by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Black Bear Pictures, FilmNation Entertainment, Bristol Automotive, StudioCanal, and The Weinstein Company.

I’m fascinated by history. Not necessarily by the big events and the brutal coups and the bloody battles, but by the small, everyday actions that send the world — either on a personal or global level — careening onto a different path. Things like Gwyneth Paltrow stopping for a pedestrian on the morning of September 11, 2001, or Gavrilo Princip grabbing a sandwich just in time to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Individual choices, whether for good or for ill, help shape the world. There’s no way to know what ramifications our decisions will have. For example, say I’m trying to decide between pizza and a bento box for dinner. What if the pizza guy doesn’t get here in time and is fired, prompting him to start a life of crime? Or what if I slip on the ice and hurt myself walking over to the Japanese place, putting me on crutches and causing me to miss the bus — and an important meeting — two weeks from now?

Something as small as ordering pizza or going for takeout can completely change the course of an individual’s life. And yet an equally simple act — one boy giving a book of secret codes to another boy — was the spark that created the modern world.

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reviews by Thom Yee

Sometimes we run out of time for a full review, sometimes release dates don’t fit into our schedule, and sometimes we just don’t have much to say about the things we’ve just watched. Here are some quick reviews of some of 2014’s bigger – but not big enough – movies.

Boyhood

Boyhood images courtesy of IFC Films

In many ways a towering achievement in filmmaking and in many more ways a simple, straightforward film about growing up, Boyhood is a strong work from every reasonable perspective, but is obviously most notable for its production schedule. Shot over the course of twelve (12!) years, the ambition of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is almost staggering, particularly considering that the key figures in the movie’s production were far from stagnant in the intervening time — director Linklater delivered prolific work, including mainstream hits like School of Rock and the final two installments in his romantic drama series, Before Sunset and Before Midnight; Ethan Hawke, who plays the father in Boyhood, starred in more than twenty movies (even if nobody actually saw them); and even Ellar Coltrane, the boy himself, had roles in several other films throughout the teen years that formed the basis of his onscreen time in this film. It’s the sheer audacity of the concept combined with coherent storytelling that makes Boyhood one of the most notable movies of 2014.

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I am not satisfied with my care

review by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Up till now, from Frozen to How to Train Your Dragon to Transformers the Movie, if you were reading an animated movie review here on GOO Reviews, no doubt about it, you were reading a review by Grace. Just like if you were reading a superhero movie GOO Review, after noticing its markedly greater sophistication and reasoning, you’d find that you were reading a review by me, Thom. But Big Hero 6? That’s a Disney movie! And it’s a Marvel movie! Disney movie. Marvel movie. Disney. Marvel. Disney. Marvel. What to do? The short answer is Grace is taking a bit of time off, and the Marvel connection was just a little too strong for me, Thom, to ignore. So here we are.

Would it surprise you to know that, like most anything else of cultural importance, I knew about Big Hero 6 before most anyone else and far before this year’s movie? That I can track the team’s origins way, way back to the first mini-series the heroes ever appeared in in 1998? Continue reading →