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Phantoms (1998)
For centuries they told us the terror would come from above. We've been looking the wrong way.
Filmmaker(s): Joe Chappelle

In the peaceful town of Snowfield, Colorado something evil has wiped out the community. And now, its up to a group of people to stop it, or at least get out of Snowfield alive.

Primeval Roles Whatever confluence of forces that were at work, when I saw ‘Lawrence of Arabia‘ I was dumbstruck. The sweep of the desert and its lonely complexities mapped thoroughly with the internal landscape this man revealed. Lonely, sexually obsessed but incompetent, determined to press through...


Published February 9, 2024
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Colombiana (2011)
Revenge is beautiful.
Filmmaker(s): Olivier Megaton

After witnessing her parents’ murder as a child in Bogota, Cataleya Restrepo grows up to be a stone-cold assassin. She works for her uncle as a hitman by day, but her personal time is spent engaging in vigilante murders that she hopes will lead her to her ultimate target: the mobster responsible for her parents' death.

Episodes of Death Long form is so hard that most films will do anything to get out of it. A standard escape is to have three acts that the viewer will accept as belonging together. Each of these can then be a small story by itself. And...


Published February 9, 2024
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Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
When patriots become heroes
Filmmaker(s): Joe Johnston

During World War II, Steve Rogers is a sickly man from Brooklyn who's transformed into super-soldier Captain America to aid in the war effort. Rogers must stop the Red Skull – Adolf Hitler's ruthless head of weaponry, and the leader of an organization that intends to use a mysterious device of untold powers for world domination.

Shifting Interiors It just doesn’t make any sense to me, how consistently bad Marvel‘s films are. Perhaps someone who loves the comics can be transported out of the movie into some well established fantasy world. In that case, all you need are a few cues. But...


Published February 9, 2024
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Cars 2 (2011)
Take a trip. See the sights. Save the world.
Filmmaker(s): John Lasseter

Star race car Lightning McQueen and his pal Mater head overseas to compete in the World Grand Prix race. But the road to the championship becomes rocky as Mater gets caught up in an intriguing adventure of his own: international espionage.

Killer TeeVee You can see Pixar being as Disney-fied at the same time Disney gets Pixar-ated. In this case, the experiments in a spatial camera all go away while the cartoon becomes an ordinary 3D production. And there’s too much story. It is a kid‘s movie, so...


Published February 9, 2024
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Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
The invasion we always feared. An enemy we never expected.
Filmmaker(s): Michael Bay

The Autobots continue to work for NEST, now no longer in secret. But after discovering a strange artifact during a mission in Chernobyl, it becomes apparent to Optimus Prime that the United States government has been less than forthright with them.

Panopticon Defects Sometimes you simply get proved wrong. I was wrong and I admit it. When I saw the first Transformers movie, I thought I was seeing something that advanced the cinematic vocabulary. The movie was still otherwise worthless, and the advance was in the service of...


Published February 9, 2024
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Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
First Contact. Last Stand.
Filmmaker(s): Jon Favreau

A stranger stumbles into the desert town of Absolution with no memory of his past and a futuristic shackle around his wrist. With the help of mysterious beauty Ella and the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde, he finds himself leading an unlikely posse of cowboys, outlaws, and Apache warriors against a common enemy from beyond this world in an epic showdown for survival.

Golden Womb I’ll let others talk about the nature of the disaster here. There are so many disintegrated narrative chunks in this stew that you are forced to grab onto one. The one that fascinates me is what ‘the girl‘ is all about. In the sort of...


Published February 9, 2024
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Stealth (2005)
Fear The Sky
Filmmaker(s): Rob Cohen

Deeply ensconced in a top-secret military program, three pilots struggle to bring an artificial intelligence program under control ... before it initiates the next world war.

One of the Guys An interesting way to see this box office failure is to consider the role of the US Navy rather than that of Hollywood. The film industry makes these sort of stupid and expensive mistakes routinely. The military has less room for tolerance,...


Published February 9, 2024
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The Girl (2000)
Filmmaker(s): Sande Zeig

A torrid affair between two women, a struggling artist and a flame-haired blues singer, upsets a man who has a thing for the girl.

Room in Paris I guess I should describe what the filmmaker described as her goals. She wanted to make a noir love story and to ‘abstract‘ it, making it pure, and therefore effective. This isn’t noir as I understand it, but that does not matter in this...


Published February 9, 2024
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Red Cliff (2008)
The future will be decided.
Filmmaker(s): John Woo

In 208 A.D., in the final days of the Han Dynasty, shrewd Prime Minster Cao convinced the fickle Emperor Han the only way to unite all of China was to declare war on the kingdoms of Xu in the west and East Wu in the south. Thus began a military campaign of unprecedented scale. Left with no other hope for survival, the kingdoms of Xu and East Wu formed an unlikely alliance.

Tectonic Extremes I am not a fan of Woo, and the reason becomes more stark when you compare this to Zhang‘s work. Zhang creates a world of grace in which people move, affected by the laws of that world. They can act, based on the values in...


Published February 9, 2024
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Ong Bak 2 (2008)
Warrior. Conqueror. Legend.
Filmmaker(s): Tony Jaa, Panna Rittikrai

Moments from death a young man is rescued by a renowned warrior. Realizing unsurpassed physical potential in the young boy he trains him into the most dangerous man alive. As he becomes a young man he goes on a lone mission of vengeance against the vicious slave traders who enslaved him as a youth and the treacherous warlord who killed his father.

Costume Trunk I was directed to this because I am interested in cinematic choreography. From a practical perspective, that usually means martial arts. Further, it means Asian films. But gee they sure get tedious after the first few unless there really is a master behind the camera....


Published February 9, 2024
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