Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/derek91/page/4/)
Oliver Stone’s Savages is a violent, gritty, and realistic suspense story with a brain. Don’t walk into this one expecting to see a typical R-rated thriller with over-the-top action and chuckle-inducing one-liners. This story matters more: it’s meaty, addictive stuff to watch. Stone treats the material in a mature way that’s not without hints of humor, but also not without beheadings, either. Continue Reading
We’ve seen apocalypse movies that focus on brave batches of humans trying to ward off Earth’s total annihilation in movies like Armageddon (1998) and Contagion (2011). In Armageddon the threat to humanity was an asteroid the size of Texas. In Contagion, infectious diseases were the destructive forces seeking to smother the lives of Earth’s inhabitants. With her directorial debut, Lorene Scafaria centers her story in an apocalyptic setting by way of Armageddon, but does something in that setting that neither Armageddon nor Contagion have done. She shows what the everyday, non-saving-the-world people on Earth do in their final days before the world’s end. It’s a fascinating new take on a popular genre that’s well worth your time. Continue Reading
The 1980s lives on with an attitude in director Adam Shankman’s Rock of Ages: a movie adaptation of a Broadway play of the same name. Along with covers of ‘80s rock and roll staple hits by bands ranging from Def Leppard to Whitesnake, Rock of Ages is also affluent with little details from the decade of decadence: leather pants that creak and squeak, hair that’s frozen in rollicking waves by a combination of trigger-happy fingers and hairspray cans, and black eyeliner seen on more men than women. The film has a free-spirited, lets-party-now-and-think-later flavor, and yet it also has characters built with haunted, intelligent layers. Continue Reading
Leaving the theater after watching director Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, I felt like I did not just watch a movie. Instead, I had experienced the vivid flashes of somebody’s real-life experience. Everyone in Theater 14 of the Carmike Wynnsong cinema had surely walked through a detailed digitally rendered nightmare. Continue Reading
In director Bradley Parker’s horror film Chernobyl Diaries, six young adults hire an extreme tour guide to take them to the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, a place that was abruptly abandoned on April 26, 1986, when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant suffered an explosion and subsequent fires in one of its reactors. Continue Reading
“You have eyes, Huntsman, but you do not see,” says Constantine (Bob Hoskins), one of the seven dwarves, to Chris Hemsworth in first-time director Rupert Sanders’ Snow White and the Huntsman. This second retelling in the past half-year (the first being Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror) of the Snow White fairy tale is built to please the eyes, but doesn’t deliver the same pleasure to the brain. Brimming with stunning CGI throughout the 2 hour and 7 minute runtime, but only boasting a memorable performance or two, Snow White and the Huntsman does not deliver on its promise of being an epic dark fantasy tale. Despite my misgivings, however, it still may be worth a look. Continue Reading
The summer movie season is an exciting time of the year for movie enthusiasts. From early May to late August, movie studios try to earn big bucks by wooing the hearts of anyone walking within a two-mile radius of a theater. Continue Reading
The wedding setting is a favored plot device in many a romantic comedy movie. From Father of the Bride (1991) to Bridesmaids (2011), rom-coms have used the scent of bouquet flowers and the bland taste of white marble cake for climaxes that usually end up with somebody saying, “I do,” after a series of shenanigans has ensued. Continue Reading
Four years ago, in the summer before my senior year of high school, I was sitting at my kitchen table with my friend and fellow reviewer Zach, tapping away at the computer, when we stumbled across the nugget of information that seemed more valuable than any tangible object: they were going to make an Avengers movie. Continue Reading
On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe, whose gothic literary tales would go on to influence both mainstream and horror fiction genres for the better part of two centuries, was found wandering the brick-paved streets of Baltimore. Poe was delirious and called out the name “Reynolds.” He was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died of an unknown cause four days later. Continue Reading