The Smackdown Audiences are primed for a good laugh because economic instability and the upcoming elections just aren’t doing it. Will we get it with the release of “Ghost Town?” This comedy of the dead […]
The Smackdown Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Burn After Reading” opened as a modest box office leader last weekend. Fresh from their large haul of Academy Awards (for “No Country For Old Men”) their bleak and […]
The Smackdown It’s been ten years next week that audiences got their first look at “American Beauty,” the film with its dark vision of Americana that went on to win our highest honor in film. […]
The Smackdown After fifteen years in development, TV comedy queen Diane English (“Murphy Brown”) has finally completed her Magnum Opus: a star-spangled remake of 1939’s “The Women.” Sixty-nine years after that classic film’s original release, […]
The Smackdown We’ve seen plenty of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino over the years, although not on the same screen for nearly 13 years until the weekend release of “Righteous Kill.” Was it worth the […]
The Smackdown With 2008’s Bottle Shock and 2004’s indie darling Sideways, we have two films that put their respective audiences smack into the middle of the California wine growing scene. One is more about making […]
Ready for his Close-Up? Honestly, we try not to get too political over here at Movie Smackdown! After all, we have our work cut out for us with our film-on-film comparisons without taking sides in […]
The Smackdown All over the country, kids savor the last gasp of summer and trudge back to school, looseleaf notebooks and lunch money clutched ever so tightly in their hands. Teachers meet and greet the […]
The Smackdown Are you the kind of person who demands meaning in your movies? Here are two films that each serve up a whopper of a morality tale: Not just any blonde can successfully take […]
It’s the End of the World as We Know It. Back in 1998, during the Year of Lewinsky, Paramount/DreamWorks got into a game of chicken with Touchstone. The result was two disaster films about comets that were about to crash into the Earth and destroy all life. The two films could share a single log-line:
When a “planet-killer” sized comet is discovered to be on an imminent collision course with Earth, an international space effort — led by the United States — sets out to deflect the object by setting off nuclear weapons deep inside its core so that it will miss Earth and, therefore, save humanity.
I won’t tell you how the Earth fared yet, but I can tell you that the point of impact in the theaters was about two months apart. Talk about operational redundancy!
Even though Deep Impact was the first in the theaters, for our purposes, we’re giving the “Defending Champion” designation to Armageddon because it won at the box-office. Armageddon grossed $553-million world-wide to the Deep Impact gross of $349-million. Incredibly, IMDB (the Internet Movie Database) has it as a virtual tie with both films scoring a 5.9 out of ten audience rating. […]
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