The Brag

A few weeks back, the trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man came up ahead of a feature film I’d gone to see, and the couple next to me began muttering about whether the series needed a reboot so soon after the Sam Raimi trilogy. If two strangers in a movie theatre are thinking it, other people are probably thinking it too, and indeed, the box office for this film may well suffer due to a general sense of Spidey fatigue – and the perception that this movie is just a blatant attempt by Hollywood to cash in on a recognisable character. Hopefully this doesn’t happen, though. The Amazing Spider-Man is not a great film, but it’s a pretty darn good one. It’s an enjoyable popcorn flick with a top-notch cast and plot that cracks along, and unlike many recent blockbusters, it doesn’t feel the need to be dark and edgy in order to be taken seriously.

Posted: July 9th, 2012 under Arts, Brag 469, Film Reviews, New.
Tags: Alasdair Duncan, Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, The Amazing Spider-Man

The Help Released September 1 **** What The Help is not – as if the gooey trailers implied otherwise – is a complex, gritty film about race. What it is is a finely performed bit of melodrama, with nuanced enough characters to elevate a potentially hokey, caricatured script. Based on Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 bestseller, The [...]

Posted: September 5th, 2011 under Arts, Brag 427 (August 27), Film Reviews.
Tags: Bryce Dallas Howard, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Joshua Blackman, Octavia Spencer, The Brag, The Help, Viola Davis