Category: Culture watch

September 2, 2015

A Not-so-Fantastic Four

by Ted Giese If a movie has the word fantastic in the title it should work really hard to be fantastic. Josh Trank, the director of this current reboot of the MARVEL comic book franchise “Fantastic Four” tweeted: “A year ago I had a fantastic…

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August 20, 2015

Ant-Man: A little fun and virtue

by Ted Giese By Marvel Studio standards, Ant-Man is a small movie. Unlike other films in the comic-book driven franchise, it isn’t about saving the world from imminent destruction. Instead, Scott Lang and Dr. Hank Pym are more interested in saving their relationships with their…

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July 30, 2015

Old, obsolete or worn out? – Terminator Genisys

by Ted Giese All the Terminator franchise films share basic elements. They are all sci-fi movies involving time travel. They all have good guys and bad guys who want to stop an event in time from happening. They are all movies about a robot apocalypse…

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July 6, 2015

Jurassic World: The key to happiness, control, and avoiding dinosaurs who want to eat you

by Ted Giese Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be; in fact with Jurassic World it may just be better! But does nostalgia make for a great film? Essentially sidestepping The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World is presented…

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June 9, 2015

Post-Modern MARVEL: Classical Super-heroes

by Ted Giese Avengers: Age of Ultron is a sequel and in many ways does what many sequels today do: set up future films. It is also the current film in the MARVEL franchise and acts as a sort of crossroads where the pathways of…

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March 16, 2015

Chappie: Of Droids and Souls

by Ted Giese Building on the aesthetic and thematic groundwork of his previous feature films District 9 and Elysium, director Neill Blumkomp’s dystopian sci-fi action film Chappie wrestles again with what it means to be a human in a world that increasingly devalues life. Its…

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