Avengers: Age of Ultron Movie Review

Does it really matter what anyone thinks of a movie like Avengers: Age of Ultron? These kinds of movies don’t live and die by either critical or popular opinion. They are guaranteed to rake in huge revenue not only at the box office, but through merchandising tie-ins. The hype and excitement, the feeling of its being a cultural event THE movie you must see this summer (or early spring as it opened in early May) ensure that hordes of people will go to see it. And those multitudes have been programmed from decades of action-packed, effects-laden event movies to believe that all they have to do is stimulate the physical senses. As long as lots of stuff blows up, implodes, collapses, cracks, breaks, splinters, and crunches accompanied, of course, by appropriately deafening sound effects, then the movie has accomplished its primary goal.

Much Ado About Nothing Movie Review

Sometimes as a great fan of Shakespeare, though certainly I am not a studied scholar of his work, I long for adaptations that get away from the stuffy theatrical tradition popularized by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh. Though I have often found much to admire in Branagh’s work, it still fails to feel truly inspired or inspiring and instead comes across as an exercise in literary interpretation rather than a production of human emotion. But it is exactly that quality in Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing that I admire it so damn much and why I’m willing to call it the best Shakespeare adaptation committed to film.

Serenity Movie Review

Seven years ago I went into the cinema to watch Serenity not knowing anything about it. I didn’t know anything about its writer and director Joss Whedon, who already had a cult following for his “Buffy” TV series and its spinoff “Angel.” I had also never heard of his short-lived series “Firefly,” canceled after a mere 13 episodes, which served as a precursor to the film. All I knew was that I was totally enthralled by the universe presented on screen.

Serenity’s amalgamation of the science fiction and western genres was unlike anything I’d seen to that point and in retrospect it’s almost an obvious combination to make. The premise is that 500 years in the future, the earth has become uninhabitable and the population has been relocated to another system of planets terraformed for habitability. There is an alliance that controls the central planets but at the edges of the system life is governed by a kind of Wild West code of justice.

The Avengers Movie Review

A funny thing started happening in my mind a few days after seeing The Avengers – I actually began feeling like I wanted to see it again. This after coming out of it with the usual lackluster feelings I have after another superhero movie. The bar has been set so low for our expectations when it comes to the latest incarnation of some colorful but troubled person with special powers that we think of films as uninteresting as Spider Man 2 and Iron Man as great works of art. I enjoyed those films almost as much as anyone I suppose and I agree they are among the best the genre has to offer, but as far as I can tell the only thing that sets them apart from junk like The Fantastic Four is a slightly better screenplay and at least an attempt at something deeper and richer beyond blowing stuff up real big and loud.

The Cabin in the Woods Movie Review

Joss Whedon has built a strong cult following around his projects that have a tendency to subvert genre conventions and put a new spin on familiar stories. His short-lived TV series “Firefly” and the follow-up film Serenity was a sci-fi space western. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which most people forget was a movie before it was a popular TV show starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, took the dumb blonde caricature who is always the first to die in horror films and made her the hero, an ass-kicking, smart-talking, wooden stake-wielding defender of humanity. As co-writer along with Drew Goddard, who directs, and producer of The Cabin in the Woods, Whedon turns his attention to the slasher/horror/torture porn set of genres and sub-genres.