The traditional love story/social drama gets upended Baz Luhrmann style, with flashy special effects, dancing, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jay Z music. This isn’t your grandma’s The Great Gatsby, but that’s okay. Especially since I don’t remember grandma’s version to begin with, if I ever saw it in the first place.
Read FilmJabber’s full The Great Gatsby movie review.
When Quentin Tarantino is lurking, no genre is safe. After checking crime, kung fu, grindhouse and war movies off his list – not to mention whatever Pulp Fiction was – Quentin Tarantino turns his sights on westerns with Django Unchained. Funny, action-packed and highly entertaining, Django Unchained may not be Tarantino’s deepest of films – but it is his most accessible.
Read FilmJabber’s full Django Unchained movie review.
What makes the best action movie? Is it balls-to-the-wall chaos? Meditative stories with bursts of adrenaline? A smart, twisting plot? The answer, as evidenced by this list that represents the best action movies of 2012, is clear: there is no single formula to making a great action movie.
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2012 was a banner year for movies. From massive blockbusters to highly anticipated adaptations – and movies that came out of nowhere – the year treated audiences with a surprisingly strong selection in practically every genre. As in any year, not every film delivered (ask Taylor Kitsch), but also, a few stand out among the rest. Here are the top ten best movies of 2012:
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Quentin Tarantino’s wildly anticipated new movie Django Unchained, starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio, arrives this Christmas (naturally). Six months out, the first movie trailer is here. A spaghetti western with a twist only Tarantino could provide, Django Unchained is about a freed slave (Foxx) who is transformed into a bad ass assassin by a German bounty hunter (Waltz). Django proceeds to hunt down the evil plantation owner (DiCaprio) that owns his wife.
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Many critics and bloggers assemble top ten movie lists (like the best movies of 2011) this time of year. Many put together ‘worst of’ lists, too. I purposely avoided movies like Jack and Jill and Zookeeper this year, however. Those stinkers were clearly avoidable from the onset.
Unavoidable, however, were the movies I was really looking forward to. You know, the ones with awesome trailers and great potential. The ones that promise to be the next best thing. The movies that don’t live up to those lofty expectations. They may not be the worst movies of the year – in fact, some may be halfway decent – but they commit a greater sin: they break our hearts.
These are the ten most disappointing movies of 2011.
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A year ago when it was announced that Leonardo DiCaprio would team up with director Clint Eastwood to portray former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the buzz was earsplitting. DiCaprio is one of the best actors working today, Eastwood a multiple Oscar winner and Hoover one of the most interesting people of the 20th century. It was a match made in heaven. So why does the new movie J. Edgar feel like purgatory?
Read FilmJabber’s full J. Edgar movie review.
The number is 26. That’s the amount of Oscar nominations the last three major films Martin Scorsese directed – which all starred Leonardo DiCaprio – earned. The movies also collected approximately $700 million worldwide. Needless to say, the Scorsese/DiCaprio combination has been a critical and financial powerhouse, which makes the prospect of a horror-thriller such as Shutter Island so intriguing.
Read FilmJabber’s full Shutter Island movie review.
Has it really been ten years since Titanic hit theaters? Oh yeah, no one was counting. I thought Titanic was great when it came out, but now I realize just how overblown this film was. It’s still a good movie, but an Oscar powerhouse, I think not. Titanic is just a bit too mainstream for its own good, and any movie that can’t get an Oscar-worthy performance out of Leonardo DiCaprio has a few issues. That being said, no one can fault James Cameron for making one of the most critically and financially successful films of all time.
But that’s not what this article is about. Titanic: 10th Anniversary Edition is coming to DVD on Tuesday, November 20, 2007, and I have a copy of the two-disc collector’s set. For those of you who don’t own Titanic, the Best Picture winner is certainly worth owning, but what about all of you who already own it? Is it worth buying a new version, especially when the DVD format is going to be obsolete in a year?
The answer is a clear no. The movie is split across two discs, which is annoying enough, and it’s probably split across two discs because the movie has three different commentaries (one by James Cameron, another by Kate Winslet, Gloria Stuart, Lewis Abernathy, Jon Landau and Rae Sanchini, and a third, historical commentary by Don Lynch and Ken Marschall, whoever those people are) and behind-the-scenes featurettes built into the flow. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a commentary guy (and I would probably only listen if Leonardo DiCaprio was involved), and I am definitely not a big fan of special features that I can only access when I actually watch the movie. If I’m watching the movie, I want to watch the movie; if I want to watch special features, I want to watch special features… I don’t want to do one to do the other, and vice versa.
The historical commentary might be interesting.
The only real interesting part of the DVD set is an alternate ending that looks more at the modern day cast and wraps their stories up a bit more. Since no one cared about Bill Paxton’s character or anyone outside the scope of the narrative, it’s no surprise that a lot of this stuff got cut. In addition, the actual ending and the way the old woman (Rose) tosses the diamond over the side of the ship is a lot cheesier here, as she does so in the presence of most of the other characters. Paxton goes off his rocker in a rather goofy way, and the fat comic relief guy takes away any dramatic impact of the scene.
While I was never a fan of any of the modern day sections in Titanic, the version that actually appeared in the theatrical release is much better. Still, it’s interesting to see what might have been.
Overall, if you really like feature commentaries, Titanic: 10-Year Anniversary Edition might be for you, but otherwise, it will be a complete waste of money. In reality, the DVD doesn’t have many special features whatsoever.
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