Tag / miguel ferrer

by Jaime Rebanal

Traffic Review: Steven Soderbergh’s Finest Hour in the Mainstream

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This is arguably director Steven Soderbergh’s finest hour in Hollywood, not only because it is the film for which he had finally won a Best Director Oscar, but alongside Erin Brockovich it helped him break into the more mainstream territory. But even as we talk about how it only continues to make him one of the most fascinating filmmakers of his own kind, it’s also amazing to think about how this film does not allow confine itself to the conventions of popular cinema at the time, because it also feels like a film that breaks down against the very system which even allowed it to get made. Soderbergh, having already established a firm ground for himself starting up a new movement of independent filmmakers with sex, lies, and videotape, has also found himself stretching beyond normal once again in a film about the drug trade.

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by Jaime Rebanal

RoboCop – Review

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When talking about the greatest action films of the 1980’s, doing so without bringing up RoboCop is disgraceful in the highest possible manner. Paul Verhoeven’s Hollywood debut remains not only a staple for iconic 1980’s action films but one of the most intelligent, if in-your-face satires of said era. A film that could easily be dismissed as enjoyable action fare from the period at youth, but oncoming years have only allowed the value of RoboCop to become even clearer than ever. It carries the look of an action movie just the way we love it but what’s lying beneath in where the wonders that form Paul Verhoeven’s body of work have formed clear. Sometime I wish to slap younger me across the face for not being able to see any of this at the time but I have to give it to RoboCop for helping me at the same time with accepting the sight of graphic violence on the screen, so in part it might have helped me in heading as far as I’ve managed to reach.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Mulan – Review

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I always felt when watching Disney films taking on female protagonists that would eventually be branded as their “princesses,” something more would always come out in a progressive manner that makes these films among the more interesting of their own output. One would know already of my own love for the arcs of Ariel from The Little Mermaid or Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and then we also have the eponymous Mulan, from Mulan. This was yet another Disney film that I always had a rather fond of when I was a child that I haven’t seen since those years, but to see my own enjoyment of it has never faded away made me smile like always.

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