The Twin Towers will always be in our collective memory because of the events in 2001. The buildings were an iconic part of the skyline of New York and it is still weird to not see them when you’ve seen them in so many movies and TV shows in the past. Still they were also the place where in the seventies one man wanted to realise a dream. That man was Philippe Petit from France (played here by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and he wanted to his high wire act between the to buildings. Continue reading
Every family has its secrets. Sometimes these are very small and insignificant, but it can also involve events that have had such an impact that it changed the people involved. It is something which translates well to the big screen and has been used many times. Festen, in which a son accuses his father of terrible things is a good example. It shows the complex relationships within a family and the roles assumed by each family member in it. Boomerang, based on the book by Tatiana de Rosnay, is also about such relationships. Continue reading
If I was to base my movie watching purely on reviews than I would never watch No Escape. They painted this as a horrible movie, which just like The Impossible, only focussed on white family abroad needing to survive, while also showing the local people negatively. Oh yeah, and the actors were supposedly miscast as well. Luckily I’m a very stubborn person, so I decided to form my own opinion about this movie. Continue reading
True stories are sometimes too bizarre to seem real and this documentary is a great example of that. The entrepreneurial Shannon Whisnant bought a grill during an auction for a nice price. He took it home and to his horror found the lower part of a human leg on the grill. The police were called, who had to temporarily store it. The story soon appeared on the news and it was not long before John Wood came forward and claimed it was his leg and wanted it back. Whisnant however felt that it was his property and was not going to give it back. It would be the beginning of a long battle between the two. Continue reading
2015 is already behind us, but as always it means I always take a moment to look back. At my movie and blog related goals, the best an worst movies of the year and of course my personal top 10. Continue reading
Last year the documentary Narco Cultura already showed that in some places in Mexico drugs have a firm grip on several towns. Cartel Land also makes that clear during its opening when several familymembers tell how a large part of their family, including children and a baby, were murdered by a cartel as they were working on a citrus farm. The reason for this was that the owner of the farm didn’t pay enough “protection money”. It immediately sets the tone for this documentary and it’s not difficult to understand that residents, both in Mexico and America, take matters into their own hands and go head to head with the cartels. It results in a raw, but very impressive documentary. Continue reading
I had promised myself to skip this latest Adam Sandler film. I had a good reasons to do so: If you look at the last ten films he made there isn’t one of them that’s worth watching. In his younger years, I could still enjoy his movies, but I have developed an aversion towards Sandler because he keeps making disappointing movies.
But why did I end up still watching Pixels? Curiosity probably is the most important reason. And I wasn’t curious if he had made a good movie this time, but I wanted to know how the game element is incorporated into the film. As someone who grew up gaming that element excited me so I decided, against my better judgment, to give Pixels a chance Continue reading
Earlier this year I watched The Maze Runner on DVD and I was pleasantly surprised by the “next” young adult book series which has been turned into a movie series and where every year a new part is released (I do hope that the last film in the series will not be split into two parts because it is at the moment one of my biggest frustration for both the Hunger Games as Divergent series). The advantage of seeing the first film in February, I only had to wait a couple of months for the next part, which I was really looking forward to. Is The Scorch Trials as good as the first part? Continue reading
It’s funny to see how certain characters in entertainment become so popular that they are actually more popular than the main characters themselves. This was the case with the Rabbits in the Rayman games where the funny, but also very stupid bunnies eventually got their own games and TV show. In the Despicable Me movies the minions were responsible for comic relief and those were the moments that were often the most fun. A spinoff with just these funny yellow figures was bound to happen (just like a flood of merchandise from dolls to “fart guns”). However, are these characters entertaining enough to fill an entire movie? Continue reading
While watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I wondered whether or not I slowly was becoming “bitter” when it comes to specific type of movies. I doubt that my taste over the years has stayed the same. If you’ve seen a lot of movies then you know what can be expected of certain genres, such as in this case a spy film. This means that a film has to do something special in order to get me aboard. If it’s all pretty straightforward movies seem to become a bit boring. I want to be surprised.
This is the latest film from director Guy Ritchie, who was previously responsible for the entertaining Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, but also for the disappointing Sherlock Holmes films. He’s a director who knows how to tell a story with style. Can he do that with a story set in the sixties? Continue reading