The View From The Mountain

There have been so many films made about Robin Hood that it’s impossible not to hit one of them if you were to randomly shoot an arrow into a field. Hell, even Doctor Who has done a fun episode, Robot of Sherwood , that deals with the Robin Hood legend. But the most recent big-budget Robin Hood film, starring Taron Egerton--along with a weird assortment of costumes that looked like they were ripped off from a Star Trek episode--was a huge bomb, which might as well have brought the noble Legend of the Hood to an abrupt end. But Robin Hood is an extremely tenacious fellow who should never be counted out, as proven in Robin Hood: The Rebellion , a thoroughly enjoyable and scrappy little film with a big heart that stars Ben Freeman as the Prince of Thieves. Finding out that his beloved Marian (Marie Everett) has been taken captive by the Sheriff of Nottingham (James Oliver Wheatley), Robin Hood plots a rescue. However this rescue involves storming the Sheriff’s castle stronghold. The ...

I first saw Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the theater back when it first came out thirty five years ago this week. I was nineteen in the summer of 1984, and I loved the Temple of Doom so much then that I promptly watched it three times in the theaters (movies coming out on home video at that time was a little sketchy; so if I really liked a movie, I usually had to see it as often as I could in the theater). I was a huge fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark (and still am), and, back in 1984, I considered watching Temple of Doom almost like revisiting an old friend. I’ve seen Temple of Doom several times since on home video, first on VHS and then DVD, and I have to admit that each time I re-watched the film my love for it has lessened more and more. When I recently saw it again in preparation for this 35th anniversary review…well, to be honest, while I still enjoyed certain aspects of Temple of Doom , overall, the film is not one of my favorites. One of the reasons that it doesn...

When I first heard what Mortal Engines , the book series , was about--giant mobile cities that hunt smaller (also mobile) towns across a vast wasteland--I immediately thought about the skit in the Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life , where executives find their boardroom meeting interrupted by pirates who raid them from a building that sails right up next to theirs (it was meant to be a joke on the “corporate raider” mentality of the 1980s, but wound up being eerily prescient of the cold-hearted greed that the corporate elite had displayed in the years since). Despite having this silly image in my head, I still tried to keep an open mind about the film version of Mortal Engines , even after it became one of the big box office flops of 2018. And now after having seen Mortal Engines , I’m really glad I did, because I thought it was a superbly well-done movie. Taking place in a post-apocalyptic world that was ravaged a thousand years ago by a devastating war, Mortal Engines is indee...