The Reel World

Captivating, creepy, and chilling, the supernatural thriller Truth or Dare takes you on a never-ending journey of death.  Much like other horror films that have perfected the formula for surprise and contagious emotional terror, this film has it all bundled tightly and calculating to transfix the audience into believing. If you saw the films It Follows, The Ring, and the Final Destination series, you’ll relive the sensations those films made way beyond leaving the theater.

Brad Anderson is a television actor who has puttered around that industry going back to David Simon's Homicide: Life On The Streets and The Wire. This is pretty much his first feature film opportunity in the director's chair, and Beirut certainly shows that he has a lot of talent... as a television director. No question the chops are there, but the framing and pacing of Beirut suffers from a kind of small thinking that fails to keep one's attention for very long. He hasn't learned how to take advantage of large set pieces and exotic locations to expand the experience for his audience. Some will believe I'm talking about action or the kind of cheap thrills that sell tickets, but that's not exactly my point.

Bold and incredibly compelling, the movie Chappaquiddick is a “tell all” with a lot of authority.  Much like last year’s The Post, it tells its story pulling no punches, playing out the characters and holding nothing back.  Although I’m familiar with the incident, many of the facts were clouded, squashed, or lost due to current events at the time.  If you liked The Post, then here’s a film that will enlighten you and make you cringe. In 1969 about one year after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy while he was touring for votes to be nominated for President, his brother Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) was already thinking about his chance at the highest position in America. On the fateful night of July 18, however, things ran amok, taking him out of any chance for the Presidency. 

You might call me jaded, but I am pretty disappointed by the state of horror movies. It's not just the last few years. The truth is I haven't seen 10 really good horror movies in over a decade. Now that I've had a chance to see A Quiet Place, that number isn't going up. A Quiet Place is not a really good horror movie. It ends up making a lot of the same mistakes that filmmakers think define a horror film in the modern age. It relies too heavily on jump scares and characters who do some of the most idiotic things, thus placing them in a somewhat self-created dangerous situation. But I will make the argument that A Quiet Place is still a pretty good horror film because of a rather clever and unique concept and a filming process that allows us care for these characters more than the usual horror film red shirt fodder that too often leaves me rooting for the monster in a Darwin-like weed-out-the-gene-pool kind of way.

Like so many others, when I read the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline I simply fell in love with the nostalgic ride through the 80’s, all thanks to the virtual reality world called The Oasis.  From start to finish it was a book filled with pop culture references that would make film and video game geeks squeal with delight, and it was no surprise that the book was a hit and would be turned into a film.  There were only two names I could think of that could ever come close to making this film a reality: Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg.  With Spielberg involved, he was the only person I could imagine that had the clout to get all the licensing rights needed to pull this adaption, but still the biggest question I had was does Spielberg still have it in him?

When Pacific Rim first came out, I had a blast with the film.  It was the ultimate giant-monster-versus-giant-robot film that my inner ten-year-old has wanted to see for so long.  Sure, the film had some dialog issues, but the world that Guillermo del Toro created with the film was so over-the-top and beautiful that the bad dialog was easy to forget.  It knew what it was, brainless eye candy, and it delivered in a big way. Now we have the sequel coming out; del Toro is no longer at the helm, and in his place we have Steven S. DeKnight whose previous directorial efforts have been episodes from Daredevil and Dollhouse.  Does the sequel hold up?  Well, to put it bluntly, not even close.

For some reason, adapting videogames into good films has been the nut Hollywood just can’t seem to crack. The Resident Evil series has been successful, but I wouldn’t say it really holds up to the game. Personally, Silent Hill has been the only adaption I’ve really enjoyed, and that film has divided fans as well. As for the Tomb Raider franchise that kicked off in 2001, sure it had some fun sequences. And with Angelina Jolie becoming a hot commodity at the time, it’s not too much of a surprise that it did well at the box office. Now 17 years later, the time has come for Tomb Raider to get a makeover

“We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.”

Much has been made about the fact that Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time is the most expensive movie ever directed by a woman of color, carrying a reported $103 million price tag. The good news is the filmmaker has absolutely infused her own personality and perspective into this live-action Disney spectacle. (No small feat, by the way.) The bad news is that DuVernay has taken those considerable resources and made a wildly uneven movie that, at various points, somehow manages to look both way more expensive and way cheaper than its budget would suggest.

“Don’t give them all of you Dominika. Hold something back. That is how you will survive.”

There appears to be nothing Jennifer Lawrence can’t do: she is an Oscar winner, the face of a successful movie franchise, and now she is a Russian spy that specializes in seduction techniques. Now in the looks department, there are scores of men that would gladly hand over their social security number for the opportunity to be seduced by J Law, so her casting was a no brainer. But she went much deeper than that, showing an unparalleled intellect and natural aptitude for the world of espionage.

"Welcome to game night".

Everybody loves playing games. OK, most people like playing games. Friends have been getting together for game nights since there have been games. From the couples’ bridge days of the 1950's to poker night with the guys, most of us have gotten together to play some kind of a game with friends. The thing about games is that they're frivolous. Playing games with some buddies is a good excuse to kill a few hours, maybe have a few drinks. You're not solving the world's problems, and it's usually just a simple night of entertainment. The same can be said for New Line Cinema's Game Night starring Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, and Kyle Chandler.