Tag Archives: Action

Star Wars: The Force Awakens review

16 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Films, Uncategorized

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

by Thom Yee

star-wars-force-awakens-one

Star Wars: The Force Awakens images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

What if a child grew up without seeing Star Wars in the same way that society sees it? What if a child found far greater meaning in the other stories he grew up with? That child would be me.

I don’t get Star Wars. I mean, I get it, it’s not like there’s some abstraction that makes it hard to interpret or understand, and I can see how it’s vast array of post-movie product offerings — toys, books, clothing, ornaments, lifestyle accessories — have allowed it to become such a big deal, but I don’t get why it’s become such an all-consuming behemoth of an intellectual property or why it’s managed to gain fan warship at a level and with a reach so far in excess of any other franchise that doesn’t count the Bible or Dianetics amongst its works. Continue reading →

Jessica Jones (Season 1)

19 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by in Television

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Anyone ever heard of earplugs?

by Thom Yee

Jessica Jones images courtesy of Marvel Television, ABC Studios, Tall Girls Productions, and Netflix

Jessica Jones images courtesy of Marvel Television, ABC Studios, and Netflix

People ask me all the time, they ask me, “Thom, when’s this whole… superhero thing gonna end?” Well… they ask me that after the considerable time they’ve been forced to spend with me and after I’ve finally lightened up enough to let them practice a bit of their own free will.

After they’re pummeled to the point of submission by a group of my various bodyguards and henchmen for such impudence — the impudence of suggesting that superhero movies will go away and the impudence of speaking to me as if I owed them (or anybody) an answer — I tell them the same thing I tell myself:

Superheroes will never end!

Continue reading →

Creed

05 Saturday Dec 2015

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Can you take me higher?  To a place like Apollo Creed.
Can you take me higher?  To a place like Rocky III.

by Thom Yee

Creed images courtesy of Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Creed images courtesy of Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The Rocky movies are beloved by many, many people, across a wide variety of generations, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Speaking to an essential part of our shared human experience of fear, self-doubt, and our hope to one day just have a chance at success, they’re also one of the few series of movies that manage to transcend film itself with two statues erected in the character’s honour that can be visited in real life in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps the character runs up during his early training also acting as an important tourist destination for the city. But, as with a lot of movie series, the first was the best and it told a strong enough and self-contained enough story that not only can you easily argue against the first Rocky needing a sequel, it’s pretty easy to argue that every one after the first takes place in an entirely different universe. Continue reading →

Spectre

14 Saturday Nov 2015

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If you take a life, do you know what you’ll give?

by Thom Yee

Spectre images courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and Columbia Pictures.

Spectre images courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and Columbia Pictures.

When we first set out on building GOO Reviews, Skyfall was the first new review we wrote after the first batch of ten template reviews we’d initially mocked up to work out the kinks of our reviewing process. It’s been a long time since that cold November night back in 2012 when we first saw Skyfall, and now, even though it’s been three years of learning and growing as movie reviewers for us, I still can’t get over how good the opening to my Skyfall review was. The rest of my review sucked though, and right now my thoughts about that long-ago review mirror my feelings about Spectre, the latest Bond movie.

At the moment, it’s hard not to be a little down on the whole Bond franchise with ongoing speculation around a new Bond and talk of how badly current star Daniel Craig wants out. Continue reading →

The Dark Knight Trilogy retrospecticus

26 Saturday Sep 2015

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by Thom Yee

batman-begins-one

Dark Knight images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

I’m not sure I fully understand why people like Batman so much, because I don’t think the Batman most people like is the same Batman that I like. My Batman is less a [Bat]man but a [Bat]god, the ultimate human, the first human superhero, and the kind of hero that never once makes you question his value among a pantheon of god-like superbeings. The kind of superhero that can bring down an alien overman. The kind of superhero so resilent that he’s endured the campiest of the ‘60s and the darkest of the ‘80s. The kind of superhero who can defeat three Martians at once and on his own, Martians that had beaten the entire Justice League, by being the first to discover their one weakness. He’s there because he’s the Dark Knight Detective, the smartest one in the room even when that room contains people who were gifted with intelligence as a superpowers.

Continue reading →

Fantastic Four (2015)

15 Saturday Aug 2015

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What the ‘FF’ is everybody’s problem?

by Thom Yee

Fantastic Four images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Fantastic Four images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

We live in a dismissive culture.

Deriding people staring at their smartphones.

Telling people their video games are a waste of time.

Throwing away our children’s’ comicbooks.

Locking all the doors and throwing away all the keys, whether we’re doing it consciously or simply as a reflex, because there’s surely nothing important on that screen, nothing to learn from video games, and no meaningful stories in comicbooks. There is only us and what we value, not you and yours, and when everyone says a movie is terrible, we pile on without care, without question, often without even witnessing, always so happy and only too eager to have found something new to reject. Continue reading →

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation

08 Saturday Aug 2015

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You’re getting old, Ethan Hunt

by Thom Yee

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol images courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation images courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

It feels like it’s been a while since Tom Cruise has done anything all that weird, and by now, even the most ardent KSW-questioning, couch-preservationing, short-person-hating, parents-should-spend-time-with-their-kids-believing critics should be able to admit that he’s made some pretty solid movies lately. And what more can we ask for than that? I don’t go to a Tom Cruise movie to watch him defend Scientology or explain why his last marriage didn’t work, that’s not why I go to movies and those subjects aren’t all that interesting even outside of movies. I go to movies to watch something entertaining and hopefully engaging, and in that way Tom Cruise continues to be the perfect action movie star.

The perfect 53-year-old action movie star. Continue reading →

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 →