Keanu Reeves playing a hero stuck between the real world, and a world that lies just beyond the imagination, with no possible chance of going back.
Category: Reviews Page 7 of 9
I’d just like to start by telling you something. Closer – recently released to DVD, and starring Jude Law, Clive Owen, Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman – is an adult movie. Not in the sense that it is pornography.
I’ll try not to get too excited, but just for the record, Ethan Hawke is the man!
Turning in his second ‘action cops’ movie of the last few years (the first being the unequalled Training Day – but more on that later), Ethan Hawke stars as Jake Roenick, a cop thrust unwillingly into the middle of the action, as a group of thugs try to bust a prisoner, Marion Bishop (played by Laurence Fishburne), out of the cells.
If there is one thing that will always hack me off about Hollywood, it’s the fact that 9 times out of 10, the director will try to do too much. Take The Island, the latest film from action director Michael Bay – it had a great ending, about 20 minutes from the end. Yet, for the last 20 minutes of the film we had an extra ending which really didn’t need to be there.
I want to make something perfectly clear before we go any further: I liked Sin City, but I also didn’t like it.
It’s possible that I might just be growing out of these sorts of movies, that the novelty might be wearing off, that I might be seeing through the computer effects in search of a more deep and meaningful viewing experience..
The debate about life on other planets has been raging since the earliest days of astrology, when men looked to the stars and attempted perceive of their own importance, and the vastness of the universe around us. Mankind looked to Mars, and Venus, our closest planetary neighbours and wondered “what if …”.
You always hear about the biggest artists in the world – like ACDC and the Rolling Stones having a concert in Toronto with over 500,000 people in attendance, or Michael Jackson selling 27,000,000 copies of his album Thriller, or David Bowie having one of the highest grossing tours of all time. But being big enough to affect the business efforts of a record label the size of EMI? It sounds unlikely.
If there was a general rule of thumb which could be applied to superhero movies of any kind, it would be this: the story about how they became who they are, or what they go through when they aren’t their alter-ego, is always a better story than one about how they kicked some dudes ass. Take Spiderman 1 (and, to a lesser extent, Spiderman 2) for example: great human stories, centred on Peter Parker, as well as great action movies. Take Daredevil: a decent story about how Matt Murdock became Daredevil (in fact, DD was unlucky, in that they got lumped with Ben “I Shouldn’t Be A Lead Actor” Affleck – anyone else plays Daredevil, and a few other tweaks, and you got yourself a movie baby). Take Batman Begins.
As you probably have heard, Mr and Mrs Smith is the new film starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, in which they play spy’s who end up married to each other, after a chance meeting in Columbia. The thing is neither one knows the other is a spy – and this lack of knowledge about the others’ secret lives is absolutely destroying their marriage.