There is a scene in Kingdom of Heaven that perfectly sums up the film as a whole. Young knight Balian, played with cheese-sandwich thoughtfulness by starlet Orlando Bloom, has vowed to defend the helpless. Therefore, he takes his ragtag band of a dozen glorified extras and rides headlong into approximately twenty thousand well-armed Muslims. The
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This month we examine Constantine, an antihero comic book movie based on “religion.”As you can see by my use of quotes, this movie will be long and contain a lot of pointless and inaccurate religious references. I shall ignore most of them in this review, as I ignored them in my free screening, because I’m
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I notice that some people seem incapable of tracking actors from one project to another, lovingly tracing their career path and supporting the dreams of someone they will never meet. I call these people “unfortunate.” I am told the common parlance is “normal,” or “not in need of medical help.” But we’re not here today
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Sometimes, a small idea gets nurtured like a grapevine by a caring, skilled screenwriter. The idea is gently plucked in a wine harvest of writing, mulled and extracted into a rich merlot of character and wit, and (after a suitable ripening period) taken from the dark cellar of obscurity and poured for a grateful cinematic
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Recently, I had the dubious honor of watching The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a summer blockbuster film that seems to have been made purely as an experiment in British character actor screen saturation. While subjecting myself to the three hours of steampunk ambivalence (perhaps it wasn’t three hours – more like eight? I’m not sure),
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