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.

From My Collection: The Departed Movie Review

When Frank Costello asks a man how his mother is and he replies that she’s on her way out, Frank’s rejoinder, “We all are. Act accordingly,” sets a tone for the film. As the title suggests, death hangs like a pall over Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. It is a film in which most of the characters live with the fear of death around them at all times. They are cops and they are criminal mafia.

The story is of two young men, played by Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, who become embroiled in an elaborate plot to take down Costello’s crime organization from one end and infiltrate the Massachusetts State Police Force from the other. Damon plays Colin Sullivan, the mole inside the State Police investigative unit for organized crime. He is recruited by Costello as a boy in an extended prologue that introduces most of the major players. Then there’s DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan, a new police recruit fingered for a special deep undercover assignment to help bring Costello down.

Wall Street Movie Review: A First Look at an 80s Icon

“Greed is good.” So says Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street, in one of the most famous 80s cinematic speeches when he attempts to save his position as an investor trying to leverage more profit out of Teldar Paper. The line is oft quoted, oft cited as one of the greatest or most memorable lines in movie history, but most significantly it’s held aloft as the prime example of what was wrong with corporate America in the 1980s. And Gekko is viewed as the epitome, the representative on the screen of the worst elements of capitalism.