Tag / j.k. simmons

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

Justice League – Review

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My friend Noah Miles wrote in his Spider-Man: Homecoming review, “I don’t know if Jon Watts is a good director. I really don’t. It’s impossible to tell from this, although the direction here is probably the worst I’ve seen so far this year, because Marvel reshoots everything and rarely allows directors creative freedom to take risks and do something visually interesting.” It was the first thing that came into my head after having left Justice League, because from the many reshoots that came along since Zack Snyder left the production after the death of his daughter, you can really tell this isn’t so much of a Zack Snyder film. As a matter of fact, it seems more like the traces of a butchered plan that were haphazardly stitched together as a means of trying to appeal to the masses. The sad thing is, there’s barely enough about Justice League as it stands that truly works.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Snowman – Review

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I’m still baffled how a product like The Snowman ended up becoming as ravaged as it is despite the amount of esteem that its crew seems to have, whether it be the fact that Martin Scorsese was an executive producer who was signed on to direct, to have Tomas Alfredson take over. I would only have expected that from the fact Tomas Alfredson had directed the excellent Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy he would only have transitioned rather smoothly when directing another mystery film of a smaller scope with The Snowman, but clearly something had gone wrong. If I were to get something out of the way, The Snowman as it is does not work, but it isn’t wholly bad – rather just a film whose potential is evident but never expressed properly. So how exactly do you pinpoint where everything went wrong with The Snowman?

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Accountant – Review

✯✯½

My biggest fears for The Accountant, thankfully, had never come true. Given as I tend to be rather highly critical of how films depict the autism spectrum, I was skeptical that The Accountant would have inaccurately portrayed it in a manner that it’s so Hollywood to the point it’s almost degrading (hence my great disdain of Forrest Gump) but to my own surprise, it was never a bother. Instead, the underlying problem with The Accountant is somewhere else, as it’s just a film caught up so much elsewhere to the point it forgets what creates a consistent flow. There’s potential to be found all around but never at all does the film manage to live up, and instead what The Accountant becomes is one of the most ridiculous films of the year. Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

Zootopia – Review

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I guess it’s easy to say that I’ve found a way to get kids to come to appreciate film-noir when they get old enough in Zootopia. Disney’s own love letter to classic film-noir might probably be the best animated film to have been offered by them in recent years, one film that certainly came out of nowhere for I expected nothing more than cutesy fun at least from the look of the ads, only to find something touching more to my sensibilities from the noirish atmosphere, to an extent even drawing me back to the work of Raymond Chandler, drawing me to admire what I got even more than what I have presumed. Continue reading →