The Reel World

“Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

With those words begin an adventure that started with the legacy of Willis O’Brien’s  The Lost World. You see, dinosaur films are nothing new; they have held our child-like fascination since the industry was born. Jurassic Park was, however, something very new when it thundered into our cineplexes and forever in our imaginations 20 years ago. The marriage of brand new CGI technology with Stan Winston’s superbly detailed animatronics models transports you back 65 million years in time.

Remakes, reboots, and sequels: these are the trends in Hollywood that seem to make fan boys groan.  Some films should be left in the past, and some franchises simply need to come to an end.  But every so often a film comes along that dares to show us something new, and the end result manages to capture some of the magic that got us to love the original film to begin with.  The new Evil Dead filmmakers managed to succeed in doing just that and deliver a film that has me excited about what is next for the Book of the Dead and all those unfortunate enough to flip through its pages.

When I tell you The Host is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, you’ll probably think I’m exaggerating. There’s a decent chance you don’t know me and that we’ll never meet, so there’s no way for you to know I’m not prone to hyperbole or making “Best Ever/Worst Ever” statements. Obviously, I haven’t watched every movie that’s ever been made, but I feel reasonably confident in saying I’ve seen more than most people. Since I don’t make pronouncements like these lightly, I’m going to do my very best to explain why The Host — a stunningly bad sci-fi/romance that utterly fails as a work of science fiction and as a big-screen love story — is among the most inept films I’ve come across.

"Sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse."

If you are a fan of director Chan-wook Park, you are used to the kinds of bizarre images and somewhat enigmatic story elements that dominate the landscape of Stoker. While none of the images here reach quite into the territory of Oldboy, it's hard not to plug into the disturbed nature of the film's themes and story. I left the movie with more questions than answers and a little bit lost as to how exactly I was going to approach this review.

For years it seems DreamWorks Animation has been living in the shadow of Pixar.  Sure, DreamWorks has had their success with Shrek and Ice Age, but when you stack the films next to Pixar’s library, you see Pixar just seems to be the best at what they do.  That is until The Croods came along; with the new DreamWorks release it would appear the animation studio has stepped up their game and released their best-looking 3D film to date.  My expectations were not too high with this release, but I was at least relieved I wouldn’t be watching Ice Age Ten: The Ice is Still Melting. 

“I'm tired of seeing the same thing. Everybody's so miserable here because they see the same things every day, they wake up in the same bed, same houses, same depressing streetlights, one gas station, grass, it's not even green, and it’s brown. Everything is the same and everyone is just sad. I really don't want to end up like them. I just want to get out of here. There's more than just spring break. This is our chance to see something different.”

Somehow I really doubt that Gomez’s character’s desire for something different was quite like what she got. You remember Spring Break, right?

"What's the secret to getting in...There has to be one, right?"

You will probably never look at Princeton University in quite the same way again after you've seen Tina Fey's latest film, Admission. Under the guise of a poorly-played-out romantic comedy, the film offers us much more comedic insight into the mysterious world of college admissions than it does about relationships. The film was actually based on a novel written by Jean Hanff Korelitz and takes us deep into the labyrinth of how a prestigious college goes about accepting its future students. Of course, it's a romp and not intended to depict the actual process.

It’s like I always tell people, the only thing better than one gloriously over-the-top action spectacle centered around an attack on the White House is TWO gloriously over-the-top action spectacles centered around an attack on the White House. Lucky(?) for us, Hollywood is happy to oblige in 2013. Channing Tatum gets a chance to protect Jamie Foxx from a very hostile takeover in June’s White House Down, but they’ve been beaten to the box office punch by Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart in the junky, wildly entertaining, and more mythical-sounding Olympus Has Fallen.

Some movies have a way of simply sneaking up on you and leave you exiting the theater with a multitude of thoughts and emotions.  When a film comes along where you are able to forget your troubles or the stresses of the real world, and long after the final credit has rolled you still can’t shake certain images or lines of dialog from your mind, this is usually the best sign of a good film.  The Call I must confess snuck up on me and managed to suck me into “the hive” of the Los Angeles 911 dispatch center and has kept me in its clutches as I write up this review.

"Welcome to the wonderful world of magic."

They say that the hand is quicker than the eye. Through the art of misdirection and skillful manipulation we have been awed by magicians ever since Glog made Ooof's club disappear somewhere in Mesopotamia circa 20,000 BC. It's not all skill, really. The truth is we've always wanted to be fooled. We're begging for "magicians" to tamper with our sense of reality. I don't know how fast the hand happens to be, but today we're fooled at the speed of 24 frames per second (unless you happen to be Peter Jackson).