Oz the Great and Powerful Movie Review

Remember when the great advance in film technology was having animated characters interact with human actors? From the simplistic designs of Mary Poppins to the sophisticated effects of Who Framed Roger Rabbit the union of live action and animation was a marvel used sparingly. Today we have Oz the Great and Powerful which is a demonstration of what happens when that technology runs amok.

The Deep Blue Sea Movie Review

I can’t figure out why director Terence Davies thought it necessary to adapt The Deep Blue Sea, the 1952 Terence Rattigan play about an extra-marital love affair in post-war London, to the screen again. It was done once with Vivien Leigh in the starring role in 1955 and, though I haven’t seen it, I would bet that it’s a much better production, if only because it fits its time period. Davies’ version, which stars Rachel Weisz, does nothing to update the material or to break it free of its period constraints, both in terms of subject matter and film style. This is a movie that moves as slow as molasses on a cool day. For a story about a woman desperately in love with a man whose ardor has cooled, it just feels stilted and wrong.

The Bourne Legacy Movie Review

Tony Gilroy, so desperate along with Universal Studios, to continue the cash cow of the Jason Bourne film series that he personally crafted and adapted from books to films, went ahead with a fourth film even after Matt Damon, the series’ eponymous hero, bowed out. How can you have a Bourne film without Bourne? They could have decided to make it something like the Bond series, replacing the actor periodically as they age out of the role, providing the character contemporary problems to confront. But then it would have run the risk of copycat syndrome, I guess. So instead Gilroy, with the help of his brother Dan, decided with The Bourne Legacy to keep it all in the same universe, but provide a new protagonist in Aaron Cross, a super-assassin involved in a program similar to the Treadstone project that created Bourne. It’s an expansion of the Robert Ludlum series of books, taking the title, but nothing of the story, from the fourth book, which wasn’t even written by Ludlum. Confused? It doesn’t matter because The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum had already deviated far from Ludlum’s novels.

Enemy at the Gates Movie Review

This review was written in March 2001 and is presented here for the first time.

Jude Law is an actor who exudes tremendous energy in any role he takes. He became a star and earned an Oscar nomination in The Talented Mr. Ripley as an American playboy living the high life in the south of Italy. In Enemy at the Gates, a new film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, he plays a Russian soldier during WWII elevated to hero status by his skills as an expert marksman. In every scene, Law boils with intensity and sinks deep within the story.

The story (based loosely on fact) is of a young soldier in the Russian army helping a tired nation fend off the Nazi regime at the Battle of Stalingrad. The opening battle sequence will warrant comparisons to Spielberg's harrowing invasion of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan. Both are bloody and seem to be completely futile attempts at victory even though we know that the Allies won at Normandy and that the Russians halted the German advance at Stalingrad.

Movie Review: Rachel Weisz Stars in Agora

*Agora opens next Friday in New York with a possible wider release later. It played throughout Europe last year becoming the biggest box office success on the Continent in 2009. It also won 7 Goya Awards (The Spanish equivalent of The Oscars) and was nominated for 6 others.

It’s said that one of the most difficult things to present on screen is the process of writing. Of all the arts it is the least visually kinetic and generally either a bore to watch or otherwise presented unrealistically. Well I can now say with certainty that there is another art form even more boring in its screen presentation: that of the ancient mathematician philosopher.

This is rather unfortunately what Alejandro Amenábar (director of the wonderful assisted suicide drama The Sea Inside and the haunting The Others) has attempted to do with Agora, the story of Hypatia (Rachel Weisz, trying her best to make the most of weak material), a brilliant female mind and university teacher caught in the center of a man’s world and the tumultuous time when the Roman Empire was succumbing to the forces of Christianity.