Review: THE PAPERBOY

Popular trash movies are sometimes compared to fast-food; they are manufactured to provide immediate satisfaction without little to no concern about the consumer’s health. The Paperboy is trash, but is has more in common with the juicy mess of grease cheese that fills the street-cart burrito you have at 4am in the morning after a long night of drinking than a McBurger cooked up in a sterilized kitchen. Like the burrito, this film has no care, no substance, and no shame but every single moment of it is delicious, rich in texture, and a unique experience.

Review: ARGO

Every now and then there comes a story so preposterous and incredible that you know it has to be true; no Hollywood screenwriter could have come up with it. Ben Affleck’s new film, in which he stars and directed, is one of those cases. The film opens with an animated intro covering the events that led to the Iranian Revolution; “This is the land of The Persian Empire”, it begins - as if this were going to be a large fantasy epic. But Argo is no fantasy and the film is ten times more gripping because of it. 

Like most average movie goers, I am not particularly fond of modern day political thrillers. They involve a lot of characters sitting around, discussing “stuff” in complex jargon as if they were playing chess. Even the acclaimed Syriana was a bit of a bore. There is some chess playing in Argo but it is mostly for a set characters to pass the time; most of the film is all show business. 

Review: Looper

Any conversation dealing with time travel it can easily become an endless debate  about the technicalities, ethics, paradoxes and impossibilities of practicing time travel. Time travel is messy and because of this it is a bit of a cheat when used as a literary device. It can get the writers into very tricky situations when the impossibilities begin to pile up, or it can be used to completely wipe a slate and start anew. Few writers have ever gotten it right, but when they do it is usually beautiful. Rian Johnson’s Looper gets it right within its own world. Unlike most time travel stories, Looper embraces the paradoxes. But more surprisingly it wipes them away in a rather clever - and intense - conclusion.

Review: RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION

One has to know what type of movie your going into when you walk into Resident Evil: Retribution, the fifth part of Paul W.S. Anderson’s adaptation of the zombie survival video game. Essentially it is going to be wall to wall action, zero-to-none character development, and Milla Jovovich prancing around in near-S&M gear. I could essentially end the review here, the film won’t be any deeper than that but, as far as bad action movies go, the Resident Evil franchise has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. So I will indulge a bit more. 

Review: RED LIGHTS

Red Lights provides us with an interesting thriller about the debunking of paranormal activities by a team of university physicists. And then the debunking of physics, and rational thinking, by that irksome thought in the back of everyone’s head that maybe, there just might be something unexplainable out there. All good horror movies depend on the exploitation of this feeling. Red Lights is the first movie, I’ve seen, that explores it through its characters. For the most part it is effective; the movie will keep you on its grip until everything falls apart in the last few scenes.

Review: TOTAL RECALL

This new version of Total Recall succeeds in many ways. It has all the necessary ingredients to make a great contemporary action Sci-Fi: it is based off a cult classic based off a Philip K. Dick story, has a great action-class cast with a few British A-listers on the side, it includes three or four exhilarating action sequences, and some incredibly rich production design, packed with lost of juicy details. Unfortunately, for the film, its characters, plot, and - most importantly- logic get drowned by the opulent production that surrounds them. What comes out is a bit of a mess, but a fun mess nonetheless. 

Lets start with the good stuff.