Into the Woods
♫ This Is Bad, Please Help ♫ Starring: Meryl Streep, Chris Pine Review written by Robert D. Patrick It’s a grisly business to adapt a musical to screen, there is no doubt, particularly when the source material is beloved. Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods shoehorns a myriad of fairy tale characters into an allegoric hornet’s nest. Culled from various stories, everything from Little Red Riding Hood to Jack and the...
Godzilla
Pacific Commotion Starring: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson Review written by Tom Bevis In the last sixty years, Godzilla has become a cultural phenomenon widely cherished by fans worldwide. Following the release of Gojira in 1954, the King of Monsters has spun off into dozen of films, television shows, video games, and comic books (including a series of Marvel cross-overs) and has perhaps become the most recognizable of all...
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Red, White and Bruise Starring: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson Review written by Tom Bevis At this point, the films coming out of Marvel Studios need no introduction. Thanks to the irresistible and insatiable curiosity of the masses and the infinitely long reach of this wonderfully infamous machine we call the Internet, it seems all details of the films are readily available weeks prior to the actual opening. To those who have been...
The World’s End
Of Suds and Sods Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost Review written by Robert D. Patrick The World’s End is about five raucous, syllable bending Brits whom white knuckle barley pops with feverish gusto (most of that is accurate). The old pals reunite, after absconding from one another twenty years earlier, to take on a fanged beast of a pub crawl that they failed to slay in their youth. The mad capped league of friends, headed by...
Elysium
Paradise Lost; Subsequently Found By Matt Damon Starring: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster Review written by Andrew Younger In dystopian storytelling, the protagonist often serves as little more than an avatar for the audience in order to explore some exaggerated negative feature of civilization. In order to be an effective audience surrogate, whether it is Winston Smith or Bernard Marx or Josef K., the dystopian protagonist only needs to...
Man of Steel
Man of Get Me Out of Here This is Terrible Starring: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams Review written by Robert D. Patrick Fluffy, steaming hot pancakes with a dollop of butter on top. A broken levee of maple syrup lacquers your flapjacks as your incisors ravenously saw apart a piece of juicy bacon. And if you’re in the mood to be a little mercurial, you can always stuff your frothing maw with the chicken fajita omelette, adorned with a...
After Earth
Smith 2 Smith Starring: Will Smith, Jaden Smith I’m about to really bum you guys out, so I hope you can forgive me. After Earth is not a Will Smith movie. Here’s a shortlist of things I learned about the future from After Earth: 1) In 1000 years, whales will have two blow holes. 2) Also, in 1000 years, climbing a volcano will seem like a good idea. Not that astounding, I know, but no one’s walking into this theater to learn stuff. The...
The Hangover Part III
Sequel: The Sequel Starring: Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper Review written by Tom Bevis Full disclosure, here: I didn’t see The Hangover Part Two. Or The Hangover Part II, whichever they decided to roll with. Why didn’t I, you may ask? Because I liked the first one a lot. It mixed dirty comedy, ridiculous scenarios, and a mystery just one step below any neo-noir picture being made today. I wasn’t so surprised that it exploded the way it...
Iron Man 3
Ironing Out the Kinks Review written by Robert D. Patrick Starring: Robert Downey, Jr, Don Cheadle Robert Downey Jr, draped in an egotistical, incisor flashing smile, surfs his fingers over the visage of an Audi that has the color of a blue jay’s plumage. The master thespian lowers his sunglasses, tilts his head down like a craning viper, and emits a cool sentence with the gratifying reverberation of a horseshoe straddling a...
Oblivion
Tom Cruise Plays Video Game; It’s Fun! Starring: Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman Review written by Tom Bevis I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you really like sci-fi movies, and it’s been just so long since you saw a good one. But, hot damn, you don’t like Tom Cruise or movies that look like they’re ripping off any sci-fi movie from The Matrix to The Postman. Well, the simple solution here is to just swallow whatever...
