Christopher Nolan’s (Inception, The Prestige) last chapter in his Batman franchise is the exciting but imperfect The Dark Knight Rises. This is an excellent movie and successfully concludes the best trilogy I’ve ever seen. However, if you go in with the idea that it will be better than The Dark Knight, you will be disappointed. With Hedge Ledger’s to die for performance as the Joker, The Dark Knight is as close to a perfect movie as you will get. It holds a place on my Top 10 Movies of All-Time list. The Dark Knight Rises is very ambitious, a little too ambitious. At 2 hours and 45 minutes, you’d think they have plenty of time to tell its story and conclude the franchise, but there is so much to the story, and rushing its development and racing to its conclusion would not have resulted in a successful movie. This is one of those movies where a review such as mine won’t persuade you to see it or not see it. You most likely have it in your head that you will either see this movie or not. So why do I write it? Because I committed myself to reviewing every film that will be on my Top 10 list at the end of the year. I am very, very confident there will not be ten other movies released in 2012 that will be better than The Dark Knight Rises.
Continue reading The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Category Archives: Suspense
The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Many critics and audiences agree that the Andrew Garfield-led (The Social Network, Never Let Me Go) reboot of Spider-Man occurred too soon after the completion of the Toby Maguire trilogy. Because it was a given that the reboot would generate hundreds of millions of dollars on name alone, many wondered how strong of an effort there would be to tell a great story. On the other hand, an uninteresting story and poor reviews from the critics that still resulted in $200 million would have devastated superhero movies. Heck, Ryan Reynolds’ disaster The Green Lantern earned a measly 27% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and still made $116 million at the box office. Fortunately, while there were many parallels to the Tobey franchise, this movie was much darker. This was my number one criterion going in. I just wanted it to be more adult-oriented. Some thought it was too dark, saying things like Spider-Man isn’t Batman, but as a guy in his mid-30s, I’d rather see any PG-13/R type superhero movie over a PG/PG-13 type one.Limitless (2011)
Bradley Cooper, you have a new fan. In the first blockbuster movie of your career that you were asked to carry, you knocked Limitless out of the park. So no longer will I reference you as “one of the guys from The Hangover.” After looking at your filmography, I’ll be the first to tell you that you’ve made terrible career choices, but maybe you were getting your feet wet. Maybe at the ripe age of 34, after eight years of meaningless roles in some of the awful movies of the last decade, including Failure to Launch, Valentine’s Day, Yes Man, Case 39, The A-Team, He’s Just Not That Into You, and, perhaps the cream of the crop, All About Steve, you’ll finally be recognized for what you potentially could bring to a movie. When I first saw the trailer for Limitless, I thought there would be no chance I would see it. But after reading some reviews about it, I added it to my Netflix queue and slowly watched it work to the top of my list.
Continue reading Limitless (2011)
Rampart (2012)
Rampart is one mess of a movie that guts by (barely) on the merits of Woody Harrelson (Natural Born Killers, Transsiberian). I can’t say it’s worth the watch because of him, but it would have been an excruciating two hours had he not been the star. Its 76% approval rating on www.rottentomatoes.com is somewhat alarming, considering how incoherent and inconsistent the script was. This was a must-see movie when I saw that it was reuniting Harrelson with director Oren Moverman. The two struck gold with Moverman’s directorial debut, 2009’s The Messenger. That movie had a purpose. It had believable drama. It had a meaningful storyline. Never did it cause you to ask yourself, “Huh?” or “What just happened?” or “How are these characters getting away with all they are getting away with?” Instead, Rampart ends up being just one jumbled, incoherent disaster.
Continue reading Rampart (2012)
The Debt (2011)
The Debt is the second highly acclaimed Helen Mirren (The Last Station, Gosford Park) movie I watched last month. The first was The Queen, for which she won the Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role Academy Award. I had high expectations for The Queen and was disappointed by it. I found it boring and just not nearly as good as all the critics made it out to be. It also starred Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, Underworld), who I’m not the biggest fan of. I also had high expectations of The Debt, but they needed to be higher to see the movie in the theater. After watching it at home, seeing it on the big screen would not have been much different. The movie was a good movie that had a reasonably interesting (though not entirely believable) story that held my interest the entire time.
Continue reading The Debt (2011)