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There’s something charming about stop-motion animation, isn’t there? Particularly the kind where an entire film is made with it, just like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Long before Wallace & Gromit took on the Were-Rabbit, Jack Skellington took on the Christmas season and owned it for about fifteen minutes. Skellington, of course, being the king of Halloween, the most un-Christmassy holiday ever devised. From a story by Tim Burton, Hollywood’s weirdest mainstream director, and directed by Burton understudy Henry Salick (who’s debut stop-motion film James & The Giant Peach was a standout!), Nightmare Before Christmas is a whimsical, lyrical, visual delight. The characters are strange, in the most manic Tim Burton way, and the world they inhabit is equally kooky: but the Halloween-styled Christmas riffs elevate this above simple animated mockery to actual art. Jack Skellington, the depressed and anorexic king of Halloweentown, is fed up with the holiday he’s ruler of. Halloween has lost its charm, so when he sees how happy folks are over Christmas, he decides to steal the holiday for himself. Capturing Santa, devising his own set of Christmassy-halloween versions of the holiday seasons cliches, and proclaiming himself the new “Sandy Claws”, Jack becomes a victim of his own covetousness.

Wanna read more about the Nightmare? Click here!!!

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Shakespeare blah blah Romeo and Juliet blah blah animated films blah blah star casting blah blah. You know, most reviews of major animated films these days tend to focus on two things: the casting, and the story. What do you write about then, when the story is one of the greatest ever written, and the cast is made up of almost entirely legendary cinema icons both young and old?At least the animation is cool. Gnomeo & Juliet is based on Shakespeare’s classic tale of Romeo and Juliet, told from the point of view of – and here’s the weird part – garden gnomes. And Elton John songs. Two gardens, both alike in looks, in fair London, were this film is set, bear an ancient grudge to which we’re never privy to the origins, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean – the owners of two joined houses in suburban London have an enmity which has spread to even their back gardens, gardens populated by gnomes which come alive when their owners are out. One the one side, the Reds, and on the other, the Blues, both battle each other over a cause unknown. Thus begins the tale of Gnomeo and Juliet.

Click here for gnomic comedy gold….

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In what can only be described as horrific, The Cove brings to light Japan’s shocking attempts to cover-up their annual dolphin slaughter near the tiny costal town of Taiji, on the southern edge of that country. This documentary, directed by Oceanic Preservation Society co-founder Louie Psihoyos, shows the quest by former dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry to end the annual slaughter of thousands of innocent marine mammals, using hidden cameras, stealth technology, deep-diving champions, and a disregard for personal safety. The Cove won the Oscar for best Documentary Feature at the 82^nd Academy Awards (held in 2010), and perhaps rightly so. It’s confronting, wrenching and entirely terrible to witness the slaughter of hundreds upon hundreds of dolphins, all carved up to feed the masses and potentially create a new problem for Japan to endure. More on this in a moment.

Click here to delve deeper into The Cove…

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Anyone who’s invested even the slightest amount of time in understanding popular culture will recognize the famous image of Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher, lazing about in that golden bikini slave outfit in the Star Wars film Return of The Jedi. Undeniably one of cinema’s most celebrated and iconic images, as well as perhaps a masturbatory aide for boys aged thirteen to thirty, the Slave Leia look is among the more popular homages perpetrated at San Diego’s annual Comic Con – that once-a-year event in which thousands of people descend on the city to check out new films, new comic books, locate old and rare items of geek value, and generally nerd around. Paul, directed by Superbad helmer Greg Mottola, and starring geek-icons Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, uses this warm-huggy feeling of nerd camaraderie to generate plenty of laughs based around the culture of science fiction and aliens. It’s a loose comedy adventure film, playing both homage to, and stealing from, some of science fictions most holy cows – lines from Star Wars, references to Star Trek, aliens at Roswell (and many others), all of which adds up to a rich tapestry of love for the genre – although non-sci-fi geeks may find much of the humor slips right over their heads.

Click here to find out what we thought of Paul!!

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Legal minefields might make awesome Hollywood fodder, but often, they can feel a lot like “been there, done that” a fair amount of the time. Blockbuster courtroom flicks like A Few Good Men, 12 Angry Men, A Time To Kill, The Verdict and Presumed Innocent all stand tall among the very best of the justice system playing out on film, and we’ve had decades of television shows doing the same (Law & Order among the most prominent current iterations), so we’ve all become accustomed to the American legal system in due course. The Lincoln Lawyer, based on a novel by Michael Connelly (who also wrote Blood Work, which itself was turned into a film by Clint Eastwood back in 2002), is yet another variation on a theme – a well-worn theme of a defense lawyer having to defend a man who could actually be guilty of a horrendous crime.

Click here to see Matthew McConaughey NOT take off his shirt…

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Ahh, the good old gangster film. Dark coats, fedoras, tommy-guns and sharp-as-a-whip broads all speakin’ the lingo of 30’s America, mixed with the heady brew of violence and sex, usually makes up a fine cocktail of crime and runnin’ from the law. Bonnie & Clyde, perhaps the most famous of all films to glorify a pair of real-life criminals, was noted at the time for its then-shocking depiction of violence and raw sexuality, and is by most modern standards the benchmark for all films of the genre. The screen presence of Warren Beatty in that film, as Clyde Barrow, was searing to say the least, while Faye Dunaway ably backed him up as the sultry muse to his violent artistry. Capturing the era, the feeling of disassociation of the time, and the dusty, grimy humanity struggling to survive the wrenching heartache of Depression era America, director Arthur Penn nailed it perfectly. Michael Mann, delivering his own version of the crime film set during the Depression, and retelling key moments in the life of John Dillinger, brings Public Enemies close to that benchmark, yet falls short in the end. While the film often skirts greatness, with some terrific dialogue, Public Enemies feels too aloof and inaccessible for all, save viewers intimately familiar with the era.

Click here to open fire and read on!

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Now that I’ve had time to digest JJ Abrams’ most recent directorial effort, the Steven Spielberg produced Super 8, I will admit that I’m still sitting here saying wow. This is a gem of a film, destined to become a true cinematic classic – and that’s something I don’t say lightly. While it has the potential to become lost in the jumble of increasingly poor Hollywood junk released into cinemas every week, and become yet another faded DVD cover sitting on the top shelf of your rental store, that would be a major disservice to Super 8′s sense of nostalgia and sheer cinematic love. It’s a film designed to rekindle the child in us all, a very Spielbergian trait, and considering Abram’s appears to have been taken under the wing of the Master himself these days, that’s hardly surprising. It’s a love affair with the American dream, a film about film, and above all, a film about love and the losing of innocence. No you filthy bastard, not that kind of innocence. Super 8 is spectacular and intimate, an emotional journey with a group of kids witnessing an unimaginable disaster within their community. There’s a lot to love about Super 8.

Click here to roll camera on Super 8!!

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My good buddy across at Above The Line, Rory Dean, prompted me into giving Duncan Jones’s work a look-over after reviewing Jones’s action genre entry, Source Code, and although at the time I write this article (mid-August 2011) Source Code is unavailable on BluRay to peruse, I did trot down to the video store and pick up a copy of Moon to get me started. Boy, am I glad I did. I’d heard good reports about Moon (in response, though, I had also heard bad reports, specifically from The Secret Squirrel, who sent me an email to say he/she’d fallen asleep watching it) and while I was keen to see it, other films had drawn my attention away from giving it a shot. Having now seen it, I’m prepared to offer a mea culpa of sorts to Jones for not appreciating his magnificent talent until now. Moon is not a film you can watch lightly: it requires concentration and understanding; understanding for the character-driven story it unleashes, and concentration in trying to connect the dots and follow the twists and turns. Long-time cinema junkies may spot the “twists” coming a mile off, and I admit, both my wife and I spotted it a fair way from the end (it’s not the point of the film to have a twist, but merely a plot deviation which makes the scenario even more heartbreaking), but it did nothing to lessen my enjoyment of Duncan Jones’s debut effort.

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Before beginning this review, I feel I have a duty of honesty to admit that the Planet of The Apes films have never really been my thing – I have always appreciated the Charlton Heston original, of course, because it is indeed a classic, but the inferior sequels and the turgid Tim Burton remake all made me realize that it was a franchise I had very little interest in. The characters, the narrative, the world itself just slid past me with a deep sigh of “meh.” So I come to Rise Of The Planet of the Apes with very low expectations – low except for the rather high expectation for the quality of the special effects, of course. Each and every trailer for this film indicated that regardless of the story or the acting, at the very least the visual effects were as realistic as possible in bringing super-intelligent apes to life. I remember saying to a friend while watching Peter Jackson’s King Kong a few years back, that if they could do this with one ape, it wouldn’t be long before a reinvented Planet of The Apes franchise came along – and I was right. He owes me ten bucks. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes is most assuredly a product of the Hollywood Machine – it’s a join-the-dots human story interspersed with an infinitely more interesting Ape story; this fact alone – that the apes of the film are more interesting than the humans – would give a cynical critic pause, but the brushstrokes of director Rupert Wyatt’s sharply directed think-piece are broad enough to ensure this films’ legacy will remain an enduring one in the Apes franchise’s long, checkered history.

Click here to rise up and take control…