Taylor Lautner has become famous for his role in the various Twilight Saga films, in which he played the role of Jacob Black. Although he played in Abduction after the Twilight movies he hasn’t succeeded yet to become an actor who gets viewers to the cinema. It seems that with Tracers he still hasn’t manage to change that status. Continue reading
Earlier this year an open letter appeared online, which was signed by many important scientists and business men, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, which called for building in security measures into the artificial intelligence systems which are being developed. There is a good reason for that, because the developments are going quickly, especially when a company like Google is investing in it. The first steps are already being made with self driving cars and personal assistants on your phone like Siri, Cortana and Google Now, but it is not hard to imagine that in our own lifetime we will see ourselves conversing with artificial intelligence which feel like real people. The movie Her managed to show the romantic side of that, in which someone fell in love with such a system. Ex Machina shows another side of it. Continue reading
I regularly get requests from various (new) directors who have made a movie and ask me if I would be interested in reviewing it. Through the years I’ve learned to be very careful accepting as generally the quality usually is pretty low and it is just a bit harder to write something negative when you feel the hope and the belief in their product and you know you’ll have to hurt that a bit. I recently received a request to review The Cobblestone Corridor, directed by Erik Bloomquist. I decided to check out the trailer for his movie and it had me intrigued. Not only because the story looked interesting, but also because it looked very polished. I had a bit of hope that this short movie actually was worth watching. Continue reading
The Shaun the Sheep TV show once started as a spinoff of Wallace and Gromit. Because of their short episode length (about 7 minutes) and humor the show became very popular. Aardman Studios, who’s responsible for producing the show took the next logical step and give the popular character his own movie. Did they succeed in taking something which works in short bursts and turning it into a feature-length movie? Continue reading
If you look at Pixar’s history, the animation studio has released some amazing movies including Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Up, Ratatouille and WALL-E. People were always excited about new Pixar movies, because they weren’t only very original and moving stories but also because the animation was more beautiful with each movie. They have released some movies which weren’t as big a success critically as they might have hoped (the Cars movies immediately come to mind) and last year they didn’t even release a movie, something they did every year since 2006. Pixar now returns with Inside Out. Are they back on top or does the film disappoint? Continue reading
The original Pitch Perfect was an unexpected success. The expectations in advance weren’t really high, whih is why it managed to surprise many people, including myself. I loved it. The story about an a capella group, the Bellas, who had to form a team to win hit all the right notes (no pun intended).
This wasn’t only because the music choices were great and performed weel, but also because of the cast. Anna Kendrick carried the story, but the weird supporting characters were memorable. Rebel Wilson shined in her role as Fat Amy and Hana Mae Lee was very funny as the almost silent Lilly. Add to that the politically incorrect comments from Gail (Elizabeth Banks) and John (John Michael Higgins) as commentators at the various competitions and the result was a surprising, almost (pitch) perfect combination of these elements. That surprise isn’t there now and the expectations are high. Does this second movie manage to meet them? Continue reading
One of the most visually striking elements from the first Avengers movie was the long shot in which the camera showed all the Avengers in one swooping move through the city. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Captain America (Chris Evans) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) managed to beat their enemy by turning into a team. They are now back and this second film opens with a similar impressive scene, all in one shot, where all the Avengers are introduced while attacking a Hydra base. This action filled opening shows a lot of promise, but does Age of Ultron succeed in keeping the movie at that level? Continue reading
There are times when you are endlessly browsing through Netflix when you come across titles which don’t ring any bells. Parallels is one of those, where I didn’t know the actors either. What I thought was interesting though was the science fiction element of the film (or series, but more on that later) which is all part of the title: Parallel worlds. Continue reading
2015 looks to be a great year for movies, especially if you are a fan of huge franchises both recent and from the eighties and nineties. Some might complain that there are way too many sequels being made, but at the end of the day moviemaking is still a business where these types of movies are needed in order to finance smaller movies. Plus looking at the biggest movies of the year I have a feeling that quite a few of them won’t only be successful, but also actually good. This is a list of the movies I’m mostly looking forward to. Continue reading
If there is one genre which has grown a lot in the last couple of years it is the “young adult” one and more specific the movies which are set against a future society where there (usually) is one special person who is the key to solving a huge problem within that society. The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner are examples of it and so is Insurgent.
In the first movie the viewer was introduced to the world of Tris (Shailene Woodley), in which order was kept by placing people in specific factions based on their character. Tris turned out to be someone who didn’t fit to one of the faction and ended up facing the political leader, having to fight her. It was an enjoyable movie which nicely set up the world. With the world building done in the first movie, it was a question what would be done with it in this second film. Continue reading