Films and Feelings

    Maybe it's just living through a pandemic-stained world rife where each election feels like a last-ditch effort to rescue liberty from the oblivion, but I'm sometimes nostalgic for the days when the most traumatic thing in my life was a poor adaptation of a favorite book.      My generation will remember the film adaptation of the popular YA fantasy book Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan with something like embarrassment, if not outright lividity. The book follows a young teen, Percy Jackson, who discovers that the gods of ancient Greece not only exist, but also sire modern day heroes. As a child of one of these gods, Percy is continually drawn into their Olympian-sized conflicts wherein he gets to prove himself every bit as much a hero as Hercules.       Each installment of the five-book series reads like a theme-park ride through Greek mythology as the teens travel across the country battling ancient m...

Fans of Eion Colfer's teen fantasy book, Artemis Fowl, have no doubt been eyeing this movie adaptation with some unrest in between all the shuffling of release dates and strict secrecy pertaining to the movie's plot and development. A beacon of hope amidst this was the assurance of Kenneth Brannagh's proficiency as a director. Unfortunately, Brannagh just appears complicit to this movie's ultimate dive-bombing. Brannagh remains one of my favorite directors currently working, some of my favorite works of his (such as his 2015 reimagining of Cinderella) even came from under the Disney banner, so I can only imagine what must have happened to Brannagh that caused him to forget how to competently direct a film. The film follows 12-year-old super genius, Artemis Fowl, (Ferdia Shaw) son of controversial public figure, Artemis Fowl Sr. (Colin Farrell) the only person for whom Artemis has any respect. When his father mysteriously disappears and Artemis receives a sinister ransom...

In December 2009, I was surfing the IMDb message boards for Avatar , set to release in a week. At the time, the conversation on these boards centered mostly around the film’s mammoth budget which represented a colossal investment for the studio, an investment it was sure to never see returned. Noting how the movie was set to release against the Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel, one commentator even lamented how amusingly sad it was that rodents covering pop songs could draw more tickets than the finest cutting-edge film techniques our master craftsmen could offer.      I’ve often wondered what happened to this guy ... By the time I finally got around to seeing Avatar myself, the film had been out for over a month, and the discussion around the film had been universally celebratory. It was actually the Monday after I saw the film, I remember I was browsing the web in Spanish class, that I saw the headlines that Avatar had in fact eclipsed Titanic as the all-time box offic...