A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by Martin Campbell Written by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein, from a story by Michael France Premiered 13 November, 1995 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE Pierce Brosnan’s four-film, seven-year residency in the tux of Britain’s greatest spy, James Bond, started off at its very peak, with what I […]
Here’s a thing that I was absolutely not expecting to happen during this tour of Disney’s direct-to-video sequels: that I’d end up seeing a sequel that I preferred to the original. Also not expected: that the film to cross that threshold would be the widely-derided Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World, a film that […]
Is it possible to talk about The Master without talking about the whole conversation surrounding The Master, sucking up nearly all the oxygen in the cinephile community this past week? Not for me, I find, and I feel sorry about that: we’re supposed to let movies speak for themselves, not filtered through the things we’ve […]
My dislike for End of Watch, as I must confess out front, is wildly disproportionate to its dramatic sins, which certainly exist but are, as such things go, not crushing, and more than compensated for by its significant merits of characterisation. What we have here is a pretty basic thing: an off-the-shelf buddy cop movie […]
The second attempt at adapting the classic British comic book antihero Judge Dredd to film, titled just Dredd, is a vastly better movie than the last attempt, 1995’s Sylvester Stallone vehicle Judge Dredd; but this is true of nearly all movies, which makes it a some pointless observation. Anyway, except for the name of the […]
On 22 September, 1995, a movie called Showgirls was released on a tidal wave of hype that could only come with being the first major film to get released under the notorious NC-17 rating from the MPAA; a rating which, coupled with the exploitation-friendly setting of the movie, was widely understood to promise, “this movie […]
A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by John Glen Written by Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum Premiered 13 June, 1989 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE First things first: the film opens with the first significant change to the scoring of the iconic gun-barrel sequence; though Monty Norman’s James Bond Theme comes in when […]
First, the petty, niggling point: by the strictest definition, Belle’s Magical World and Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Magical World are two different features. Initially, the second sequel – if that’s even the right word – to the luminous Disney classic Beauty and the Beast was released under the shorter of its two titles on […]
The considerable success of Aladdin and the King of Thieves, I suspect, is the proximate cause that transformed the direct-to-video sequel from curiosity to major revenue stream for Disney in the late ’90s; the real glut of DTV projects started coming out at just about the perfect time to have been greenlit right around the […]
Author’s note, January 2017: I used to have you might call a bug up my butt about this franchise. Let’s say that although I stand by this review, I don’t actually agree with it. Typically, we do not want bad movies to have sequels; we want bad movies to go far away and stop ruining […]
Author’s note, January 2017: I used to have you might call a bug up my butt about this franchise. Let’s say that although I stand by this review, I don’t actually agree with it. I do not suppose that any of my habitual readers were anxious for me to watch and review Resident Evil: Afterlife, […]
A guide to this blog’s James Bond marathon can be found right here. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTSDirected by John GlenWritten by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. WilsonPremiered 29 June, 1987 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCEAnd so, having bid goodbye to the genial, charming, brightly authoritative, and above all, goddamn old Roger Moore, the folks at Eon seemed to view […]
