Superman Returns Is A Rote Rehash of Past Superman Movies

Oh, what a puzzle Superman Returns is.

Describing how Superman Returns goes awry makes one sound like they're just contradicting themselves. At once, Returns is a film that's too dour but also too goofy. It's got too little action for long stretches but what action we do get is pretty uninvolving. It's slavishly devoted to the original Christoper Reeve Superman films (complete with recreating the final shot of Superman II) yet struggles to understand what actually made those classic movies work. While those grievances may all sound like vague paradoxes, they're also all true. Superman Returns strives to be the kind of epic movie event that soars above all other blockbusters. Instead, it just falls to Earth. Hard.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift Revved This Franchise Up

In hindsight, one particularly fascinating part about the Fast & Furious series is how, unlike most mega-blockbuster franchises, its initial films weren't all that great. The Fast and the Furious, the very first title in the saga, becoming a sleeper box office hit way above anyone's expectations showed that it clearly struck a chord with viewers. To boot, the importance of the original feature being one of the few American movies at the dawn of the 21st-century to star people of color cannot be underestimated, particularly when exploring how and why this series managed to resonate so storngly with audiences in the first place. But much like the DC Extended Universe or the Star Trek and Harry Potter movies, Fast & Furious didn't really hit its stride until its sequels came along.

Richard Linklater Delivers An Intriguing Trip With A Scanner Darkly

Richard Linklater's primary focus as a filmmaker has been making quiet meditations on how mundane moments of life shape us as people in the long-term. This wistful kind of storytelling has served him extremely well in delivering such outstanding features as Boyhood or any of the three Before movies. But over the course of his career Linklater has stepped out of that comfort zone to deliver delightful family comedies (School of Rock), remarkable Coen Brothers-esque dark comedies (Bernie) and even acclaimed period piece romantic dramas (Me and Orson Welles). But perhaps his biggest stretch outside of Boyhood-type projects is A Scanner Darkly, an animated adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's novel of the same name.

Brick Is An Excellent Neo-Noir In Touch With The Past And The Present

The most prominent shared trait across Rian Johnson's eclectic group of feature film directorial efforts is that he loves to take traditional film genres and subvert expectations audiences have of those genres. The Brothers Bloom take heist movies into a quirky direction, Looper was a more methodical time travel action movie and The Last Jedi brought an intimate angle to the Star Wars mythos. Johnson constantly upends conventional genre norms in his motion pictures but he does so with clearly evident love and knowledge of the genres or franchises he's tackling. This prominent feature of his work as an artist was alive and well in his first directorial effort, Brick.

Inside Man See's Spike Lee Excelling In The Confines of A Hostage Thriller

Spike Lee has done a lot in his distinguished filmmaking career, but in 2006, twenty years after his first directorial effort was released, he got to try out helming a mid-budget Hollywood heist movie for the first time. Easily the most expensive and commercial endeavor of his career, the feature would end up being Inside Man, and thankfully, Lee wouldn't be sacrificing his own unique traits as an artist to make this motion picture. For instance, though he's not credited with the screenplay penned solely by Russell Gerwitz, a lot of traits in the Inside Man script, namely an emphasis on extensive dialogue, feel akin to what one might find in a typical Lee screenplay. This project certainly feels like it's been fitted for Lee's sensibilities and that results in an extremely entertaining heist thriller.

Half Nelson Tackles Two Troubled Human Beings With Remarkable Levels of Nuance

Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is a good teacher. He's maybe not the best teacher ever but he's passionate about what he teaches his Middle School students, clearly has a dedication to the material he teaches and has some real personality when he's teaching to his students. However, as an everyday human being, Dunne is more of a complex person as he struggles with the sickness of addiction. Cocaine is his drug of choice and he takes it regularly, to the point that one of his students, Drey (Shareeka Epps), catches him in the middle of a drug trip in one of the school's locker room. Believe it or not, this moment leads to an unusual friendship between the two of them, as Dan starts to look out for Drey, who has her own set of problems at home mainly stemming from the sudden re-emergence of Frank (Anthony Mackie), a drug dealer that Drey's brother used to sell for, in her life.

Children of Men Is A Riveting Post-Apocalyptic Tale As Only Alfonso Cuaron Could Tell It

Right after Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, director Alfonso Cuaron had a whole heck of a lot of clout, the man who had previously been known for doing more offbeat fare like Y Mama Tu Tambien was now the filmmaker behind one of the biggest movies of 2004. Cuaron parlayed this influence to get a large-scale action movie made that differed in many ways from conventional action fare, namely in its dour tone and how its lead character was not a John Rambo-esque figure that could pick up a gun and take down any person who crossed his path. Instead, the lead character would be a bitter individual going through the motions of daily life who's thrust into a narrative far larger than himself.

Even This James Bond Novice Was Floored By Casino Royale

Come 2006, it was time for James Bond to get an upgrade. The Pierce Brosnan era of the character had come to an end four years prior and MGM/EON were eager to address audience complaints that had emerged in response to the last Brosnan Bond movie, Die Another Day. Just like how the prior year's Batman Begins had approached Batman, this new take on James Bond, which would be called Casino Royale, was looking to go back to the very beginning of a cinema icons career and see what informed their personality. Also like Batman Begins, Casino Royale ended up being a big moneymaker that not only revitalized an aging franchise but also stands up as just a great film even when separated from the larger franchise it exists in.

Thank You For Smoking Squanders Its Potential On Derivative Storytelling

Juno was the movie that took director Jason Reitman to a whole new level of fame, but it wasn't his very first foray into the world of feature-length movies. After directing a large number of short films, Reitman made his inaugural foray into this type of directing with Thank You For Smoking, a political satire that establishes the kind of character-informed dark comedy that would be omnipresent in his subsequent works. Unfortunately, the kind of quality that would be found in Reitman's next three features is nowhere near as prominent in Thank You For Smoking, which is a more erratic and frequently frustrating type of Jason Reitman movie.

Douglas Laman Gets A Tune Up (Entry #9): The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance

DOUGLAS LAMAN GETS A TUNE-UP

ENTRY #9:  The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance

Douglas Laman Gets A Tune-Up is a series of essays wherein Douglas Laman listens to an album of music he's never fully listened to before (though he may have heard one or two songs from it) and writes up his brief thoughts on it.

For so many years, My Chemical Romance was a source of pointless ridicule from myself. Even though I had had no exposure to their music, I made them the butt of so many of my own jokes that degraded the band and their work simply because my younger brother was fixated on this band to a major degree back on his middle school days. Thus, the anti-MCR jokes, like the years in a Smash Mouth song, started coming and didn't stop coming despite me, again, having no actual experience with their music. For that, I truly apologize to the band and its assorted members, who, though not above any form of criticism, deserved to have criticism stemming from someone who had actually listened to their music.

High School Musical Is Pure Musical Cheese And, Delightfully, Very Much Knows That

How have I not seen High School Musical before? There are numerous classic movies that I've reviewed for this website that I'm not entirely surprised I've never seen due to a myriad of external circumstances, but seriously, how did I manage to avoid watching High School Musical prior to December 31st, 2017? This Disney Channel original movie was a touchstone for my generation, something whose songs were belted out ad nauseum by people in my age range all throughout my first years of middle school and is now looked upon with nostalgia by those very same people. It's baffling it's taken me this long to get here but I finally made it to High School Musical!

The Fountain Is Amazingly Grand In Both Its Visuals And Emotional Power

There exist a recurring subgenre of more substantive and ambitious high-concept fantasy/science-fiction movies dedicated to using the stylized tendencies ingrained into their specific genres to explore larger-scale ideas about mortality, our place in the world, death, etc. Some of the best films in this subgenre include A Monster Calls, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Cloud Atlas as well as the subject of this review, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, an absolutely beautiful motion picture that spans centuries and dances around the cosmos all in the name of an intimate tale depicting man's inability to cope with the looming prospect of death.

Lady In The Water Is Listless Fairy Tale Storytelling

Lady In The Water was a game-changer for M. Night Shyamalan but not in the ways he intended, good Lord no. His previous movie, The Village, may have generated a divisive response that resulted in strong but frontloaded box office but at least that one has its ardent fanbase. Lady In The Water, on the other hand, has spent its eleven years of existence under intense derision and has been widely seen as a turning point for Shyamalan from titan filmmaker to the nearly decade long stretch he'd spend in the land of awful cinema before The Visit revived him. I wish I could say I was going against the tide and found Lady In The Water enjoyable, but alas, I found it be a kind of interesting but mostly boring misfire.

It's Hard Not To Get Heated Up Over Environmental Dangers Thanks To An Inconvenient Truth

It's always fascinating to go back and watch movies made in a specific political climate and see if they both hold up as movies and examine them as artifacts of the era in which they were made. When I watched Sidney Lumet's Network for the first time last month, that was the exact experience I went through as the film very much served as an encapsulation of 1970's politics while also resonating on its own timeless merits. In the first decade of the 21st century, plenty of pieces of pop culture emerged critical of the George W. Bush administration, one of which was Al Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a film that does make reference to real world political events occurring in the W. Bush era, but is mostly concentrated on the timeless horrors of global warming.

The Prestige Is Magic, You Knoooooow....Never Believe It's Not So!

In between creating two different Batman movies that revolutionized how we would forever see the character, director Christopher Nolan managed to also churn out a thriller entirely centered on magicians entitled The Prestige. A Fall 2006 drama starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, it did not receive the massive box office intakes Nolan's directorial efforts now make without even blinking, instead ranking as the 61st biggest movie of 2006, winding up narrowly behind Final Destination 3 and the 2006 remake of The Omen. Of course, people have been talking about and enjoying The Prestige long after those horror films have faded from the public's memory and now upon seeing The Prestige for myself, it's easy to see why it's garnered such acclaim over the past decade.

Journey To A Captivating World In Pan's Labyrinth

Despite being a massive Guillermo Del Toro fanboy, I've never seen his 2006 feature film Pan's Labyrinth before, which I suppose is akin to being a massive fan of The Beatles while thinking Abbey Road is solely a road in London. Anywho, sitting down to watch this one was a fascinating experience in terms of placing it in the larger picture Del Toro's filmography, as his later films would carry over certain elements of Pan's Labyrinth, such as a period era setting that plays heavily into the story (Crimson Peak) and the heavy use of mythic fairy tale characters (Hellboy II: The Golden Army). It's apparent that the experience of Pan's Labyrinth left a profound impact on Guillermo Del Toro as a director.

Snakes On A Plane Review (Classic Write-Up)

The fervor surrounding Snakes On A Planes upon its initial theatrical release is, in hindsight, kind of extraordinary. All of the social platforms we use in frequent capacity today were either nonexistent or still in their infancy (keep in mind, when Snakes On A Plane came out in August 2006, Twitter was only a month old and Tumblr was six months away from existing at all), yet, this film spread like wildfire across the web. It wasn't the first feature film to garner the intense interest of the denizens of the interwebs, but its memorably outrageous title made it a kid of online phenomenon like few other films at the time.

Slither Review (Classic Write-Up)

The single most important question you must ask yourself prior to watching Slither is the age old inquiry "Do I want to watch an extremely gory movie where extraterrestrial mind-controlling slugs lay waste to a small Southern town?" If so, well, Slither should more than satisfy, as it excels as not only living up to all the gross-out potential premise, but also in having some well-written characters and examples of strong acting from the likes of Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks.

The Wicker Man Review (Classic Write-Up)

Allow me to say it once again; Nicolas Cage is a great actor. Films like Adaptation demonstrate the sort of acting accomplishments the man can achieve, making his transition into the laughingstock of the internet in recent years sort of befuddling. Yes, he's been popping up in a number of low-quality films since 2010, but really, it feels weird to boil down the entirety of Nicolas Cages career down to just some memes of him yelling "HOW'D IT GET BURNED???" That line of dialogue comes courtesy of The Wicker Man, a film released over Labor Day weekend nine years ago and one which provides....well, let's call it an interesting experience for now, shall we?

Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby (Classic Write-Up)

Two Days, One Talladega Night

Some movies are intentionally time capsules of certain eras, period pieces obviously falling under such a distinction, but other movies unintentionally serve as a great reminder of what the film industry was like in a certain place and time. Flash back to August 2006 with me, won't you, when Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby was released into theaters to large financial success.