If you make a big-budget disaster movie, it might as well be based on a true story. I’m over the huge blockbuster disaster movies like
The Day After Tomorrow, Poseidon, Independence Day, The Core, Volcano, Into the Storm, Armageddon (which I really like),
San Andreas (which I also kind of liked),
Dante’s Peak…the list goes on and on. The point of these movies, and so many others, is to make a big buck. Forget about the plausibility; most of these movies are utterly ridiculous. The hero(es) always overcomes the most extreme circumstances and, often, ends up saving the world. Now, while the 2010 disaster caused the worst offshore oil spill in United States history and made British Petroleum (BP) the most villainous company on the face of the planet at the time, the story of
Deepwater Horizon does take some liberties along the way. While the unfortunate events on that night of April 10th certainly did happen, the events on that rig felt very much like James Cameron’s
Titanic after the ship hit the iceberg.
Continue reading Deepwater Horizon (2016) →
I’m starting to think Hollywood is either entirely out of original ideas or knows they are guaranteed a minimum of a hundred million dollars at the box office if it remakes a movie and has a starting cast of Hollywood A-listers. There is no reason why The Magnificent Seven needed a remake. I have not seen the first one, but I imagine it was probably a pretty good movie when it was made…56 years ago. Not many great Westerns have been produced in this century; while they were good, most have been remakes (
I did not see 2015’s Citzenfour documentary about Edward Snowden. Had I, I might not have appreciated Oliver Stone’s (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) biopic as much as I did. Part of the reason I was such a big fan of Snowden was that I knew very little about it before my viewing. I knew of Wikileaks and learned much from the news but didn’t pay. Snowden went from your everyday no-name to one of the most controversial figures of this century. If you think this movie will be completely neutral, you don’t know Oliver Stone very well. Heck, this was the same man who directed JFK.
Two days after seeing the best lead actress performance I saw so far in 2016 (Alicia Vikander – 
The Light Between Oceans was a flawed movie that is likely to bore many, if not most, of its moviegoers. This was evidenced by the guy sitting behind me who was sawing logs for the entire second half. But I am a sucker for broken relationship movies caused by some strife, and that’s what I got here. The only thing I knew about this movie was that it was about a couple living on a small island while he managed a lighthouse and that they found a baby in a boat they took as their own after she suffered a series of miscarriages. I wish I had gone in knowing nothing about this movie.