TheRetroCritic

SPOILERS Well, this is it, people. The final chapter of " The Twilight Saga ". ... REALLY?! THIS is it? Wow. After sitting through every single Twilight movie, I can safely say that this new installment is one big disappointment. Not so much in terms of lols, it does deliver a good bunch of those, as ever, but just in terms of sheer drama and cinematic competence. Yes this is meant to be like a cheesy vampire Harlequin romance type thing but it's also meant to be a story worthy of an entire franchise and, most importantly, a movie. As it turns out, this "saga" fails on all accounts. Shame, with Breaking Dawn Part 1 , things were finally starting to get borderline insane and mean-spirited just the way I wanted it to! Ah Part 1... You beautiful bastard. Here we have Bella, finally a red-eyed vamp, complete with super-strength, super-powers, moody doochiness and wood-like posture. FINALLY Bella is resembling a strong female lead and an actua

Watching this third Alien film after a re-watch of Alien Resurrection certainly offered a contrast. Where one was somewhat reminiscent of Ridley Scott's original vision, the other felt more like a fun, if stupid, cartoon. It is quite a big leap between Alien 3 and Resurrection so lets see how the Alien Trilogy ended before it... began again. From the offset, Alien 3 stylistically pays homage to the first Alien with it's white/greenish tones and clinical feel rather than the bluey, sweaty look of Aliens . We are led to believe that this will be a back-to-basics outing with a focus more on atmosphere and subtle horror with less action but more impact. To a certain extent, this proves to be an accurate assessment: Alien 3 most definitely approaches the horror aspect of the franchise the way Scott went about it. You get several scenes where something thoroughly unpleasant is going on, whether it's gory surgery or an autopsy, and we mostly see the event through the charac

With Werner Herzog documentaries, you never really know what to expect. Would you have thought for one second that The Wild Blue Yonder would have been a sci-fi alien movie set on another planet which in fact is Earth and...actually it turns out you're not watching a sci-fi alien movie at all but an abstract documentary about...Man?! Yeah, this one's not that mad but in the same spirit. Like the filmmaker states early on, this isn't another movie about penguins. It isn't even really a movie about the beauty of Antarctica but rather a realistic look at the place and mostly the weirdos that work there, clearly isolated from the rest of the world and slowly, it seems, becoming eccentric hermits as a result. Herzog doesn't sugarcoat Antarctica for us. Sure he shows us the beauty of the glaciers etc. but also questions the validity of Man's presence there and how it's essentially awkward for us to be there in the first place (hence the rampant madness goin