Alright, y’all; running late for today, Saturday, January 6th, but I’d be seriously, seriously remiss if I let the stuff happening this evening just slide past, unmentioned. Because it’s neat stuff, truly…
In case you hadn’t heard already, some good-hearted souls out there — namely, director Marcus Pontello and producers Jeromy Barber and James Templeton (both of production company Dinolion) — are attempting to make a real-live documentary about longtime H-town venue Numbers…
Somewhere in the not-too-distant now, aliens will/are/have invaded the world via a meteor landing in continental Europe. Aliens with the ability to replay periods of time (roughly 24-48 hours) over and over again, making them largely invincible. Or at least they were, until press officer William Cage (Tom Cruise) finds himself an unlikely front-line soldier…
From across the land they come, the nerds, the geeks, the professionals, and the hobbyists. The computer programmers and the computer deriders, the chess pros and the chess amateurs, all seeking the answer to that age-old question: can you teach a computer to play that game of chess? A word of warning right from the outset: this movie is not for everyone…
On April 8, 2009, four individuals from Somalia boarded the cargo vessel Maersk Alabama, marking the first time a U.S.-flagged vessel became subject to an act of piracy in a century. Over the next four days, the drama of the capture played out in real-time for American audiences, as the pirates abandoned the ship aboard its lifeboat with its captain, Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), as hostage, attempting to make for the coast of Africa…
Damn, damn, damn. Not sure how, but I totally missed this one in today’s roundup of cool shows… Tonight — Saturday, October 19th, if you just came to — the utterly awesome, utterly cracked chamber music group {Two Star Symphony}, will be playing up at the equally-awesome Orange Show starting at 7:30PM, doing their original […]
Luc Besson‘s The Family is filled with his signature visual wit, boasting occasionally sharp satire aimed equally at both sides of the Atlantic, but he lets us down in the end, through the deadly combination of broad characters…
Young adult-oriented urban fantasy has gotten so pervasive in the post Harry Potter world that it’s possible to create tick boxes of elements (let’s not say clichés, rather battle-tested storytelling tools) which a successful, or at least popular, series should have…
Vin Diesel and David Twohy‘s Riddick sees the filmmakers and their creation on a search to return the anti-hero to his roots after the operatic excess of his last outing and, despite a few pitfalls along the way, they largely succeed…
What comes next? It’s the question every storyteller dreads, faced with the blank page or canvas, trying to figure out what should happen to their characters next. How to develop them, what to have happen to them, and why? If you think about it, it’s the question…
It’s nearly the same as the first RED, but less so. The filmmakers, and probably the money people behind them, have taken the first film as less of a setup and more in the way of market research for how to make a franchise work…
Dead people aren’t dead, or at least they’re not taking it lying down. They’re coming back into the world, squeaking through the cracks and trying to keep some semblance of their lives up. And in the process, running the world to rot. Someone’s got to keep them in line…
Who doesn’t like giant robots? That is the deep, philosophical question at the heart of Guillermo Del Toro‘s Pacific Rim. If the answer that pops into your head is “nobody, obviously,” then this is definitely the movie for you…
The program schedule for Comicpalooza has me all a-twitter with excitement. This weekend, Friday, May 24th, through Sunday, May 26th, the George R. Brown will be the site of Comicpalooza…
No, it’s not the movie version of the hit video game. That would be awesome. Instead, Oblivion is Joseph Kosinski‘s follow up to 2010’s Tron: Legacy, this time featuring Tom Cruise as one of the last survivors…
The crime film is a tricky beast; there are no two ways about it. On the one hand, the plot needs to be appropriately twisty, surprising the audience at every bend. On the other, even past masters like Raymond Chandler have discovered the ease of disappearing…
Oh, G.I. Joe, will you never get the respect that Transformers does? Will you always be in their shadow, no matter how much slightly, marginally better your movies are? The answer is “yes,” when marginally better is compared to…
Once upon a time there was a talented director known for taking what could just be pop fantasy, looking it over with a mature eye, and producing entertaining films that didn’t insult anyone to get to a mass audience. Then his popular acclaim started to wane, and he faded…
The time: two years before the Civil War. The place: the deep south. The person: Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave being slow-walked across to auction in Texas. Or at least, he was, until his band is stopped…
It doesn’t seem like it’s been nine years since Peter Jackson and company delivered the last of the Lord of the Rings films, but after making forays off into other films for a time, they are back to deliver…
Cool, cool, cool. I hate to admit it, but I never got to see Honky Tonk Blood, the quasi-tongue-in-cheek B-grade (and intentionally so) comedy/horror flick by Hank Schyma of the {Southern Backtones}…
Film afficionados with some time to spare this Saturday (November 17th) should think about making the trek out to Katy, where the Houston Film Critics Society and Fox Searchlight…
Okay, I’ll keep it brief: unsatisfying. Not just The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2, mind you, but The Twilight Saga in general. Depending on your relationship to the franchise, that may mean something…
A lot has been written about Abraham Lincoln in the nearly 150 years since his death, to the point where you have to wonder if there is anything that hasn’t already been said. After nearly a decade of trying, Steven Spielberg‘s…
Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) may not be much — not much of a husband, not much of a father, probably not much of a friend — but he’s a great pilot. When he’s forced to prove it by landing a crippled jumbo jet…
Meant to post about this last night, but sleep got the better of me… Today/tonight marks this year’s incarnation of Creeperfest, a cool, cool, fun-sounding mini-festival thrown by the gang of oddballs & scenesters who hang out/live at the Houston House of Creeps…
Until just six short years ago, Bond films were familiar and comfortable like an old chair, as each iteration tried to out-Goldfinger the previous one. There would be a couple of Bond Girls with ridiculous names; a briefing with Q…
Yeah, there’s a crap-ton of cool stuff happening tonight — and I’ll get to that, don’t worry — but I wanted to call this one out in particular, because it’s extra-special awesome-cool. See, like the title says, this evening (Friday, October 19th) up at Discovery Green…
Why is it so hard to make an effective horror movie? Shouldn’t we know what it is that scares people? What scares us? Actually, we know exactly what scares us, or what will easily scare us. The problem is…
Normally, a ground-up reboot would be seen as a mixed bag. It means that your series has gotten off-track somewhere and needs to be brought back to its roots. Or that the filmmakers have completely run out of ideas and instead have chosen to go back…
If the only role Channing Tatum is capable of bringing anything like charisma, humanism, and likeability to is that of an aging male stripper, we still get a good movie out of it with Magic Mike, and that’s almost worth all…
[SPOILER WARNING: Reader beware, there are some fairly serious plot twists mentioned in the following review…] Some people never learn, and some people only have one trick up their sleeves. It’s hard to tell which you’re dealing with sometimes, and Prometheus is a perfect example of that
Jeff (Jason Segel) lives at home, although that probably goes without saying. In an effort to get him to do something, anything besides smoking pot in the basement, his mother (Susan Sarandon) sends him out to get some glue…
Everybody, whether they’re interested in him or not, recognizes the name of Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ signature creation: Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. But except for a few hardcore fans, the public at large is less well-acquainted with his other great creation…
According to Q, if you break down a narrative you will find at its heart seven essential conflicts: man against man; man against nature; man against himself; man against God; man against Society; man and woman; and man caught in the middle. Any one of these is more than enough grist for a storyteller’s mill…
First, we set the stage. Pina Bausch was one of the giants of, not just German dance, but modern dance as a whole, helping to usher in the wave of dance theater — Tanztheater — into the modern dance oeuvre since the 1970s. Combining acting with intricate set design, score, and other hallmarks…
It should go without saying that no adaptation is going to please everyone; it’s impossible to encompass all the nuances of one medium across the transition to another. Which makes comparisons not exactly a waste of time but certainly counterproductive…
Y’know, I’ll be up-front about it: back in the days of my post-college almost-youth, I wasn’t big into KARP. Didn’t hate ’em or anything, mind you, but I wasn’t a big fan; my tastes back then only sporadically ran that far to the “noisy” end of the punk spectrum…
While music is mostly what I tend to pay attention to, yeah, I’m also a sucker for movies of all sorts. Which is why I get all excited & happy every time a film festival rolls through our fair city (even though I rarely get the opportunity to actual go to ’em, these days…)
The fact that you’re reading this on a Website rather than in a newspaper or book somewhere should tell you, whether you realize it or not, the current state of flux in media. The newspaper, and the news business as we have known it, is dying…
