The Amazing Spider-Man Movie Review

Was it really necessary for Sony to reboot the Spider-Man series only five years after the last film and ten years after the first? Is Sam Raimi’s trilogy already ancient history? Apparently for the Millenials anything older than half a decade is passé. I don’t mind a new actor in the Peter Parker/Spider-Man role or a new director at the helm. James Bond has changed hands through six actors across fifty years. The problem I find is the absurd need to retell the origin story. The Batman series went through three actors and two directors with a major stylistic shift halfway through without getting back into Bruce Wayne’s history. It was Christopher Nolan who rebooted that franchise by taking a completely new track on the mythology. Unlike Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man which is virtually indistinguishable from the first trilogy.

The Five-Year Engagement Movie Review

SPOILER WARNING: I can’t completely discuss my main criticisms of this film without revealing how the story plays out through the end. Read ahead at your own peril.

Emily Blunt is such a charming actress and has such a light breezy quality to her performances that it’s easy to watch her in just about anything. She has generally been the best aspect of bad and mediocre movies like The Devil Wears Prada, The Wolfman and The Adjustment Bureau. Jason Segel is a charming actor of a different sort. He’s funny, but doesn’t force it. Wisecracking comedy comes naturally to him and his big and goofy demeanor is a valuable asset for likability. They make a fine on screen couple in The Five-Year Engagement and initially I found myself, in spite of all inner protestations toward rom-coms, hoping for the best of a lovely little romance. We know going into any romantic comedy that at the end of the movie, no matter what happens as it runs its course, the couple will be together. The trick to be overcome is in making the journey surprising or at least interesting. The Five-Year Engagement gets about twenty-five percent of that formula by being somewhat interesting and almost never surprising.

Anonymous Movie Review

I’m not a Shakespeare scholar. I probably know more than most people but I certainly can’t claim any intimate knowledge of his life and work. I know enough to say that the alleged controversial question of authorship of his works is complete and utter bunk, in spite of what Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi believes. The issue strikes me as little more than the common disbelief among those who have spent lots of time and money on formal education that someone with a lesser education could possibly possess such genius. A major part of the argument has been that Shakespeare’s education was insufficient to prepare him for works containing classical allusions and such. As far as I’m concerned this is no different to any modern day conspiracy theory that suggests for instance that we never really went to the moon and that George W. Bush personally flew airplanes into the World Trade towers.

Pirate Radio Movie Review: The Boat that Rocked

First published at American Madness on 18 November 2009.

Republished here a punctuation alteration.

*This review is based on the European release of this film which runs 2 hours and 15 minutes. The film was re-edited and shortened by about 20 minutes for the American release following criticism of its length in the UK.

Don’t be fooled by the way Pirate Radio has been advertised in the US. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character is not the focus of the film. To be sure, he is the lone American in a sea of British characters, which seems to be a theme writer-director Richard Curtis has developed (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love, Actually), but he is just one of many radio DJs living on and broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea to get around the government rules regarding rock music on the airwaves.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I Movie Review

Bill Nighy as Minister of Magic presents the items bequeathed by Dumbledore in his will

As the Harry Potter book series progressed, they became denser, packed with more and more material. As such, as the films have trudged onward they’ve had to make various omissions in order to fulfill a kid-friendly movie running time. They’ve also grown to be darker as the full weight of the power of Voldemort and Harry’s predicament comes to bear. The result has been a series of films that I imagine would be virtually incomprehensible to any viewer who hasn’t read the books. I say this because I’ve often had to try to refresh my memory of missing details from the book to aid my comprehension of the story of the screen.

My hope was that the splitting of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two parts would resolve this problem. Without a doubt, Steve Kloves has done a fine job of drafting a story that makes sense for Part I, but so many of the details the characters use to make connections are given little more than a cursory glance.

Mr. Nice Movie Review

Bernard Rose was present at the Seville European Film Festival earlier this month presenting his film, Mr. Nice. He comes across like Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in Stnaley Kubrick’s Lolita, not only by his physical appearance with thick black hair and slight stature, but also in his speaking style and mannerisms, including his frequent adjustment of his horn rimmed glasses.


He introduced his film by prefacing it with his view that drugs should be legal and that people shouldn’t have to languish in prison for years because they take drugs recreationally. He also made sure to draw a distinction between what he considers to be two separate issues: the question of legality on the one hand and of addiction on the other. Any reasonable person should have no trouble agreeing to that, but Rose’s film fails to adequately address the second.

Greenberg Movie Review

If writer/director Noah Baumbach’s latest feature, Greenberg, feels a bit directionless, that’s probably because the title character, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), has lost focus after a breakdown and brief stay in a psychiatric ward. Come to think of it, Baumbach sort of specializes in directionless characters beginning with his first film, Kicking and Screaming, about four recent college graduates unwilling to go forth and take their places in the world. Roger Greenberg could be any one of those characters fifteen years later.