Category: Reviews
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Review: AVATAR
The dreams of Iron Jim There’s a man who can’t walk, but in his dreams he can stride out into an alien wilderness and run. The man is Jim Cameron, and if he is known to be a tyrant, perhaps it’s only because he’s spent so much of his life stuck in that damn wheelchair.…
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Review: HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE
The Ghost Story I’ve given the Harry Potter films an easy ride over the years. Flat raves for the Columbus films (stylistically, they hew closest to the spirit of their respective novels). Warm enthusiasm for films 3 and 5, each sharply told by talented directors. This leaves the mishmash Goblet of Fire as the only outright rejection, but coming…
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Review: STAR TREK
And on we go. So here we are, at last. Honestly, the (latent? dormant? something) Trekkie in me – the one who, like umpteen million others, found Trek when he was a disenfranchised, too-cerebral adolescent – never thought the Powers That Be would have the balls, or the foolishness, to reboot the franchise as they…
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Review: THE DARK KNIGHT
You wanna play a game? Let’s say you had an idea. A kind of “intellectual project,” if you will: you saw a problem, and thought you could design a solution. The problem was a city run rampant with organized crime, and the solution was very much a design — a visual/emotional icon, more myth than…
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Review: THE GOLDEN COMPASS
One ring to rule them compass I feel sorry for The Golden Compass. Of all the fant-lit-to-film gimmes in the half-decade since The Lord of the Rings, Compass is the one which most painfully wants to wear Daddy’s clothes. Its every nook and cranny is so painfully subservient to that frantic desire that the film that emerges is utterly naked.…
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Review: LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD
Re-posting this review from 2007, one of my favourites. Somehow, I never mentioned Timothy Olymphant once by name; but, the rest of the piece, I really like.
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Review: TITANIC
The Ship of Dreams I remember very clearly that for about six or seven hours, Titanic was the best-kept secret in the world. As the release of James Cameron’s seventh feature film drew towards us in 1997, I had heard all the horror stories, seen the (rather irritatingly) vague trailer, read the Time Magazine article about the sinking ship…