Category → Movie Reviews
Review: Super 8
![Super 8 [Paramount]](http://www.woogmoog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/super82.jpg "Super 8 [Paramount]")
Warning: The review below contains very minor spoilers for Super 8. If you’re so spoiler-averse you can’t stand to learn that ‘the good guys win’ and other relatively inconsequential things, beware!
Confession time: I’ve never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wasn’t even born when E.T. came out, and I think the last time I saw that I was like seven. I have no connection to this nostalgic Steven Spielberg people keep touting while hailing J.J. Abrams’ Super 8.
The Spielberg I nostalgia-bomb myself with is the guy in the 101st Airborne jacket, the guy behind Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Munich or Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s films fill the viewer with a certain sense of awe, wonder and adventure, and even Spielberg’s weaker entries fare far better than anything Super 8 can muster.
Super 8 is a mess. A mess that starts off promising but ends up falling apart under its own weight. This is unfortunate because there is a bevy of strong performances from the movie’s cast of kids and some interesting concepts but, like most summer schlock these days, the concept is the only aspect of the film that’s been fleshed out. Abrams had an idea for a movie and shot it before anyone finished writing the last act. READ MORE!
Springtime Double Feature: Super vs. Sucker Punch
Preface: This was supposed to be a review of Super, but I couldn’t help contrasting the craziness in Super with the craziness in Sucker Punch. Both James Gunn and Zack Snyder are swinging for the fences with these movies, but Gunn hits it out of the park while Snyder epically whiffs. Both movies have the distinction of being totally batshit insane, but only one of them resonates. READ MORE!
Review: Unstoppable
![Unstoppable [Twentieth Century Fox]](http://www.woogmoog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/unstoppable_xlg-690x1024.jpg "Unstoppable [Twentieth Century Fox]")
Tony Scott’s directorial output over the past decade has been rife with eye-bleedingly obnoxious symphonies of shakycam shenanigans and over-stylized mishmash. Among the most annoying offenders are his shots in which the camera dollies in a circle at ludicrous speed around something as innocuous as a character sitting at a computer or having a normal, irrelevant inside-voices conversation.
Suffice to say, I was not looking forward to Unstoppable. The last time Tony Scott played with a train set we ended up with the miserable The Taking of Pelham 123. Pelham 123’s opening scenes feature John Travolta in freeze-frame cosplaying as a member of the Village People and set against the dulcet tones of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” It is utterly ridiculous.
I braced myself against the seat, awaiting the inevitable wave of thumping bass, freeze frames and joyless camera-tossed-in-a-clothes-dryer action.
Jarringly, it didn’t come. READ MORE!
Review: The Social Network
![The Social Network [Photo - Columbia Pictures]](http://www.woogmoog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/socnet1.jpg "The Social Network [Photo - Columbia Pictures]")
A David Fincher film is an event.
Seven was my very first Fincher film way back in 1995. There are scenes and images from that movie that are burned into my memory. But, like many others, it wasn’t until 1999’s seminal Fight Club that I truly became enamored with him.
Like for many of the impressionable youth of my age at the time, Fight Club was and remains a milestone film. It came out at just the right time alongside flicks such as The Matrix and was a gateway drug into cinema for a generation raised on video game consoles, Napster and the Internet (née Interbutt). READ MORE!
Apocalyptic Double Feature: Legion vs. Book of Eli
![Legion vs. The Book of Eli [Screen Gems + Warner Bros.]](http://www.woogmoog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/legion-vs-eli3.jpg "Legion vs. The Book of Eli [Screen Gems + Warner Bros.]")
Last week, an earthquake ravaged the greater Washington area (the ground shook a little bit and I think a mailbox may have fallen over) and the good citizens of Rockville, Maryland were aflutter the next morning, visions of Roland Emmerich’s latest apocalyptic masterpiece (prophecy???) fresh in their hearts and minds. While this unprecedented catastrophe (the earthquake, not the Emmerich movie) sent the uninformed masses running frantically to consult the nearest Mayan calendar, I was merely inspired to dust off my 2012 DVD. READ MORE!
Review: Inception
![Inception [Photo - Warner Bros.]](http://www.woogmoog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Inception-movie-poster-5-702x1024.jpg "Inception [Photo - Warner Bros.]")
Inception is something special. It is the artistic culmination of everything Christopher Nolan has done, from Memento to The Prestige, from Following to The Dark Knight – every trick, every technique, every idea a snowflake in an avalanche colliding into one incredible opus.
It is a movie whose hype is entirely justified, a wholly engrossing and amazing piece of popular commercial entertainment.
This is what expensive, high-tech Hollywood art can and should be. READ MORE!
Review: Predators
![Predators [Photo - Twentieth Century Fox]](http://www.woogmoog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/predators_xlg-692x1024.jpg "Predators [Photo - Twentieth Century Fox]")
It’s been a rough couple of years for everyone’s favorite cloaky-snarly-stabby yakbak-utilizing alien hunter. The one-two punch of the overall horrendous Alien vs. Predator movies (AvP is watchable but terrible, and AvP: Requiem is like some sort of hate crime) while his xenomorph counterparts live it up in star-studded sequel after sequel (yes, I am kidding – no rational person feels anything positive for Alien: Resurrection).
Can Robert Rodriguez and relative newcomer Nimród Antal turn all of that around? READ MORE!
Review: Restrepo
![Restrepo [Photo - National Geographic/Outpost Films]](http://www.woogmoog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/restrepo.jpg "Restrepo [Photo - National Geographic/Outpost Films]")
There’s no explicit agenda in this documentary, no side rooted for. There are no experts from one side of the ideological fence lobbing grenades at the other, no professors or economists or politicians. There’s only the soldiers. Frightened, angry, depressed, they form the core of Restrepo, a war documentary unlike any other. READ MORE!
Review: The Last Airbender
![M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender [Photo - Paramount]](http://www.woogmoog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/wallpap.jpg "M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender [Photo - Paramount]")
The experience of watching The Happening unfold on the silver screen to an unsuspecting audience is something that can never be replicated. The trailers hinted at something frightening, some new twist M. Night Shyamalan would pull on us. Watching that unfold and collapse under so much unintentional hilarity and wooden acting so unimaginably bad is something I never expected would happen again.
Enter The Last Airbender. READ MORE!
Review: Jonah Hex
![Jonah Hex [Photo - Warner Bros.]](http://www.woogmoog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/jonah_hex.jpg "Jonah Hex [Photo - Warner Bros.]")
Just about the only thing Jonah Hex has going for it is its running time: discounting the credits sequence, the movie’s really only about 75 minutes long. Please don’t take this as a recommendation. Standing outside in the sun’s harsh ultraviolet rays for the same amount of time is much more entertaining, and you save a few bucks to boot. Nothing in Jonah Hex works, from the characters to the action to the writing and the special effects: it’s all a boring, stilted mess. READ MORE!