‘Frankenweenie’ (2012) review

ughGrooooan. 

No, that's not the sound of The Creature coming to life. That was the sound film-fans around the world, myself included, collectively made when we first heard, about 2 ½ years ago, director Tim Burton, the once impossibly imaginative mind who gave us Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, would be remaking one of his own films—a short called Frankenweenie, produced during his early days at Disney in the 1980s—expanded into the incoherent 3rd-dimension no less. Turns out, our groans were for naught, and this is one of the best things the director has done in years. But, no one would’ve guessed so when the news first broke.

'Looper' will throw you for a loop

Acknowledging my terrible title for this review of Rian Johnson's Looper, I have to say the statement is, in all terribleness, nonetheless true. The film is not quite like its--what I assumed was an over spoiler-y--trailer suggests. This is not some cheap, awful, 6th Day-esque shlock-fest disguised as a science fiction thriller. It's really not like any mainstream time-travel film, and in some ways its barely a time travel film at all.

Don't misunderstand, certainly Looper is a sci-fi action film, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis do play the younger and older version of the same character respectively, forced together via a convergence of thrilling time bending trickery. That much is explained, accurately, in the trailer. But the trailer only reveals a fraction of what the film is actually about. And it doesn't come close to demonstrating the depths of the creativity and craftsmanship at work which make Looper one of the years best.

'Dredd 3D' not as dreadful as expected

Actually, I didn't expect Dredd to be dreadful, although I'm honestly not surprised its box office has been, well... exactly that.

Dead or alive... wait, this isn't "Robocop".  Or is it?

So, yeah,  I am now one of the dozens of people who went to see Pete Travis' Dredd 3D (albeit in 2D) in theaters. The film opened this last Friday, and made a pathetic $6.3 million at the US box office over the weekend, and isn’t likely to make enough to cover the cost of its reported $45 million budget. Clearly, no one went to see it. Which is a shame, because Dredd is actually, sort of unbelievably, very decent—and will probably go down as a better Robocop movie than the dreaded reboot of that franchise due in 2013.