Archive
THUNDER FORCE – Fil Eisler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The latest high-concept comedy from husband-and-wife filmmaking team Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy is Thunder Force, a spoof of recent superhero movies. The film is set in a world almost 40 years after a ‘cosmic ray blast’ turned some of Chicago’s inhabitants into “miscreants,” lethal villains with superhero-like powers. Melissa McCarthy plays Lydia, a middle-aged woman whose former high school best friend Emily (Octavia Spencer) is now the CEO of a scientific research company. Despite the pair having been estranged for decades, Lydia shows up at Emily’s office complex one day to ask her to their school reunion; while there, Lydia inadvertently injects herself with a serum which gives her superpowers of her own. It turns out that Emily has been secretly developing a way to fight back against the Miscreants by inventing a way to turn regular people into superheroes – and now, with Lydia having taken the serum, she and Emily must join together as the crime-fighting duo Thunder Force. The film co-stars Bobby Cannavale, Pom Klementieff, and Jason Bateman wearing prosthetic crab claws, and much like last year’s Superintelligence was a fun, lightweight action-comedy that had way more laughs than it had any right to have. Read more…
SUPERINTELLIGENCE – Fil Eisler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the funniest (for me) films of 2020 was Superintelligence – an action sci-fi comedy directed by Ben Falcone, and starring his wife Melissa McCarthy. She plays Carol Peters – the most average person in the world – whose life is turned upside down when her phone, her apartment, and eventually her life is taken over by a super-intelligent artificial intelligence which adopts the voice of comedian James Corden, as he is her favorite celebrity. The AI wants to study Carol and her interactions with other people as a way to learn about humanity; it manipulates her life to the extent that she becomes a multi-millionaire overnight, and tries to help her re-connect with her ex-boyfriend George (Bobby Cannavale) before he leaves to take a job overseas. However, it soon becomes apparent that this ‘superintelligence’ may have some less-than-altruistic intentions, and before long Carol is knee deep in an action caper with the National Security Agency of the US Government. The critical consensus of the film has not been kind, but I actually enjoyed it a lot, especially for the comic interaction between the AI and the increasingly exasperated Carol. Read more…
NEWTOWN – Fil Eisler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Friday, December 14, 2012, began as a fairly standard day in Newtown, Connecticut. People getting up, eating breakfast with their families, and heading to work. Moms and dads dropping their kids off at school. This all changed at 9:35am when a mentally ill young man named Adam Lanza stole a shotgun, murdered his mother, and then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he subsequently shot and killed 26 other people – most of them children aged six and seven – before turning the gun on himself. The incident was the deadliest mass shooting at a high school or grade school, and the third-deadliest mass shooting by a single person in American history – and yet, despite public outcry, despite the catastrophic numbers of dead children, the Government of then-President Barack Obama was unable to pass stricter laws on gun ownership. It remains ridiculously easy for Americans to buy these sorts of deadly weapons, and as such future tragedies like this remain a distinct possibility. These events, and their aftermath, are examined in detail in the harrowing documentary feature Newtown, directed by Kim A. Snyder. Read more…
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