We the Party
2012
104 minutes
Rated R

At its best, Mario Van Peebles' We the Party feels like the director's overt thesis statement on today's youth culture.  The picture is at heart a somewhat...

It was right at the opening credit sequence. That haunting footage of the various passengers embarking on the ship, with a sorrowful version of the theme playing in the background (a version that inexplicably was never been included on the soundtrack CDs back in 1997/1998) As...

In a classical sense, Feminism is defined as believing that women should have the same rights, freedoms, choices, privileges, and benefits as men in a civilized society.  Under that relatively general definition, I would argue that most rational people, men and...

Wrath of the Titans
2012
99 minutes
rated PG-13

Jonathan Liebesman's Wrath of the Titans is arguably about as 'good' as a movie called Wrath of the Titans can be expected to be.  It is...

On the surface, Goon is an assembly-line underdog sports movie.  And yes the film hits a handful of familiar story beats along the way.  But...

2012
109 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

By all rights, this film should be a disaster.  On paper, a comedic reboot of a...

2012
110 minutes
rated R

There are few things more dispiriting than an engaging and thoughtful film slowly ditching that which made it unique and instead traveling down the...

Detachment

2012
100 minutes
Rated R
Opens in limited release on March 16th

Most of the ideas in Tony Kaye's Detachment are not revolutionary, especially not to anyone who has followed the last thirty...

I understood Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible the first time I saw it in theaters.  I had no trouble following Chris Nolan's brain-twister thrillers (Memento, The Prestige, Inception).  It was...

You can't have more than one 'f-word' in your movie and still get a PG-13.  There have been a few exceptions over the years, but generally it's one 'f-word' in a non-sexual context.  Anymore than that, and its an automatic R-rating.  We can...

In yet another stupidly crowded weekend at the box office (in such a crowded marketplace where only one new release debuted on more than 2,200 screens) we had yet another solid surprise, as the low-budget Act of Valor topped the box office with...

I don't generally watch clips, let alone post them, for upcoming films.  I somewhat dislike the practice of releasing full-blown scenes of upcoming films, as it's purely spoiler material, plain and simple.  But I will make an exception, as posting the above clip gives me the opportunity to rant about something that came to mind about a month ago while I was on a Disney Cruise with the wife and kids. Point being, there will be any number of essays written over the next few months about how Pixar's Brave is some kind of groundbreaking picture because it has a female lead, a warrior princess no less.  But its story, which seems to involve a young girl who rebels against her family's expectations regarding his place in life as a girl in 1300s (?) Scotland (see the teaser and the trailer HERE and HERE).  That's fine.  The film looks gorgeous and I'm a sucker for Scottish music (Patrick Doyle is handling the scoring duties). Alas, I think it's frankly downright regressive that we view this film as a feminist breakthrough.  Quite simply, Disney released an animated film back in 1998 starring a female protagonist who rebelled against society's expectations of her.  Mulan was as much a feminist fable as Brave is selling itself as, and there wasn't nearly as much huffing-and-puffing about it at the time.

Mulan is neither one of the great Disney animated features nor one of the lesser ones.  It's a rock-solid cartoon, arguably stronger in  its first third when it's centered on family drama than its later acts which are somewhat dominated by comic supporting characters (Eddie Murphy's dragon and Mulan's fellow soldiers).  And, as much as I like Miguel Ferrer, I have never been able to buy his soft-spoken vocals coming out of a massive and physically imposing Hun leader.  But come what may, it is a straight-ahead action picture (with a decent-sized body count to boot) that not only stars a female warrior but explicitly deals with the kind of 'girls can do what boys can' messaging that the marketing materials for Brave seem to be emphasizing.  Whether or not Brave will be better or worse than Mulan is beside the point.  When Mulan was released in mid-June of 1998, its female-centric action story was basically treated as 'no big deal,' because at the time it somewhat was.

I've complained before about the inexplicable need for the DC Animated Universe features to be so bloody short.  Only...