HollywoodandFine.com Right from the start, let me stipulate that, when it comes to most comic-book movies, I turn into Anti-Man. I believe comic-book movies — and the overweening Comic-Con mentality that has consumed the Hollywood studios — are strangling the movie industry, in part because these movies are so generic. …
HollywoodandFine.com These feel like cinematic end times – not in terms of Hollywood movies (that horse is already out of the barn), but in the pack-mentality, “hey, it’s good enough” approach of critics to the colossus that bestrides summer movies, otherwise known as the Marvel Universe. I speak specifically of …
HollywoodandFine.com Maybe it’s because the studio movies at this time of year are so universally dreadful, but I find myself drawn to the smaller films that bite and snarl and generally have bad manners: “Bad Words,” “The Raid 2” and, this week, “Dom Hemingway.” Written and directed by Richard Shepard …
HollywoodandFine.com Kenneth Branagh’s “Thor” had a certain playfulness that pitted the ultra-serious world of Asgard, land of the Norse gods, against 21st-century USA. Now director Alan Taylor has taken the reins of the franchise and, with “Thor: The Dark World,” drains the fun from it. Instead, he focuses on this …
HollywoodandFine.com I want to applaud Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing” for all the things it does right, and I will. But Whedon’s side project – between his various TV and Marvel-related entertainments – gets one thing unfortunately wrong: It’s never very funny. Much of that has to do with …