Review – Captain Marvel (2019)

by Kevin Muller

There is a destructive force coming to the MCU, Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it has to power to destroy everything in its path. No, I’m not talking about Thanos, but the star of this film, Brie Larson. For those of you who don’t know, Larson hasn’t been the easiest person to deal with during the filming and promotion of this film. As the lead in a MCU film, she is using it as a platform to deal with women’s rights and other injustices she wants to talk about. Her foot has already been in her mouth a few times, including her saying that the new super hero film wasn’t made for white men, who are the majority of the critic reviewing population. On top of that, she apparently isn’t meshing well with the other Avengers, which could cause a problem. See, most of these original heroes will start to fade out, with the new ones, like Captain Marvel, stepping up to take the lead for the coming years. It doesn’t look good when your main star has created such controversy before the movie was released. Outside of the controversy, the main reason people want to see this is to get information about the person who will fix what Thanos did at the end of Infinity War.   At the end of that film, Nick Fury was seen contacting her, before disintegrating into nothing, along with half of the world’s population. So, how is this origin story that tells us about the savior to this epic saga?

Continue reading →

Review – Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

by Kevin Muller

Alita: Battle Angel is a project that has been in development for over twenty years. It was supposed to be the follow up film for James Cameron immediately following Titanic. Then, Cameron got deep into the world of Pandora with his characters from his hugely successful Avatar film, which he’s currently making four back to back sequels that will be released over the next ten years. Enter Robert Rodriguez, who has directed Desperado, Sin City, and the Spy Kids movies, to take on the long awaited project.

Continue reading →

Review – Bottle Rocket (1996)

by Armando Vanegas

Sometimes, I get bored reviewing new movies so for some reason, I wanted to go through all the Wes Anderson movies in chronological order in the meantime. It’s just something that gives me a challenge to do and maybe there will be unexpected feelings and unique thoughts I never saw coming. So, without further delay, let’s begin with his 1996 debut, Bottle Rocket. I remember this being a movie that got a lot of play on Comedy Central back in the day and it was always the kind of movie that I never felt compelled to watch when it’s on. Honestly, I was never impressed with the bits I’d seen, but there were always interesting sequences that made the rest of the movie worth it. So, in subsequent years, I would watch bits and pieces because there was sometimes nothing to watch on cable. When I last watched this movie, I rated this movie rather highly back when I was more of a snob when it came to movies. But as anyone who has read my Phantom Thread review, I’ve decided to just to watch movies as their own individual self, judge them as their own thing no matter who’s involved in terms of the directors, the writers, or the actors. Watching this again was interesting. As a movie directed by someone who would be later become one of the most idiosyncratic and quirky filmmakers of our time, younger middle school me who watched this on cable was right. Outside of a few well directed sequences, it’s fine.

Continue reading →