Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
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I want to climb a mountain about as much as a dog wants fleas, but an excellent documentary like Meru at least gives the indolent viewer an idea of why climbers go in for this grueling activity in the first place, while allowing we sloths the chance to experience the chill, the trench foot, the sharp rocks, and sleepless nights vicariously as a warning to never try the exercise ourselves. Meru features Bozeman resident Conrad Anker, one of the world's most skilled climbers, an Outside cover...
Get ready, home viewers, because as the colder nights are looming, Netflix is about to lose thousands of its most popular movies. Two of the top causalities are The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Transformers: Age of Extinction. This radical change is due to the lapse of a licensing agreement Netflix enjoys with a distributor, and Netflix has decided against renewal. The firm is called Epix, and it handles films for companies such as Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM (the Bond films). You'll still be able to see these movies elsewhere, say, on...
One of the most significant changes in the history of motion pictures is the retreat from the big screen to increasingly smaller ones. Television wasn't the cause, though it predicted the idea of free moving images at home. Rather, the cause was the rise of the personal computer. As its power and memory increased, as it became portable and sharper, the big screen lost its potency. If you haven't been to a theater lately, try it, because the larger image and darkened room is still powerful. But y...
Showing at Valley Cinemas (VC): Fans of Tom Cruise and his action films will be pleased to know that Mission Impossible Rogue Nation is a good, solid, and entertaining, if still workmanlike, entry in the 20-year, now-five-film franchise. The actor can handle stunts, comedy, and other facets demanded by tentpole summer epics with flair, while the film itself mixes its action scenes with lengthy plot explanations in opaque dialogue. The premise is that a secret organization called the Syndicate is piggybacking on the MI team’s assignments and c...
Didn’t we just see a Marvel comic book movie last week? Well, if it’s Friday that means yet another ransacking of the comic book heritage, which adults hated when I was a kid. This week it’s Fantastic Four. Same genre (comic character origin story), different company (Fox instead of Ant-Man’s Disney or Spider-Man’s Sony). If you’ve seen the Jessica Alba FF you’ve seen this one. Four scientists, out in space, rendered mutants. It’s a familiar story told with numbing repetition and noise. Pixels is a Saturday afternoon wish fulfillment epi...
Paper Towns is another teenage love story, in this case about a boy who sets out to help the girl next door, whom he has always loved. The film is directed in a conventional manner by TV director Jack Schrier, who previously did Robot and Frank, but the main attraction is the story the book author tells. Like Nicholas Sparks, Mr. Green is the real star of the show, and his films are almost actor- or director-proof. Therefore the characteristic theme of the film is Mr. Green’s. These are teens stories anchored with interesting themes, o...
The minions made their first appearance in 2010's Despicable Me, a mere five years ago, though it feels like one. They proved to be more popular than the title despicable creature, Gru, and appeared in three short films that year, followed two years later by a straight-to-video feature that still had to have the word "despicable" in it (Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem 3D is the full title, and also features Gru). In 2013, Despicable Me 2 appeared, with diminishing creativity and moxie. Now comes Mi...
Is it possible that Americans, or at least American movie reviewers, don't actually watch movies? Could it be that they only listen to them? That's the complaint that movie historian Andrew Sarris made as far back as the early 1960s, when the late Village Voice writer decried the elevation of visually dull social problem movies over the work of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, among many others. This was because the critics at the time only listened to these movies, and in the social message...
Don’t trust reviewers. That’s the conclusion I reached, but always really knew, after making the mistake of reading a few articles about the second season of HBO’s True Detective, which made its debut on Sunday, June 21. Devising a new story and location for the second season, True Detective tells of the crime that links a gangster on the make for legitimacy (Vince Vaughn), an angry county sheriff (Rachel McAdams), a suspended highway motorcycle patrolman (Taylor Kitsch), and a city detective (Colin Farrell) in the pocket of the gangs...
Here's why I don't like to review animated movies. After years of dutifully attending all the animated films from Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, Fox, the recent upstart Laika, and the animés from Japan, and after seeing the Shreks, the Toy Stories, the polar comedies, and whatnot, I realized that most animated works told one of exactly two basic stories. In the first story, someone decides to take a journey. It's either a widower going on a vacation (Up), or a zoo animal character who decides to...
Jurassic World pretends that earlier sequels Lost World and III didn't happen. Still, it seems that every time a billionaire wants to resurrect a dinosaur for spectator sport, something goes awry and soon, as Jeff Goldblum says in Lost World, it all seems like a good idea at first, and then there's running, and screaming. This time around the sheen has dimmed on the idea of Jurassic Park after 10 years in operation since the first film and so to increase foot traffic the park's corporate guides...
Steven Spielberg is one of the most important living filmmakers as both director and producer, with his hand also in numerous TV shows, but he is not immune to the glitzy, avaricious aspect of showbiz. Jaws was his first big hit. Later he had another blockbuster with the broadly similar Jurassic Park, also based on a popular novel. But Hollywood DNA must replicate itself, and so there were sequels. Do you remember how many sequels there are to Jaws? After the first film came Jaws 2, followed by...
If they moan, you're good. That's the tact taken by defense counsel when representing a college male accused of attacking or raping a co-ed. That little noise symbolizes "consent," indicating that the woman is enjoying the rough sex emerging from a drunken night at a frat house or a football celebration. The joke used to be that one went to college to learn to drink, have sex, and become an atheist. Now, there's an addendum: what women learn in higher education is gender betrayal. Jon Krakauer...
Both movies at Valley Cinemas are held over this week, which gives us a chance to catch up before the next onslaught of big, new releases. So here are addenda to last week's previews of Tomorrowland and Poltergeist. The predictable knock against the remake of Poltergeist is that it's unnecessary, there being nothing wrong with the 1982 original. But have those who argue this point seen that old film recently? Even at the time the acting was obviously uneven, the special effects were poor, and th...
