Years after the fall of the Galactic Empire, a new threat to freedom arises in the form of the First Order. With the goal of destroying the Republic and becoming the dominate government, the First Order found itself faced with a new generation of freedom fighters, the Resistance. Led by General Leia Organa, the...
I first saw The Dreamers (2003) a few years ago. I had just seen Eva Green play Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (2006), and since she played a different type of Bond girl and gave a good performance, I wanted to see her in another role. At the time, there was not much to...
I first saw Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) in December of 1981. It was my final quarter at Western Washington University. My roommate, Eugene, and I needed a break from studying, and the movie was playing at a campus auditorium. At the time, I had never heard of Thomas Hardy or of his infamous novel,...
A good gangster movie does two contradictory things at once. First, it must show how the gangster is just like everyone else. Second, it must show how he is like no one else. Black Mass (2015), a biopic about real-life gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, achieved both. It’s the best gangster movie I’ve seen in...
A long time ago… 1977 …in a galaxy far far away… Hoquiam, Washington …I took a high school literature class in science fiction. (Please don’t ask me to remember the teacher’s name. Like I said, it was a loooooooong time ago!) One day after school, the teacher loaded us into a school bus and...
When Fantastic Four opened with a young Reed Richards (Owen Judge) in class on career day, saying his career goal was to be the first person to teleport, I knew the filmmakers had taken a false step, and the movie would suffer from it. Maybe it is just a prologue, I try to console...
I have always been lukewarm to the Mission Impossible movies. Action is not my favorite movie genre, because I find the plots simple-minded, the characters stereotypical, and the action scenes–the genre’s bread and butter–overdone and predictable. (Car chases! Wow! Fist fights! Pow! Gun fights! Whoa! Who would’ve ever thought there would be a gun...
Yesterday I finally purchased Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) from iTunes movies. I had seen the movie three or four times before, and it has proven to be enjoyable everytime. Since every year or two, I suffer the desire to see it again, I decided that I needed to own it. The price was...
Lest anyone believe I was naive, when I went to The Legend of Hercules, I wasn't expecting a great movie. I doubt that I was expecting a good movie. From the trailers I saw, I could tell that Renny Harlin suffered from mixed ideas about how to film this legendary story. Should a...
