 30 years later, but since the Hollywood studios have all but run out of ideas, Disney went ahead and made one. TRON: Legacy picks up several years after the conclusion of the original and then leaps many years into the future to bring us to the present. It also follows thematically from the first film’s warning (more quaint than foreboding) about the impending computer age.

TRON warned of the potential dangers of machines creeping more and more, ever so insidiously into our lives, depicting the consequences of a megalomaniac giving rise to a computer system that could eventually take over.  Legacy follows in a grand tradition of cinema depicting man vs. machine conflicts from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Matrix in upping the ante from a human villain operating a computer system for nefarious purposes to artificial intelligence attempting to create a more perfect world at the expense of their human designers.