Category: Culture watch
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…