Category Archives: Films

Ant-Man review

01 Saturday Aug 2015

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Some ants may have died in the production of this movie

by Thom Yee

Ant-Man images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Ant-Man images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

One of the things that’s really helped to make a regularly updated movie review website a sustainable endeavour over the last three years here at GOO Reviews has been the rapid proliferation of superhero movies. They’ve consistently been some of the leading tentpole movies of their respective seasons and years of release, they’re easy to schedule reviews around, and, frankly, they’re easy to write about. As a lifelong comicbook nerd and as someone who usually finds more to believe in from these fictional heroes than from anyone in our non-fictional world, I always get a kick out of watching them, and it’s usually easy for me to find something new to say about them.

On the other hand, Ant-Man is coming out at what may be a crossroads for the superhero movie in general. After almost ten years of consistent critical and box office success, there’s been an undeniable and growing shift in recent viewer preferences away from the format as it stands today. It started with low rumblings as people started to gripe about how sick they were of origin movies, it’s continued through a vocal recognition of how formulaic and unremarkable superhero movies are becoming, and right now I think it’s a movement spearheaded by some of the outright animosity Avengers: Age of Ultron has received from critics, the general movie-going public, and even some underwhelmed former fans. Continue reading →

Back to the Future

04 Saturday Jul 2015

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Say hi to your mom for me

by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.

It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Back to the Future!

That’s a big deal.

Really.

It is.

It was July 3, 1985 when Back to the Future first hit theatres, literally just over thirty years ago, and not only does that mean we’ve finally reached the year its sequel travelled forward to, with its flying cars and hoverboards and rehydrated pizzas, it also means that we’ve travelled as far forward in time since its release as Marty McFly travelled back in time to 1955 to ensure his own existence and re-emergence into an improved 1985 timeline.

Is that important? Does that mean anything? Did that sentence even make any real sense? It doesn’t matter. I don’t, uh… I’m gonna start over. Continue reading →

Inside Out

27 Saturday Jun 2015

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by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures.

Images courtesy of Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures.

To varying degrees, we’re all creatures of emotion. When I was younger I believed I had more right than anyone else to have emotions, and, more specifically, to channel those emotions in whatever way I saw fit. After all, what did the other kids in my class know about loss? What did they know about feeling unloved or unwanted?

In my young and narrow mind, I believed they knew nothing. And as other children do, I even went so far as to believe that I was the only one in the world, that no one else had feelings, that only I could experience the world as I did. I lacked empathy, or the basic understanding of others’ emotions and the will to feel the same way.

Empathy, as with most things, came as I grew older and as I learned that others did, in fact, have the same association with loss and rejection as I did. So did the ability to understand my emotions and the reasons behind them. It was no longer enough just to feel sad or angry: I had to know why I felt the way I did, which led to understanding, which led to (hopefully) not taking those emotions out on others.

But when I was a child, with emotions so much fuller and so much more untameable, this maturity was beyond my grasp. All I knew was that I felt angry, or fearful, or happy, and I didn’t know how to keep my emotions inside where adults told me they belonged. So instead of keeping it all bottled up, I let the inside out.

Continue reading →

Ex Machina

13 Saturday Jun 2015

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Fell in love with a girl robot. Again.

by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of A24

Images courtesy of A24

You suck.

You’re awful.

You’re just too slow.

You can’t do complex math in your head (if at all). You wouldn’t recognize a micro expression if your life counted on it (and believe me, it does). You probably can’t even remember your best friend’s phone number (even though you text them all the time, I would know).

Your brain is small and easily damaged. It doesn’t even have a connection to the Internet. It can’t be easily modified or upgraded. Or moved to a different body.

Continue reading →

Tomorrowland

30 Saturday May 2015

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Fell in love with a girl robot

by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

When I was a kid, by the time I was ten years old I had already been to Disneyland three times. And I don’t know why. For a kid from Edmonton, Canada, three times to Disneyland strikes me as a lot, almost like my parents were intentionally overloading the front half of our family vacations to prep me for future holidays that would never see us leave Canada again.

I liked Disneyland well enough, but I was a pretty cynical kid even during those pre-ten-year-old years, so most of my specific memories of Disneyland have more to do with the shock I felt at how much everything cost.  Probably the most vivid memory I have of my Disneyland adventures was the time I accidentally ruined the day’s pictures by exposing the film in our old Pentax. That one’s on you, Mom and Dad, did you really expect me not to be curious about pulling that ‘open’ tab on the back of the camera?! You could have told me what would happen! You… you could have told me… Continue reading →

Pitch Perfect 2

25 Monday May 2015

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by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Gold Circle Films and Universal Pictures.

Images courtesy of Gold Circle Films and Universal Pictures.

Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d never become a writer. I like to pretend I could’ve been an artist, an actor, or a singer. (Never anything so pedestrian as a doctor or lawyer, if only because you don’t need good grades to go into the arts.) The only problem is, much like my boy Justin, I’m mediocre to middling at all of those things.

Even though — and maybe even because — I lack the kind of superstar power that could help me succeed in any of those fields, I love them like crazy. I love art, I love theatre, and I friggin’ love a well-sung piece of music. And you know what I really extra especially love? When that music is just voices and nothing else. Yes, this is me freely admitting that I like a cappella music.

Unfortunately, my radical, all-encompassing love for a cappella didn’t extend as far as Pitch Perfect 2, and I’m going to tell you in my usual exhaustive fashion exactly why that is.

Continue reading →

Avengers: Age of Ultron — A Review from an Allegedly Normal Person

18 Monday May 2015

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by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Studios.

Images courtesy of Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Last week, the sweaty nerds — or one of them, anyway — had their say about Avengers 2: Age of Ultron. It was a review dripping with both sweat and unbridled nerdiness. It was a review jam-packed with self-referential prose about the movie-watching experience, wonderings about the Marvel cinematic universe, and well-thought-out arguments against popular critical positions.

And you should be aware that I, supposedly a normal person, agree with most of it.

Continue reading →

Avengers: Age of Ultron — A Review from a ComicBook Nerd

09 Saturday May 2015

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With great power comes great… wait… different franchise. Never mind. Not relevant.

by Thom Yee

Avengers: Age of Ultron images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Avengers: Age of Ultron images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Age of Ultron represents a sort of anniversary for us here at GOO Reviews. It was nearly three years ago that Grace and I set off on this endeavor to review pop culture in all of its minutiae (or at least the parts we could be bothered with) after seeing an already overcrowded and thoroughly well served market of online reviews and saying, “Us too!” We launched with a spate of reviews, of movies and TV shows and novels and comicbooks, but the first out of the gate was a review of a particularly special movie – The Avengers. We’ve come a long way since 2012 and those lowly days of 3G iPhones, Large Hadron Colliders, and misinterpretations of Mayan calendars. We’ve reviewed more than 100 films, provided week-by-week coverage of several popular television series, and witnessed the Marvel Cinematic Universe grow from mewling quim to roaring froth. Some of us have graduated college, moved out of our parents’ house, and are well on our way towards marriage and adulthood, while still others have also graduated college, had already moved out of our parents’ house, and are continuing on our lonely, vengeful, blood-red path, with marriage, fulfillment and contentment still nowhere in sight, hoping that the next leap will be the leap home. Continue reading →