Movie Review: DOCTOR STRANGE – Marvel’s latest sticks to the format, but Cumberbatch is typically great and the visuals are nice.

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As well as having written for Marvel Comics in the recent past, I’ve been a Marvel Comics fan for as long as I can remember.  My interest in their comic books has waned dramatically over the last couple of years, but I still have a soft spot for the company.  One of my first memories of reading any kind of material was the first issue of Spider Man from Marvel UK in 1973.  I was hooked, and the characters and stories became a huge part of my life for decades to come.  This isn’t going to be a giant retrospective about Marvel Comics, but I couldn’t really start a review of Doctor Strange without a self-indulgent opening, right?

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Movie Review: HACKSAW RIDGE – surprisingly lightweight everywhere, but the war scenes are typically intense Gibson set-pieces

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In these days of keyboard #outrage, it’s easy to be shamed by association, and even by not taking a public position against certain things or people.  The single-mindedness of the insulated social justice warriors of the internet draws crude inference from expressed lack of opinion, drawing associations where none are present.  I’ve seen it on Facebook recently where if one does not publicly condemn Donald Trump or Brexit, you must, therefore, stand for them and all the terrible things associated.  It’s a divisiveness that is nothing but self-serving.  I haven’t been a victim of this, but I read a very brief review of Hacksaw Ridge the other day that went along the lines of “if you pay to see this movie, you’re supporting the racist, misogynist views of Mel Gibson”.  This guilt-by-even-tenuous-association is disgusting, but it speaks more of the mindset of the “writer” than it does of the other party.

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Movie Review: I ORIGINS – nice performance by Michael Pitt, but the movie lacks the courage of its conviction.

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There’s a somewhat interesting story behind I Origins – the movie itself, not necessarily the movie’s story.  Mike Cahill, writer and director, unable to resolve story issues during development phase of his follow up movie to Another Earth, essentially scrapped the draft and turned to writing, instead, an origin story for his original concept.  Hoping it would allow him to address the story issues of the first draft, I Origins was produced as a prequel to the main concept, which was set up at Fox Searchlight sometime in late 2015.

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Movie Review: SHELLEY – low-key Danish horror with good performances, but runs out of steam at the end.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie Reviews2 Comments

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I don’t speak Danish, so part of this is on me, I suppose.  I’m guessing that the likelihood of anyone reading this understanding Danish is sufficiently low for me to say that I would have turned the movie off due to lack of comprehension … the trouble with Shelley is that the movie is mostly in English, so I naturally expected that to continue.  That turns out not to be the case, so the third act continues in unsubtitled format – at least the copy I was watching.  It isn’t a total deal breaker, as the narrative is conveyed well enough by the visuals and direction.  Nevertheless, it would have been nice to have understood the spare dialogue that comes in the third act.

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Movie Review: DON’T BREATHE – Doesn’t live up to over-hyped expectations, but worth watching.

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I’m not exactly sure when or why I started disliking Stephen Lang.  I haven’t seen a lot of his work, and I didn’t recall him being in Manhunter all those years ago, but there was one movie I actually hated him in, or a TV show, or something.  No idea, though.  I know it was before Avatar, a movie that most people now, thankfully, regard as being mostly crap.  I think it’s something stupid, like his face.  I always have this feeling that he looks childish and petulant whenever I see him – like I said, stupid.  And it’s because of him specifically that I avoided watching Don’t Breathe.  I won’t go out of my way to never watch a movie Lang is in, though – the only moviemaker I refuse to watch these days is Kevin Smith, and my dislike of Lang is nowhere near that bad.  Whatever.  I ended up watching Don’t Breathe at the weekend, so here we are. Continue reading “Movie Review: DON’T BREATHE – Doesn’t live up to over-hyped expectations, but worth watching.” →