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![]() A ton of fun, notwithstanding its fashionably dark title, Thor: The Dark World features great baddies, ample turnabout, strong women and one mighty powerful hammer. My theater really enjoyed it, dates even more than dudes, judging from all the female laughter. That was mostly triggered by two…
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"As excuses go, it's not ... terrible."
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![]() Whoa, we’ve got ourselves a great new SciFi gem, an instaclassic along the lines of Gravity. It’s imperfect sure, but Europa Report’s mashup of that new benchmark’s workaday realism, Prometheus’s something’s-out-there sensationalism an…
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Europa One flies by Jupiter
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![]() Like fine wine, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home has gotten better with age. It was too cheesy when it came out, even for Star Trek, the ultimate in SciFi fondue. That was then, this is now. It’s set in the 23rd Century and now, when Now was 1986. I remember that ’86 Now just as I remember n…
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Sitting in a pickup on Marina Green: ...
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![]() Bucket List for Wise Guys is how to think of the great genre spoof Stand Up Guys. From perfect title to iconic moviestars, Fisher Steven’s film from a rookie writer’s script smartly uses Pacino, Walken & Arkin. Plus he surrounds the three elders with nubile ladies, some of them ladies of th…
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Old School Pacino
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![]() Tesla stands alone: the most mystical, the most gifted, the most freaky of the great industrial magnates, e.g., Edison, Westinghouse & J.P. Morgan, who also appear in this biopic of the Serbian-American inventor. From Zagreb, it presents as a bizarre movie where people’s mouths don’t match what’…
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Tesla meets J.P. Morgan. Edison fumes.
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![]() “Shane, come back!” could have been a Simon & Garfunkel lyric. Instead, the troubadours chose Joe DiMaggio, another icon of mid-Century American manhood. Yet, Shane endures as a cultural touchstone. Thousands of baby boomers were christened with his clarion clear name…
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Jack Palance: a badass star is born
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![]() RoboCop was a blast out of the blue when it appeared near the end of the Reagan Administration – freshly inventive, appallingly entertaining. Star powered, brilliantly conceived, smartly executed, it spawned two sequels, both inferior. Now it’s spawned a 21st century reboot…
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Peter Weller's Iconic Tinman
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![]() The great Elmore Leonard wrote two kinds of scripts, great ones and, well, er, the great Elmore Leonard wrote one kind of script, not counting the two genres he wrote: Westerns and darkly funny crime dramas. Known more now for the latter, he was a modern master of the former, populating his hair…
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Guitar kicks in 40s into the Joe Kidd...
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![]() This great martial arts movie follows the beats and tropes of fictional king fu movies while burnishing the legend of Ip Man, a real life Grandmaster of Wing Chun kung fu and Bruce Lee’s teacher. The scene of an unarmed Master Ip facing down an armed Police Captain is a classic of the form. *I…
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Ip Man amid the Japanese occupation
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![]() I avoided End of Watch when it came out in 2012, thinking it was just a steroidal TV Cop Show, moviestar Jake Gyllenhaal notwithstanding. Then David Ayer’s movie demanded attention, given BrianSez’s effusive review and Ayer’s recent mas…
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Cop Dogma in Outstanding Open Scene
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