The View From The Mountain

There has to be a better way to get an Oscar than this! When I studied writing in college, I was taught that there are three basic stories: man verses man, man verses himself, and man verses nature. The Shallows is definitely the latter version of classic story-telling: man verses nature. Although, in this case, it’s actually woman verses nature. Blake Lively plays Nancy, a med-school drop out who’s doing a surfing tour of Mexico after the death of her mother. Her mom’s death has shattered her to the point where she wonders aloud to her father about what’s the point to it all. Why go on, she muses, with such loss all around us?  But Nancy gets a hard lesson in the basics of survival when she goes surfing in a secluded cove on the Mexican coast. Unknowingly swimming right into the feeding ground of a Great White Shark, Nancy becomes stranded on a rock outcropping that’s just 200 feet from shore. Yet she doesn’t dare try to swim for it, because the monstrous shark is actively ...

Let those misogynistic bastards have it! I have to admit to never being a huge fan of the original Ghostbusters film. I didn’t hate it; when I saw it for the first time in theaters I actually had a nice time with it. The movie was a fun ride. But then I forgot about it. Unlike movies that I truly loved, like Blade Runner , or the Star Wars movies, I never had any real urge to own a copy of GB , and other than seeing it a second time with friends during a double feature with Fright Night a year later in 1985, I never saw Ghostbusters again until very recently on home video (it was only the third time I saw it in over thirty years, and the first time I watched it with closed captions; it was nice to finally pick up some missed lines). So when they announced a new version of GB , with an all-female cast, I wasn’t one of those cry-babies who whined, because the original Ghostbusters was just another movie for me, nothing more (and even when they did remake stuff I loved, like Sta...

Hey, creepy ghost, wait there, I'm going to get the Marines. In Lights Out , a little boy named Martin (Gabriel Bateman) is having trouble staying awake in school, having fallen asleep in class for the third time. When Martin’s big sister Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) goes to pick him up at school, she learns that the reason he can’t sleep at home is because Martin is being terrorized by a vengeful apparition that lurks in the shadows. And when he tried to get help from his mother, Sophie (Maria Bello), Martin saw her speaking in a conspiratorial manner to the monstrous wraith in her bedroom. Rebecca, who lives on her own, decides to keep Martin with her at her apartment. When she was younger and still living at home, Rebecca suffered at the hands of her mother--who clearly has some deep-seated mental issues--before running off to start her own life. Now she wants to spare Martin the same torment, yet the social worker that’s been assigned to Martin’s case informs Rebecca that tryi...

There's somebody behind me, isn't there? Shortly after the astounding success of The Exorcist , William Peter Blatty, who wrote the original novel the film was based on (as well as the screenplay for the film), had an idea for a sequel. At first William Friedkin, the director of the original Exorcist , liked the idea, but when he reportedly changed his mind about directing it, Blatty turned the sequel idea into a novel called Legion , which was published in 1983, ten years after the release of the seminal movie. In 1990, Blatty would go on to write and direct the film version of Legion, which was called The Exorcist III , at the insistence of the studio (Blatty had wanted to call it Legion, after his novel, but the studio felt Exorcist III was a more viable title). George C. Scott (Patton) stars as Lt. Kinderman (a role played in the original Exorcist by Lee J. Cobb), who finds himself confounded by a series of brutal murders, including that of a boy and a priest. The s...

You heard of the mile high club, then just think of this as being the million miles away club.  Passengers is a science fiction film that tries hard to be an intelligent SF story, one that deals with issues more than people shooting ray guns and whatnot. And certainly, when you hire an actress the caliber of Jennifer Lawrence--an Oscar winner, no less--one would expect a degree of gritty drama to be served with this heaping pile of space opera. Yet Passengers falls way short of being anything more than a popcorn flick. That’s not necessarily a bad thing-- Passengers isn’t a horrible movie, not by any means, but in falling short of properly dealing with its storyline, it becomes just another mediocre flick. Chris Pratt, best known for his roles in Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World (both films I enjoyed immensely) co-stars here as a passenger on board what’s known as a sleeper ship. Outer space is extremely vast, and it will take many years to travel from solar ...