Apparently the Writer’s Guild of America has nominated Avatar for an award for Best Original Screenplay. This is surprising news. I had no idea Avatar even had a screenplay. I thought James Cameron had just organized a big game of charades and Sam Worthington took three hours to mime Ferngully before anyone in the cast [...]
Posts under ‘Movies’
Greatest Movies: The Data
For several months—possibly almost a year at this point—I’ve been working my way through Empire magazine’s list of the 500 greatest movies of all time. I’ve seen 203 so far, including those that I’d already seen before the list was published.
You won’t be surprised to learn that my tracking of this project involves a spreadsheet [...]
New Star Trek Trailer
I’ve gone all giddy. There’s a nice new, shiny Star Trek trailer for us all to drool over. It’s still pretty firmly in teaser territory, giving no real hint about the story beyond what’s already known (essentially that it’s an origin story revolving mostly around Kirk and Spock, and the villains are pointy-eared rather than the [...]
Babylon A.D.
This film features a man blowing up a robot attack plane with a handgun while doing a back somersault on a snowmobile. It features the line, “We’ll all die when we get to New York. Well, good night.” The main characters travel from Mongolia to Vladivostok via Kazakhstan. These facts should be all you need to [...]
Get Smart
Get Smart is the epitome of what I would call a decent movie. It would be crazy to call it great, but equally crazy to blast it. It’s like a sturdy table that lasts for fifty years—very capably constructed, without any real flaws, but nothing to write home about (clearly writing on the internet has [...]
Platoon
I’ve just taken another significant step on the road from fake movie buff (“I love movies, me.” “What do you think of the Godfather trilogy?” “Um, yeah, I’ve been meaning to see those.”) to real movie buff. Platoon has sat on my DVD shelf for the last half year, ever since my last abortive effort [...]