items tagged with Pearl Harbor

BATTLESHIP

In the latest effects-heavy entertainment by Hancock director Peter Berg, a group of heroic U.S. Navy and Japanese-military officers team up to fight a race of marauding aliens, four of whose spaceships have crash-landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Battleship? This thing should’ve been called KerPlunk.

BAD BOYS II

Near the climax of Bad Boys II, Detective Mike Lowrey (Will Smith), leading a high-speed chase involving dope-runners and the Cuban military, turns to his car’s passengers and barks, “Everybody start shooting somebody!” One can imagine the same command being issued from the mouths of director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

DAREDEVIL

Though he tries mighty hard, Ben Affleck isn’t quite able to ruin Daredevil, Mark Steven Johnson’s screen adaptation of the Marvel comic. Among comic-book fans, the news that Affleck would be portraying the tortured hero – an angry, despressed, and, oh yeah, blind lawyer who, when not losing cases in court, dons leather and kicks bad-guy ass – was met with a collective rolling of the eyes; a friend of mine, upon hearing about the casting, put it succinctly: “Oh great. It’s gonna suck."

IRIS

Allow me a moment, if you will, to thank the folks at Moline’s Nova 6 Cinemas for their continued efforts at occasionally booking more offbeat cinematic fare than the multiplex standard.

WE WERE SOLDIERS

We Were Soldiers is, in many ways, the oddest war movie I’ve ever seen. It’s set during the Ia Drang battle of the Vietnam War, but it’s performed and directed with such resolute patriotism and heroism that it feels like a product of World War II, or rather, movies about World War II.