My Own Little World

Ready Player One is exactly what I expected. And that is a very good thing. Steven Spielberg is more or less the one who created movies like this one, and he proves once again here that he can helm a big blockbuster film in ways that few others can. There is attention to detail in the direction; there is a firm command of the power of scale; there is excitement and fun and some emotion. This is probably the most fun I’ve had watching a movie so far this year, and it is all because the man who created the template for great escapist filmmaking is back doing his thing. Of course, Ready Player One ’s escapist nature does make it suffer a tad in some areas that would seem very important like character development and a possession of deeper themes, and I know some will complain about that. While I understand how some might see this film as shallow and meaningless, there is a very good story at its core that makes me feel. It doesn’t have the emotional punch of an Oscar-nominate...

As soon as I saw who was involved in The Post , I was hooked – you give me Steven Spielberg directing people like Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, and it’s kind of like the most surefire Oscar contender you can get. And I got exactly the film I expected with The Post : a high-quality, entertaining, and even slightly informative movie with some great performances and few if any flaws behind the camera. It’s probably irrational for me to assume that The Post could be any greater than the sum of its parts, but that sum – as good as it was – is something I have seen before. Spielberg has gotten into a groove of these kinds of movies, these politically-charged dramas that tend to show a correlation between the world of the past and the world of today. The Post does everything that films like Lincoln and Munich have already done and done well; as lazy as that may sound for someone with Spielberg’s profile, this film does make some very pointed connections between the Nixon and Trump ad...

Somehow, some way, Jurassic World  is both one of my most anticipated films of the year and one of the most surprising. The anticipation shouldn't be hard to grasp: I remember seeing the original Jurassic Park  on VHS when I was give or take 8 years old. I fell in love with it immediately and even more so when last summer I saw it on the big screen for the first time at my local arthouse. So, where did the skepticism come from? Well, as I saw more and more material come from Jurassic World , I kept thinking (and hearing from others) that it looked more and more like a mindless CG crapfest similar to the Transformers  franchise...or Jurassic Park III . Thankfully, the 14 years we've waited for a fourth Jurassic Park  film were well worth the wait. Not only is Jurassic World  visually entertaining and thrilling, it also captures a lot of the magic of the original film. The majority of this magic comes from the story. The "too long; didn't read" version...