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‘Oz the Great and Powerful’ a sometimes charming, sometimes flat fantasy-adventure

Oz the Great and Powerful Directed by Sam Raimi Written by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire USA, 2013 Oz the Great and Powerful is a film obsessed with façades. The characters, particularly the lead, rely on being able to control and define what is and isn’t real. Oscar Diggs, a would-be genius magician who accidentally …

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‘Oz the Great and Powerful’ overcomes flaws to become a fine entry in an old series

Oz the Great and Powerful Written by Mitchell Knapper and David Lindsay-Abaire Directed by Sam Raimi U.S.A., 2013 Here we go again. Another March, another major live action Disney film coming to theatres. More than that, it is another live action adventure which taps into very old, much beloved fantasy literature, directed by a major …

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More Equal Than Others: Six Films of 2012 Done Better

For better or worse, films don’t exist in a vacuum. If literature derives from itself, and, according to Marshall McLuhan, the content in any new medium is always the same as in the old, then films don’t exactly have a wealth of opportunities to be original. You can always compare a film to one that …

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Is ‘Liberal’ Hollywood to Blame for America’s Gun Culture?

On December 14, 2012, a young man named Adam Lanza broke into a primary school and fatally shot 26 people in the small village of Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Twenty of them were children, aged 6 or 7. On that day, no matter where I went or what I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about the …

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‘360’ is an overload of flatness from Meirelles and Morgan

360 Written by Peter Morgan Directed by Fernando Meirelles UK/Austria/France/Brazil, 2011 360’s writer Peter Morgan has declared that the film is directly inspired by Reigen, an 1897 play notably adapted to film by Max Ophüls as La ronde in 1950. The title of Morgan’s work, directed by Fernando Meirelles, derives from the 360 degrees of …

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The Lovely Bones

Tragically, there’s ample evidence onscreen of Jackson’s love for the material, but he brings to the table none of the qualities that made Creatures – another drama surrounding pubescent girls and grisly acts – such a startling breakthrough. The Lovely Bones Directed by Peter Jackson At this point, Peter Jackson probably isn’t the sort of …

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