Real Review - Speed Racer 2008

After giving Iron Man a pass, critics generally seem to have knives out for Speed Racer, despite the fact that Speed boasts the most radical visual strategies seen in a movie theater since Sin City, and maybe longer. Yes, of course “unconventional” is not equivalent to “excellent” or even “interesting,” and I guess I can understand why you might not want to let the Wachowskis play your optic nerve like a Jew’s harp for more than two hours in a sitting. But, man, if you value a little razzle with your dazzle, this one delivers a lot more of that stuff than, say, Iron Man. Read more

Real Review - Flight of the Red Balloon

Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those movies where nothing much happens. It’s a simple, relatively peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first time. Hou’s starting point–dictated by Paris’s Musee d’Orsay, which commissioned the film–is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of Paris, a floating red balloon. Read more

Real Review - Paranoid Park

The reviews had been generally good for this small, independent film, so trusting my instincts I settled into my chair and watched Paranoid Park. All I knew of the film was that it was about a teenage boy who liked to skateboard, but a tragic event had upset his world. Directed by Gus Van Sant, the renegade Hollywood director who seems to prefer making art films to Hollywood blockbusters, I knew this would be the kind of film I needed to break free from my recent slate of popcorn flicks. Read more

Real Review - Iron Man.

Iron Man did not disappoint. It’s taut, fast-paced, and he’s probably the best embodied super-hero, in recent memory. That prize had previously gone to Tobey MacGuire, until Spidey 3. Then, I started imagining what Spidey would have been like with Topher Grace in the role. Read more

Real Review - Iron Man 2008

When I read Glenn Kenny’s line about Iron Man being, essentially, the best Marvel superhero movie to date, I have to admit: it annoyed me. Or, at least, Kenny upset the Spider-Man fanboy inside me. But movie critics are all standing in line to carry Iron Man’s jock, so what do I know? Read more

Real Review - Juno

I really wanted to dislike Juno even before I watched it. Certainly a film about an unwanted teenage pregnancy would fail to entertain. If not for an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, I probably would have never bothered with this movie. But, having viewed the other nominated films for this year’s Best Picture, I owed it to myself to see how Juno measured up against the competition. Read more

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