Dustin Cook’s family drama is a brilliant and tragic picture of two sons forever strapped down to their mother. Too often has this image resonated where kids feel not only constrained to their parents, but dutiful despite their own unhappiness and lack of fulfillment. Cook’s short drama is immediately a compelling character study that explores how families can become a burden and how the children, grown or young, can be forced to forever keep their burden.
Through a fine tongue in cheek attitude, director Shannon Michaelas explores what life is like as a little person, especially in the midst of the popularity of Peter Dinklage. It’s insane how much one actor has come to define an entire group of people, but lo and behold, “Peter Dinklage” explores how the popularity of the man has helped popularize little people for better and for worse.
Written and directed by Esteban Uribe, “Schlock Fish” really is something else. It’s the kind of movie you look back on with a fond chuckle and an eye roll because it’s just so damn silly. Director Uribe offers up his own twist on “Moby Dick” with a tale of revenge, a big fish, a lone fisherman, and a lot of dynamite. It’s the stuff classic tales are made of!
I’m not going to pretend I enjoyed “Honor Student” if only because the movie is so inexplicable and miserable it’s tough to pinpoint what it’s going for. I watched it twice and spent my time scratching my head as to what it was trying to get across and what in the world the finale meant, if anything.
With “Escape from New York,” director John Carpenter once again evokes the western by delivering his own trademark twist of the sub-genre. Through his film he offers up a classic tale of a hero in the badlands while also introducing us to one of the most colorful figures in the Carpenter gallery: Snake Plissken. Plissken is a role only Kurt Russsell could have played, a brooding and rebellious anti hero who is also very cunning and of few words.
It’s nice to know that “Mad Max” is a film that still holds up, and is arguably an action masterpiece. George Miller directs an apocalyptic opus that’s set in the wasteland of Australia where the apocalypse always tends to eventually catch up with the environment. “Mad Max” is one of the best of its kind, it’s a revenge film, but a very complex cop film about the losing battle between a biker gang and a police force.
By all accounts, “Fury Road” should not have been so good. The George Miller epic return to “Mad Max” is a film that snuck under the radar of many movie fans and comes in through the dusk to grab us by the throats once more. When it comes to post apocalyptic cinema, Mad Max is the crème de la crème of the sub-genre, and George Miller is bold enough to re-visit a universe that paved its way through cinema over thirty years ago. With “Fury Road,” George Miller doesn’t try to change the formula of his trilogy too much, opting for the same visceral post apocalyptic action epic that made Mel Gibson Mad Max. Yet he also strives for a visual stimulation that ushers in a new era that puts Tom Hardy in the seat of Mad Max.