Ratings Central - Movies

I walked into the theater clinging to the memory of what a Christopher Nolan picture used to be. The murmurs surrounding The Odyssey were fractured, but I bought my ticket banking on the director's track record for boundary-pushing spectacle. I expected the intricate craftsmanship that defined his prime. Instead, as the credits rolled, I was staring at a screen that had just projected two hours of a director surrendering his signature vision to the Hollywood assembly line, trading his artistry for a painfully generic studio mandate. Image by The Cornell Daily Sun A Mediterranean Coat of Paint A Greek mythology epic needs to breathe the dust of the Aegean, but this simply doesn’t. When you watch Clash of the Guardians , Troy , or even Hercules (to a lesser extent, I suppose), they ground you in the bronze and dirt of antiquity; you feel like they belong in the era. The Odyssey , however, completely lacks that localized heartbeat. It operates like a standard, modern action flick th...

Those that know me well, will know that I'm into comics. Maybe not as much as I used to be, I've always loved Marvel comics specifically, and Spiderman is my guy. I used to read as many different iterations as I could from Spectacular Spiderman, Amazing Spiderman, Web of Spiderman, Ultimate, the list goes on and on. Like most of us, I needed to know where the story goes now that Mysterio was killed and made public Spidey as Peter Parker. I will not spoil anything from the movie that was not already presented in a trailer of some-sort. If you haven't even seen a trailer, well, then maybe stop here.  Let's get my initial impression out of the way. Yes, I loved it. Past Spiderman movies have done multiple villains and failed miserably, but this one does a pretty good job of giving each of them their own respective screen time and a real reason to be there. There's lots of action and, surprisingly to me, lots of emotion. I cried three times just as an example (Yeah I...