News, Views & Reviews of Movies from a Catholic Perspective
Posted in Adventure, Anti-Catholic on May 21st, 2009
After wasting an hour or two too many several years ago on the much-ado-about-patent-nonsense controversy surrounding Dan Brown’s laughable blockbuster, The DaVinci Code, I have of late been sedulously avoiding all references to “Dan Brown”, “Angels and Demons”, “Ron Howard”, or “Tom Hanks”. But when I stumbled across Ross Douthat’s spade-calling op ed piece [...]
Posted in Adventure, Drama, Historical, Romance on May 12th, 2009
The last word spoken in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is “panache.” It’s a single-word summation of all that came before. Cyrano — like Falstaff, Captain Ahab or Robin Hood — is a literary character turned worldwide phenomenon. He is the big-nosed, swashbuckling poet who embodies “panache,” and has captured the hearts and imaginations of [...]
The challenge of adapting Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo for the screen, large or small, is of such a colossal magnitude that perhaps only Nostromo himself, the novel’s hero and “a man in a thousand” should have been charged with the task. The difficulties start with the logistics of the production. Set in a fictional South American [...]
Revenge is Sweat
Any Bond movie is greater than the sum of its parts. It has the whole weight of the 007 mythology behind it, and the ghost of Connery lurking in the wings. Daniel Craig has donned the tuxedo, spoken the line (“Bond. James Bond”) and driven the Aston Martin, but he’s made the role [...]
Posted in Action, Adventure, Comedy, Family on Jan 7th, 2009
Starring Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, and Randall Duk Kim
Reviewed by John Murphy
Kung Fu Panda succeeds as a cartoon, a comedy, and an action film. It is seriously entertaining. Formulaic? Sure, but the formula works. The animation is eye-popping, the gags are good, and the action sequences have energy and imagination.
Directed by Andrew Adamson
Starring Ben Barnes, William Moseley, and Georgie Henley
The first two installments of C.S. Lewis’ beloved Chronicles of Narnia have gotten the big-screen treatment, and my fingers are crossed that the producers will take the Harry Potter route for future adaptations and start parceling out directing duties piecemeal. Andrew Adamson, the director of [...]
Directed by Tarsem
Reviewed by John Murphy
Tarsem, the mononomic commercial and music video director, self-financed this visually stunning labor of love, filmed over years in over a dozen countries. The product is a lavish, inventive, and darkly imaginative spectacle. A woman is trapped in a labyrinth, birds fly from a shaman’s mouth, island-exiled bandits hitch a [...]
Directed by Sean Penn
Starring Emile Hirsch, Hal Holbrook
Into the Wild is based on the true story of Chris McCandless, a college graduate from a posh family who abandons his privileged existence for a life of hitchhiking, living off the land, and go-with-the-flow spirituality. He sends his life savings to OxFam, scissors his credit cards, and [...]
I’m a rank sentimentalist, I know, but I tell you I cried when I saw this trailer for the long-awaited Indy 4: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
It would appear that the Spielberg we have always loved, and whose most “childish” work is perhaps more important than he knows, is back.
We [...]
Posted in Adventure on Jul 5th, 2007
starring Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., David Niven, and Raymond Massey
Families looking for movie entertainment that insults neither their morals, their intelligence, nor their aesthetics can often do no better than go to the vaults for the vintage products—those great old films from the Silent era through the Forties, usually in black and [...]
Hopelessly LOST? Read Debra murphy's LOSTian disquisitions on the "LOST in the Vines" Newsvine group.So, was that your friend in the wood chipper, then?
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