Tag Archives: Action

Simul-Review: Guardians of the Galaxy

10 Sunday Aug 2014

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by Thom Yee and Grace Crawford

What Thom Thought:

They Got My Dick Message!

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

I can’t believe how skeptical people were of this movie.

Before the summer started — before your winter soldiers and days of future pasts and ages of extinction — I told people that the only summer movie I had faith in was Guardians of the Galaxy. And every one I talked to said that they weren’t so sure. And I’m not trying to be that guy just because I called this one, just like I called Finding Nemo in the 2003 summer of the second Matrix, X-Men 2 and Terminator 3, because I’m also the guy who thought John Carter was a decent movie and that Blackberry really was going to make a comeback last year (and besides that, who remembers anything about 2003 other than Freaky Friday?).

I think by now that Marvel Studios has come a long way towards earning our trust.

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Edge of Tomorrow

14 Saturday Jun 2014

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Sometimes shooting yourself in the head really is the best choice

by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

We all know it’s impossible to talk about a Tom Cruise movie like Edge of Tomorrow without talking about Tom Cruise.

A working actor for more than three decades whose box office earnings have reached a combined, unadjusted total of more than three billion dollars, Tom Cruise is a true movie star, consistently able to draw crowds, whether it’s to his movies or to witness his oft-bizarre behaviour, much of which seems attributed to his beliefs as a Scientologist. The star of some of the biggest movies in modern history and an enduring fixture in blockbuster American cinema, Cruise has been attached to several Hollywood starlets, including marriages to Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes, and that’s about as much as I’m going to write about Tom Cruise, because, like it or not, watching movies is supposed to be about watching movies.

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Simul-Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

31 Saturday May 2014

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by Thom Yee and Grace Crawford

What Thom Thought 

It was worth it just for Iceman.

Images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Let’s be honest with each other, you and I. For once in our lives.

Now when it really matters. If only this one time.

If only about the X-Men.

There’s never been a truly good X-Men movie. I’m not just zeroing in on The Last Stand or the Wolverine movies. While they all vary in quality, none of them are very good. First Class comes close, but it’s still a little off.

As one of the few people in the world who grew up with but never grew out of reading comicbooks, I’ve come into superhero movies already familiar with most of the groundwork being laid, and already aware of the continuities being established and messed with. And as GOO Reviews’ resident comicbook historian/nerd, I’ve thought about superhero movies a lot more than any one person probably should at any point in their lives.

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Godzilla (2014)

24 Saturday May 2014

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures and Toho

Images courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures and Toho

If you have even a passing interest in Godzilla (and I assume you must considering what you’ve done to arrive here in the middle of this sentence), over the last few weeks you’ve probably been seeing and hearing a little bit more about the character and series than you normally do. This year marks sixty years since the release of the very first Godzilla, the debut of the iconic Japanese monster and the first steps of an icon that would go on to star in more than thirty movie that broke free of their homeland and gave birth to an entire genre of… grown men dressing up in rubber monster suits and trampling all over obviously fake cities as allegories for nuclear terror and mankind’s contempt for nature (is contempt the right word?).

And what better way could there be to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the venerable series and symbol of Japan than with an all-new 2014 movie produced in America, with a British director, filmed in Canada, and set for release more than two months later in its homeland than most of the rest of the world (that’s right, Godzilla opens on July 25th in Japan)?

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier

12 Saturday Apr 2014

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

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

As hopelessly optimistic and cartoonishly heartwarming as Captain America: The First Avenger may have been in telling the story of the greatest hero of our greatest generation, it was tough to swallow that whole pill without noting the bitterness it ended with. If you had any investment in the character at all, it was hard to watch him running through the streets, frantically taking in the sights of a world seventy years his senior, and not feel your heart sink just a little bit as he realizes what’s happened and how far from home he will always be. If you’ll remember, The First Avenger essentially ended with Cap’s musings on missed love, ending the whole film on a bit of a sour note before shunting us off to his first modern mission, a post-credits sequence leading into what was, at the time, our first, best look at the upcoming Avengers movie. It’s that man out of time aspect, that sacrificing it all and wondering at the price, that’s at the heart of the character, and if you don’t get that, if you don’t understand that Steve Rogers is someone who embodies the best of many traditional American values without being a slave to the system, then you’ll never really get the character.

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Captain America: The First Avenger

05 Saturday Apr 2014

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by Thom Yee

Captain America: The First Avenger images courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Captain America: The First Avenger images courtesy of Paramount Pictures

At the heart of the success of the Marvel Studios movies is a sincere desire to respect and honour the characters. While that may seem like an obviously necessary element of any adaptation, one need only look to the poorly translated and unnecessarily altered characters in movies like Fox’s Fantastic Four franchise to see what happens when producers deviate too far from the source material. The reason why so many of our biggest comicbook characters have transcended major societal shifts and uprisings through more than (in Marvel’s case) seventy-five years of existence is that, at their core, they represent a wholehearted commitment and (in the case of the heroes) a dedication to the fundamental good that we all hope is really at the heart of all mankind, even if that good is often hidden or deliberately suppressed.

I’m reminded of this fact as I recently re-watched Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, mostlybecause I was too lazy to turn over and change the channel, but also a little bit because that Human Torch-Silver Surfer chase is, admittedly, pretty sweet.  Continue reading →

GR Dailies: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – The Bridge

11 Wednesday Dec 2013

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

1×10:  “The Bridge”

And so we come full circle.  Sort of.  Well, a character from the first episode is back.  So half circle.  Sort of.  I don’t know.  Whatever.

Here we are at the midseason point anyway, and I feel like I can definitively say that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is not a good show.  Not by a longshot.  It’s not a tumbling travesty, but it’s doing little more than treading water, its producers content to make it an utterly average and typical show.  The most common complaint you’re likely to hear about the show is that it fails to make the most of its Marvel universe setting, and while that’s an easy observation to make, the problems with the show run much deeper.  Its characters are flat and lifeless, and its stories are boring and predictable.  Worst of all, from what I can tell from having read interviews and the general vibe given off by each episode, there just seems to be no ambition on the part of the creative team — showrunners, producers, and writers — to make anything special.  It’s become incredibly frustrating watching a show defined by superhuman potential realized in such a mediocre way.

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GR Dailies: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – Repairs

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

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by Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

Images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

1×09:  “Repairs”

What “Repairs” should be is an attempt to shed light on the most enigmatic member of our team, Melinda May — pilot, hand-to-hand combat specialist, sometimes referred to as “The Cavalry” for exploits that have grown to near mythical proportions throughout S.H.I.E.L.D.  May’s one of those people that we may see in life, but will probably never really meet.  She’s quiet, hard to get a read on, almost aloof.  She rarely smiles, never laughs, and if you examine the social structure of the people she’s with, she’s clearly the most separate from the rest of the group.  And that’s a character type that I completely understand.  From what little we learn of May in “Repairs”, it’s clear that she experienced something horrible, something that affected her so deeply that she would never be the same.  A trauma (or traumas) that would make her distant, never able to truly integrate or accept herself as a part of the group, knowing that it’s better for everyone if she holds back, stays away, even if that leads people to the wrong conclusions about her.  I think the writers really understand the type of character Melinda May is and where people like her are coming from, and I truly mean that as a compliment.  It’s too bad that’s the B story.

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