Whenever an artistic medium dares to cheat on its loyal fanbase by scurrying over to another, anger and thinkpieces likely follow. Technology has amped up an uncanny-valley-sort of realism in video games. Movies have added more CGI to its blockbuster spectacles and animation. Thus, the previously distinct media have drawn blurrier lines with consumers none too pleased.
Cymbeline is director Michael Almereyda’s second Shakespeare adaptation set in modern day, his last being 2000’s Hamlet, also starring Ethan Hawke. The Bard’s late work tragedy, previously set in the Royal Court of Olde England, receives a face-lift, updated to a war between the Roman police force and the Briton Motorcycle Club ran by Cymbeline (Ed Harris). The King trades in a crown for an Uzi and a leather jacket as a drug kingpin troubled by familial strife. His second wife (the serpentine Mila Jovovich) despises Cymbeline’s daughter, Imogen (Dakota Johnson, proving she has acting chops that viewers may not find in Fifty Shades of Grey), for not marrying her son, Cloten (Anton Yelchin). In secret, Imogen has pledged herself to Posthumus (Penn Badgley), much to Cymbeline’s displeasure.
We may not be getting a new book in the Game of Thrones series, but it looks like more work by George R.R. Martin will be headed to the big screen. The Hollywood Reporter reported on Monday that Resident Evil star Milla Jovovich and Shameless actor Justin Chatwin will lead Martin’s In The Lost Lands. …
Quick question; does a flamboyantly camp and knowingly ridiculous science-fiction adventure costumed by Jean-Paul Gaultier and written by a teenager obsessed with 50’s and 60’s Belgian/French futuristic pulp comics sound like a good idea? The idea that any cynically minded executive would immediately stab his thumb in the air at the pitch of The Fifth Element is as fanciful as the bizarrely hypnotic and anachronistically beautiful world (or worlds) in which it is set.
Resident Evil: Retribution Written by Paul W.S. Anderson Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson USA/Canada/Germany, 2012 In returning to direct Afterlife, a fourth franchise installment following two mostly thrilling sequels to his Lewis Carroll-inspired “Resident Evil” adaptation (both of which he still had a hand in writing and producing), the commercially controversial Paul W.S. Anderson displayed …
Resident Evil: Retribution Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson Written by Paul W.S. Anderson USA/Canada/Germany, 2012 For schoolchildren, September heralds the end of an enjoyable epoch – the end to all of the carefree hedonism and devil-may-care attitudes of summer vacation. In its place are the daunting expectations of school, the angst of making new friends, …
————– Stone Directed by John Curran Written by Angus MacLachlan USA, 2010 An unusual hybrid of Hollywood casting and production values with a serious dose of left-field character choices, Stone, from director John Curran (We Don’t Live Here Anymore, The Painted Veil), comes as a bolt from the blue in a season full of dreadful …
The Fourth Kind Directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi Seventy-one years after Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast convinced the American public of a real-time alien-invasion, writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries a similar gimmick by presenting a cinematic re-creation of supposedly true occurrences in and around the small town of Nome, Alaska, that suggest an alien …