By ANDY MORGAN There are very few movies I completely and utterly abhor. Generally, I can usually find something positive or likeable in a film, even if said cinema is receiving disgust and scorn en masse from most fall-in-line movie critics. I relish the truth that I don’t always see eye-to-eye with most critics and can find some thread of hope in Hollywood’s efforts. Such is not the case with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender. I literally hated every …
Category: Reviews
By ANDY MORGAN Making fun of Twilight fans and bemoaning Stephanie Meyer’s novels and the subsequent movies is almost as easy as drumming up sarcastic jabs about Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton or Miley Cyrus. There’s no effort required. It’s easy. And it’s also out of control. It’s almost as popular to dump on the vampire-werewolf franchise as it is all the rage to scoop up Team Jacob or Team Edward paraphernalia at Hot Topic. Every time I see a teen …
By DAN VINTON If there’s one thing The Last Airbender does well, it proves any mystique surrounding M. Night Shaymalan is gone. With this coffin-bound nail, all residual goodwill The Sixth Sense director retained from followup successes like Unbreakable, Signs and even the creepy but fatally flawed The Village has been throttled by his is own hands. Shaymalan’s latest, (based on the 2005-2008 Nickelodeon cartoon series I’ve never seen), builds a likable, tactile, genuinely fascinating and lushly art-directed world of …
Every autumn for the last four years, Dan and I, along with our pal Nick, head up to Garden City, Utah – home of Utah’s Bear Lake – and spend a weekend inhaling everything and anything bad for your body, including Doritos, cinnamon rolls, bacon, M&Ms, Swedish fish, soda, Oreos, Nutter Butters, hamburgers, fries, pizza and anything else in sight that’s chocked full of sugar. This three day culinary orgy is affectionately called “Mankend” and is punctuated by an afternoon …
With childhood nostalgia anchored firmly in the 80s, I’m a prime target for Hollywood’s recent nostalgia sweep. Thanks to a raging ego, contrarianism and a cold black heart however, I’m a hard sell– or like to think I am. I tend to like 80s nostalgia planted firmly in the 80s- big hair, fluffy innocence, original charm and all. And while we here at AATM are never against a remake/reboot, oftentimes they’re thin rehashes that rely on name brand only and …
It would be easy to dismiss all the boobies, drugs, drinking, swearing, puking and other dirty deeds in Get Him to the Greek as “been there done that,” especially considering the director, Nicholas Stoller, was the man behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the movie that inspired this current spin-off sequel. And of course we can’t forget the Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, The 40 Year-Old Virgin) connection, as he serves as producer on both comedies. But what makes Get Him to the …
With the combined might of uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Jake Gyllenhall’s rockin’ abs and respected director Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time hits Memorial Day weekend with a big question mark: will this video-game based movie finally pass over the threshold of wretched to mediocre and inspire a franchise in vein of Pirates of the Caribbean? I’ll always argue a movie’s success should be based on its merits as …
Shrek and Shrek 2 can easily be referred to as animated classics and have, like nearly every feature film in the Pixar canon, set the standard for tone and design in computer-animated movies for the last decade. Using irreverence as fuel – almost making concerted efforts to be the anti-Disney, and buoyed by an eclectic list of effective voice talent, the first two Shrek films were able to appeal to adults and kids with its fairytale mix of sweet and …
I had this big introductory paragraph parsed out about how difficult it is to make sequels that don’t suck in Hollywood and how it’s even harder to push out a comic book sequel considering the rabid throng of fans frothing in the background, waiting to pounce if their beloved story isn’t up to par with their expectations. I imagine this type of stress might cause the bookkeepers in Tinsletown to drink Mylanta like an ice-cold pitcher of summertime Kool-Aid and …
When I was ten, I used to have a lot of imaginary adventures with my friends. Many times we’d be army guys, stuck in some impossible situation, fighting against overwhelming odds, and, I’m embarrassed to say, there was usually a lot of overacting along the way…enter The Losers. The latest movie by relatively unknown and unproven director Sylvan White, The Losers began in 1970 as a war comic set during WWII and then re-imagined in the ’90s with its heroes …