Tag / eric bana

by Jaime Rebanal

‘Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers’ Review: Supposed Riff on Reboots Too Self-Serious for Its Own Good

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Amidst Disney’s own trend of live-action remakes of their most popular live action films, surely enough it took a while before they decided to go ahead and catch up with rebooting one of their own animated series. With director Akiva Schaffer taking the helm at bringing Disney’s beloved chipmunks to the screen to a completely new generation of viewers, what he brings out with Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers seems to be born out of a parody for how they’ve continuously seen their animated fare as of late – but even knowing that this is still under Disney’s own noses, they can’t fully reach the levels of lampooning that you know the material at hand would be opening themselves up to.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Hanna – Review

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Joe Wright’s films come off to me as the sort that show off whatever is possible without offering much beyond that. I remember trying to watch Atonement for a history class and I was struggling just to stay awake, and his Pan film was just about one of the most awkward experiences for myself (I think the anachronistic soundtrack was already jarring enough whether it be the inclusion of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or the Ramones’s “Blitzkrieg Bop” that gave everything away for me) – and yet I find Hanna strangely enchanting. Quite frankly I also remember it as the first time I had seen Saoirse Ronan in anything, and her performance here was enough for me to say that Wright had opened me up to what seems missing from the action genre in this day and age. She doesn’t hold back and it only creates something all the more tense in Hanna.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Finest Hours – Review

✯✯½

Another one of those frustratingly inspirational by-the-numbers “based on a true story” films once again. I’ve taken issue with films of this sort whether it’s blatant Oscar bait like The Theory of Everything, but this isn’t particularly any surprising when you have Disney as the producers of said film. Directed by Craig Gillespie, who was prior responsible for Million Dollar Arm (which I already rather disliked), what he’s created is once again another by-the-numbers biopic but while it’s not inherently a bad film, not enough is present that would have me considering it a good film either. Continue reading →