2011 - Page 11 of 14 - Movie SmackdownÂ®

Green Lantern (2011) -vs- Iron Man (2008)

June 17, 2011 The FilmGuru 7

Imagine willpower given form by technology from beyond our world. Or willpower shaping technology made in the U.S.A. We’re starting a battle of wills between two fighters: one a hotshot test pilot turned intergalactic cop, the other a hotshot playboy industrialist turned superhero.

In the DC Comics universe, Green Lantern is one of the heavy hitters. He’s a man without fear, who uses an alien ring that transforms thought into reality by sheer force of will. So it only seems fitting that we pit him against Iron Man, the Marvel Comics version of Steve Jobs combined with Donald Trump. Iron Man is one man’s technology and ingenuity given form in the ultimate expression of man as machine. […]

Smack Classix Week: Father’s Daze

June 12, 2011 Movie Smackdown 1

Fathers in film come in all shapes and sizes; tough, funny, sad, angry, you name it. Letâ€™s face it, Don Corleone was a dad and so is Homer Simpson. Thereâ€™s a lot of latitude in the job description.

Sometimes theyâ€™re cardboard stereotypes only there to give their kids someone to fight with and other times they show us moral courage and patriarchal strength.

Jimmy Stewart was the quintessential breadwinner and family man George Bailey in Itâ€™s a Wonderful Life. John Wayne acted as a surrogate father to a collection of schoolboys in The Cowboys. Gregory Peck played the remarkable Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. And in recent years, audiences have chuckled at the antics of Steve Martin as Gil Buckman in Parenthood, and Eugene Levy as Jimâ€™s Dad in the American Pie films. Most often, these modern dads donâ€™t know best at all. […]

Click (2006) -vs- Big Daddy (1999)

June 12, 2011 The FilmGuru 0

We all know that guy, maybe in high school or college, who was a complete idiot most of the time. This is the guy who ran naked through the football field at Homecoming or would eat anything at lunch for a quarter. You know the type. Years later, you may have seen him with his family and thought to yourself, “How the heck does he have kids?”

That’s the way I felt about Adam Sandler. After seeing his wacked-out characters in everything from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore to The Waterboy, I wondered how anyone could cast him as a caring, down-to-earth father figure. After all, he’d spent most of his adult life playing a man-child.

Then, Sandler was cast as a father in two separate movies, Big Daddy (in 1999) and Click (2006). The first was an edgier Sandler, forced to play the role of a reluctant surrogate father. In the second, the broad comedy of Sandler is more apparent as he plays a man trying to make time for his family and his career.

The question is, which film best captures Sandler’s charm to make us look past his goofy tendencies and appreciate his dad appeal? […]

Super 8 (2011) -vs- E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

June 10, 2011 Bryce Zabel 4

â€œListen, guys, we got J.J. Abrams writing and directing a film about alien contact that Spielbergâ€™s gonna help him produce. Whoâ€™s in?â€

When the words were first uttered in Hollywood, there must have been a hush in the room. Now, with the sci-fi world ablaze with anticipation, Super 8 is ready for its own close-up.

In Summer 2011â€²s first big swing into science fiction, this Spielbergian team-up goes with a story of kids in small town America discovering something amazing. Our Challenger Super 8 is set in 1979, just a few years before the release our Defending Champion E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Both films involve kids getting involved with aliens, cover-ups, and military diversions and suppressions.

And even though Steven Spielberg is on the team of this latest effort, over here at the Smack, itâ€™s still personal. Two directors slugging it out. The brash new contender in J.J. Abrams and the wise, beloved champion in Spielberg. […]

Summer of Smackdown: Sci-Fi & Horror

June 9, 2011 The FilmGuru 1

When I was young, summer always heralded some of the best science fiction films. All year long, I would wait to see what to would come next to the local theaters: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Alien — to name a few.

These were the films that made me glad to be a kid. I would walk out of a movie theater into the summer night, look up into the sky, and wonder what was out there among the starsâ€¦ or what horrors awaited us here on Earth.

This year, the Summer of Smackdown includes some pretty original entries. Green Lantern could rightly be called science fiction. But we covered it â€” and other comic book heroes â€” in the spotlight we did on superhero movies. So I won’t repeat them here. […]

Midnight in Paris (2011) -vs- Adaptation (2002)

June 6, 2011 Mark Sanchez 7

If thereâ€™s anything that sounds less appealing than watching the mental anguish of a blocked writer, we canâ€™t imagine what it is. In fact, we canâ€™t even begin to visualizeâ€¦ hold on a secondâ€¦ getting my thoughts straightâ€¦ just have to play some Spider Solitaire while I, umâ€¦ trying to focusâ€¦ Huh — I didnâ€™t know we had Cheetosâ€¦.

Fifteen hours later:

Right, where were we? Oh yeah, writerâ€™s block — itâ€™s not pretty. Not cinematic either, until Charlie Kaufman came along and sweated blood for three years, cracking the code of how to translate to film his own innermost creative struggle in a deeply personal, throw-out-the-rulebook kind of way. His resulting screenplay for Adaptation became the Holy Grail of screenwriter movies, and under the brilliant direction of Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are), earned a slew of Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Adapted Screenplay. […]

X-Men: First Class (2011) -vs- X-Men (2000)

June 4, 2011 The FilmGuru 4

The last time we saw mutants on the big screen, it was the disappointing third installment in the X-Men trilogy, appropriately titled X-Men: The Last Stand. What had begun as a promising franchise under the steady hand of director Bryan Singer turned to crap under the watch of replacement director Brett Ratner. As Joel Schumacher had done with the Batman franchise, so too had Ratner done with the X-Men.

Now, after five years, the mutants are back. Instead of trying to resurrect the franchise by fixing the problems of the previous film (which included killing off two of the main characters), the new franchise is starting over at the beginning with a prequel. Now we have a chance to look at two different beginnings for the X-Men franchise and see which one works better.

Now, after five years, the mutants are back. […]

Life After Contact

June 3, 2011 The FilmGuru 2

Starting in the ’60s, we began to meet the kind, benevolent aliens waiting to usher us into their interstellar version of the brotherhood of man in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

The past couple of decades have brought the aggression closer to home with stories of alien abduction. Bordering on horror, films like Communion, Fire in the Sky, and The Fourth Kind suggest something sinister (or at least coldly detached and clinical) in these encounters.

And there have also been films like District 9 and Alien Nation that sought to use alien contact as a metaphor for immigration issues and the devaluation of the Other as a second-class citizen. […]

Our Smack Tribute to National Donut Day… and More!

June 3, 2011 Movie Smackdown 0

Iron Man would like to remind you that today is National Donut Day. We don’t ordinarily pay attention to such matters but while scooting through all the news channels this morning Fox had a reporter on location at a donut shop so we figured it must be important. We also remembered this great still photo from Iron Man 2.

With the pressing donut issue dealt with, we would also like to remind the handful of people out there who are not aware of this fact that X-Men: First Class is playing on like 14-billion screens today that we will also be Smacking that new film down against X-Men, the first film in the series.

Kevin Wohler is all over that one and he’s braving a re-enacted Cuban Missile Crisis to bring it to the Smack… soon…

Meantime, here’s a little something to hold you over: […]

Battle: Los Angeles (2011) -vs- Transformers (2007) -vs- War of the Worlds (2005) -vs- Independence Day (1996)

June 1, 2011 Bryce Zabel 12

There are alien invasions and then there are alien invasions.

This Smack is about the ones where the aliens swoop in, lasers blazing, hell-bent on some balls-to-the-wall human ass-kicking. No demands, no negotiations, just straight-ahead mayhem where the Earth is torn up with no regard whatsoever. It’s as if they’re treating our planet like a condemned building that just needs to knocked down as fast as possible so the new construction can get started. I know some folks think we’re already doing that ourselves but let’s skip the politics and just define this as apocalyptical visitation.
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