Blog Archives

Movie review: 'Ted 2', crude, offensive, hilarious...everything you'd expect

6/26/2015

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Genre: Comedy

Run Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes, Rated R

Starring: Seth MacFarlane (voice), Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried, Jessica Barth, Giovanni Ribisi, Morgan Freeman, Sam Jones

Written and Directed by Seth MacFarlane (Ted, A Million Ways to Die in the West).

It's hard to believe that there was once a time when the world wasn't quite ready for Seth MacFarlane. His animated TV series, Family Guy, was actually cancelled after only its third season on Fox back in 2001, before its successful return a few years later when it grew from a cult hit into a cultural phenomenon. But nowadays, MacFarlane's crude style of observational humor - a style that he all but invented, that is mainly pointed at every single aspect of pop culture - seems to be the norm. It is hard to believe that only a few decades ago, Bart Simpson was regularly offending people with his disrespectful "Don't have a cow, man," catch-phrase. Flash-forward to 2015 - 16 years after Family Guy's initial premiere - we now hardly bat an eye when MacFarlane scripts a scene in Ted 2 (opening today) where one of his characters is covered in semen after knocking over a shelf full of samples on himself while hanging out at a local sperm bank

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Movie review: 'Inside Out', a wonderful Pixar head-trip

6/19/2015

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Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Inside Out (opening today) is the 15th full-length animated film to come from the now legendary Pixar Animation Studios. It's been quite a while since the brand has lived up to the hype, created by its revolutionary first-film, Toy Story, back in 1995. While always a success at the box-office, Pixar's last three feature-length entries - Cars 2, Brave and Monsters University - were mostly thought of as "lesser" Pixar films...with 2012's Brave being its only original story. Before Brave, you'd have to go back to 2009's Up, a film directed by Pete Docter (and co-directed by Bob Peterson) to find the last original plot, so there has been rumor and panic in recent years that Pixar had lost it's magic touch over the years for ground-breaking original stories.

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Movie review: 'Jurassic World' proves that dinos still have box-office might

6/12/2015

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Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Genre: Action, Adventure, Science Fiction

Run Time: 2 hours, 4 minutes, Rated PG-13

Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D'Onofrio, Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson, Irrfan Khan, Jake Johnson, BD Wong

Directed by Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed)

The creators of Jurassic World (opening everywhere Friday), want you to forget about the past two Jurassic installments. It has been 22 years since the ground-breaking, box-office shattering Jurassic Park, and 14 years since the previous film, Jurassic Park III (sandwiched in the middle of these was the 1997 sequel, The Lost World). Surely, there is no evidence that either of the last two films existed according to Jurassic World, where we had last seen a flock of pteranodon flying off the coast of Isla Nublar, the island near Costa Rica that was home of the original Jurassic Park. The implication was that we had unleashed dinosaurs into the wild. But forget about all that...this fourth installment feels much more like a direct sequel to the first film. And if you can get past the idea that the last two never happened, Jurassic World will be more than satisfying. In many ways, the true brilliance of this new chapter is that it provokes the same sense of excitement that the original film did. It is a wondrous Summer blockbuster, the sort of film that you hope for every time you buy a ticket and the kind of film that makes you love going to the movies.

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Movie review: 'Generation Baby Buster' doc examines the horrors of parenthood

6/9/2015

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Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Genre: Documentary

Run Time: 1 hour, 31 minutes, Not Rated

Written and Directed by Terra Renton (feature-documentary debut film)

The low-budget documentary, Generation Baby Buster (available today on VOD) begins with an intriguing premise: It aims to examine why more and more females in today's world are opting to not have children at all. We all are aware of the stigmas associated with the childless woman, and how women's rights over the past century have shattered traditional gender roles within the family unit. But almost instantly in this doc, the snide tone of the narration (supplied by writer/director/executive producer and first-time documentarian, Terra Renton) ruins any chance there was of having an adult conversation about the real worries that women - and men - face when confronting the responsibilities of parenthood.

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