Pop culture musings by Kevin Mathews
Christopher Nolan’s game-changing Dark Knight is a decade old! Here’s my contemporaneous review.
It makes a whole lot of sense that the second film in Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the Batman franchise is called The Dark Knight. After all, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns revived the moribund comic book industry (together with Watchmen) and challenged fans to take the super hero a bit more seriously than before.
Continue reading “PoP20 | SUPERHERO FILM : THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)”
After the dark and heavy Infinity War, Ant-Man and the Wasp delivers light-hearted comedic superhero action to MCU fans.
Continue reading “GEEK OUT!!! SUPERHERO FILM : ANT-MAN AND THE WASP [NO SPOILERS]”
Fourteen years! That’s how long it took director Brad Bird to put together the sequel to Pixar’s animated foray into the superhero genre, The Incredibles.
Continue reading “GEEK OUT!!! SUPERHERO FILM : INCREDIBLES 2 IS WELL WORTH THE WAIT! (NO SPOILERS)”
Ironically, the groundwork for the enormous success of Avengers : Infinity War was laid almost EIGHTY years ago by Marvel’s main comic book rival DC Comics in Justice Society of America.
By Yong Shu Hoong
While Wonder Wheel bears a lot of writer-director Woody Allen’s finger-smudges – from the plain and simple opening credits, and the use of old songs on the soundtrack, to the featuring of big-name Hollywood actors – it’s unfortunately one of his middling works to be parked under those Woody Allen films that are more cursory than noteworthy.
Continue reading “REEL TO REAL | DRAMA : WONDER WHEEL [REVIEW]”
Here we are again, about to defend a geek movie that most movie critics have harshly criticised. In a crowded space for summer blockbusters, it was difficult for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets to get attention from movie goers but it is definitely worth the effort!
Continue reading “GEEK OUT! VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS”
Wonder Boy is a biopic of the Singapore music icon Dick Lee, directed and written by Lee himself with co-director Daniel Yam and co-writer Wang Guo Shen. The film stars popular local musician Benjamin Kheng as Lee.
The critics agree that War for the Planet of the Apes is one of the best conclusions to a franchise trilogy ever made!
Considering how amazing and surprising the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie was, when it was released in 2014, it is perhaps shocking (or maybe not) that its sequel matches not only its sheer entertainment quality but builds on the characters and relationships introduced in the original.
Continue reading “GEEK OUT! GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 : LIGHTNING DOES STRIKE TWICE!”
With all the brouhaha going on in the USA – the home of the superhero – concerning alleged Russian interference in the recent Presidential elections, it is interesting to consider Guardians, a superhero movie made in Russia.
Continue reading “GEEK OUT! GUARDIANS : SUPERHEROES FROM A RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE”
The last time a scifi movie moved us as much as Arrival was Predestination (2014), the Spierig brothers’ adaptation of Robert A Heinlein’s 1959 short story, -All You Zombies-.
Continue reading “GEEK OUT! ARRIVAL IS ONE OF THE BEST SCIFI MOVIES EVER! (SPOILERS)”
Synopsis
Fund manager Seok-woo and his daughter Su-an are travelling from Seoul to Busan onboard the KTX. But the train is overrun by zombies which kill several of the train staff and other passengers. Seok-woo is in the fight of his life to survive and to save Su-an.
Synopsis
The USS Enterprise crew explores the furthest reaches of uncharted space, where they encounter a new ruthless enemy who puts them and everything the Federation stands for to the test. directed by Justin Lin from a screenplay by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung. Starring Chris Pine (Captain Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), Karl Urban (Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy), Zoe Saldana (Uhura), Simon Pegg (Scotty), John Cho (Sulu), Anton Yelchin (Chekov) and Idris Elba (Krall).
Synopsis
The latest film adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic story finds Tarzan, having acclimated to life in London, being called back to his former home in the jungle to investigate the activities at a mining encampment.
If you have been paying attention, you will be aware that we loved Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice whereas most critics reviled Zack Snyder’s magnum opus to such an extent that it scored only 27% at Rotten Tomatoes. Mind you, the totally awful Independence Day: Resurgence managed to score 33%, so that gives you an indication of how much critics hated BVS.
Synopsis
Based on the Warcraft video game series and novels set in the world of Azeroth, The film portrays the initial encounters between the humans and the orcs and takes place in a variety of locations established in the video game series. The film is co-written and directed by Duncan Jones and stars Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper, Toby Kebbell, Ben Schnetzer, Robert Kazinsky and Daniel Wu.
Background
Whilst ostensibly, X-Men: Apocalypse deals with the emergence of the world’s first mutant, Apocalypse in the 80s, and the X-Men’s attempts to defeat his extinction level plan, it is actually the conclusion of the time-hopping trilogy that began with the Matthew Vaughn-helmed X-Men: First Class. With the re-introduction of beloved X-Men characters like Scott Summers/Cyclops (Tye Sheriden), Phoenix/Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), Nightcrawler/Kurt Wagner (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Storm/Ororo Munroe (Alexandra Shipp), the movie sets the stage for the X-Men’s new adventures.
Synopsis
Differences arise between Avengers,Captain America (Steve Rogers) and Iron Man (Tony Stark), over the proper response to the Government’s demands for oversight over superhuman activities. Then, Rogers’ best friend Bucky Barnes (aka Winter Soldier) is implicated in a terrorist act and Rogers has to choose between Barnes or Stark, which leads to disastrous consequences for the Avengers.
Synopsis
A 2015 American coming-of-age drama written and directed by Marielle Heller, based on the graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures by Phoebe Gloeckner. The film stars Bel Powley as a 15-year-old girl (Minnie) who becomes sexually active by starting a relationship with her mother’s boyfriend (played by Alexander Skarsgård).
Continue reading “REEL TO REAL: THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL”
Background
Not the sequel to Man of Steel (2013) but according to director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen), the outright launch of the DC Cinematic Universe (DCU) with the first appearance of Batman (Ben Affleck), Superman (Henry Cavill) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) together in the same movie. Key question is whether the movie itself can justify the slew of DCU films coming up in the pipeline, and in particular, Justice League (2017).
Continue reading “GEEK OUT! BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE”
There are two aspects to the Xinyao documentary The Songs We Sang, directed by Eva Tang viz. the objective and the subjective.
Alright, let me get it out there right off the bat. I have never liked Deadpool. Mainly because… Rob Liefeld. Same reason I never liked Cable. Gimmicky characters without substance. Breaking the fourth wall by itself isn’t enough to mask the fact that Deadpool is a poor rip-off of Slade Wilson a.k.a. Deathstroke.
Apart from writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa being animated from stop-motion puppetry, there is initially nothing too different about the film. But knowing Kaufman’s reputation for weird story-telling (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), that normalcy does not last for too long.
Continue reading “REEL TO REAL! FILM REVIEW: ANOMALISA – MOVIE OF 2015”
More avant-garde/speculative fiction/fantasy than outright scifi, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster is a triumph of imaginative allegory. There is a strong message running through the narrative that somewhat loses steam in the third act. The set-up though is well conceptualised.
Despite its title, Youth is really about aging. Or perhaps a surreal examination of the meaning of youth. For this reason, Youth has been compared to Birdman, apart from the fact that the innovative cinematography in both movies clearly marks them out as distinctive.