REVIEW: Bikes vs Cars [2015]

“In heaven everyone rides a bicycle” The amount of gasoline-powered automobiles on Earth is growing at an exponential rate and everyone needs to look at what this realization is doing to humanity. I’m not even talking about global warming, pollution, depletion of natural resources, or any of those highly-politicized issues where proponents and detractors wield hyperbole to strike fear in the populace rather than spark change. I’m talking about a simple issue of safety for motorists and pedestrians alike made to share less and less space as each year passes.…

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REVIEW: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation [2015]

“Face your fate” It’s amazing what a few years can do for a celebrity’s image. From couch-jumping in love to rumors of getting written out of the fourth Mission: Impossible installment despite building the franchise to being the bell of the Hollywood Ball scaling the Burj Khalifa and now hanging from an Airbus A400M Atlas in flight without a stunt double, Tom Cruise epitomizes box office royalty. Hell, there’s even rumblings he’s trying to distance himself from Scientology now—but I won’t hold my breathe with that one. Whatever he does…

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REVIEW: Vacation [2015]

“I’m as hard as a faucet right now” I smelled trouble as soon as Ed Helms was cast in Vacation as the now father-of-two Rusty Griswold. While the perfect surrogate for Chevy Chase‘s bumbling Clark in a remake of the original National Lampoon’s Vacation, he’s a far cry from the character he’s meant to play in this half reboot/half sequel. I made the mistake of rewatching that first entry into the Griswold’s saga to realize it coupled with the equally fantastic Christmas Vacation prove Rusty was always the one family…

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REVIEW: National Lampoon’s Vacation [1983]

“Nothing worthwhile is easy. You know that.” You can’t blame the magazine for thinking movie-making was going to be easy after the success of National Lampoon’s Animal House. But does anyone really remember its two follow-ups National Lampoon’s Movie Madness and National Lampoon’s Class Reunion? I didn’t think so. Something about the latter must have hit someone’s funny bone, though, because screenwriter John Hughes—a writer for the periodical—would get another shot. This time it was in the form of a somewhat established property the producers knew could be successful as…

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REVIEW: Game Changers [2015]

“That’s not how you use that card” Can a film about twenty-eight year olds be considered a coming-of-age story? I guess it can when the two men in question were teenage professional gamers because that’s exactly what Robert Imbs‘ Game Changers is. And if we really thought about it, that age is a pretty critical crossroads in a person’s life regardless of the path they’ve taken to get there. Thirty is kind of an unspoken cut off point where maturity is either embraced or ignored forever. That’s a gross generalization…

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FANTASIA15 REVIEW: Crumbs [2015]

“People say the spaceship has been rusting in the sky since the beginning of the war” Spanish writer/director Miguel Llansó‘s independent film company Lanzadera Films explains its mission as a firm that focuses on “undiscovered countries, experimental, weird, hallucinatory, poetic fiction and documentary films”. I’d say his feature debut Crumbs is the epitome of exactly that. A self-proclaimed apocalyptic surreal science fiction, it posits a world centuries removed from a great war that’s all but extinguished life. Only the oft mistaken birth from that time remains: a new generation completely…

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FANTASIA15 REVIEW: Ava’s Possessions [2016]

“Did anyone call in sick for me?” When the industry is inundated with supernatural horror redundancies like it has for the past two decades, work like Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg‘s Shaun of the Dead or Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead‘s Spring are necessary to kept things from going stale. A point when audiences simply stop caring does exist. It’s apparently much farther out from the fad’s onset than you’d think America’s attention-deficiency would tolerate, but it will eventually arrive. Perhaps this extended longevity can be attributed to just such…

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REVIEW: Mommy [2014]

“A mother doesn’t wake up one morning not loving her son” If I can be justified in agreeing with all the praise after seeing just one of his films—his latest, Cannes Jury Prize-winning Mommy—twenty-five year old writer/director Xavier Dolan is every bit the wunderkind label that has been thrust upon him. Five films in six years all by the time he’s hit the quarter century mark with four debuting at Cannes and the other Venice? How can you not take notice of such accomplishments? Carrying the preconceptions a critical darling…

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REVIEW: Southpaw [2015]

“This is the talk you get when you lose not when you win” The origins of Southpaw are interesting because it was born from screenwriter Kurt Sutter‘s want to collaborate with Eminem. Now try to picture Marshall Mathers after peering upon any of the bloodied and crazed publicity stills of his replacement Jake Gyllenhaal without laughing. Sutter has said the boxing aspect of the script was meant as a metaphor for the rapper’s personal struggles and the fight for his daughter is exactly that. He hoped the project would prove…

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FANTASIA15 REVIEW: 奇人密碼: 古羅布之謎 [The Arti: The Adventure Begins] [2015]

“Where the heart is lies eternity” You can’t watch 奇人密碼: 古羅布之謎 [The Arti: The Adventure Begins] without finding yourself in awe of the amazing puppet work on display. While told it was only “enhanced” by CGI, it looks as though a lot more was computer-generated than such a verb would infer. For one the smoothness at which the characters move seems impossible and two there appears to be too many instances of fake backgrounds and green-screen effects to believe there weren’t other shortcuts taken. So it definitely behooves you to…

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FANTASIA15 REVIEW: Observance [2016]

“Just watch and report back” You know you’ve seen something special when your only thought upon completion is whether to watch again or scour the internet for possible interpretations. This is what Joseph Sims-Dennett‘s Observance did for me. A horror/suspense filled to the brim with atmosphere and mood, its tension gradually rises like the dark liquid barely contained by a jar in the corner of the room assigned to Parker (Lindsay Farris) for his latest surveillance job. Close-ups of that same fluid dripping down the walls cut in as filler…

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