Mr. & Mrs. Smith
SimilarBates Motel, Black Scorpion, Breaking Bad, Dead Ringers, Knuckles, La Femme Nikita, Legacies, Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Little Birds, Love Sea, Love You Just as You Are, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, More than Blue: The Series, Person of Interest,
Planet of the Apes RoboCop: The Series, Samurai Jack, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The Dead Zone, The Little Drummer Girl, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,
Amazon’s excellent reboot seems more interested in interrogating Bond movies and television domestic dramas than its thin source material.
So, remember that movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith? Not the Alfred Hitchcock Mr. and Mrs. Smith from 1941, the Doug Liman one about the two married assassins that end up trying to kill one another? (No, Scott Bakula was in the television show from the 90s about two married assassins called Mr. and Mrs. Smith.) This is the 2005 movie with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Remember all the tabloid stories about their relationship? Great! Do you remember the film itself? Kinda? Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of movie it was. Neither good nor bad, Mr. and Mrs. Smith modestly cleared the “watchable” bar mostly on the backs of its cute premise, Pitt and Jolie’s magnetism, and competent (if unremarkable) direction.
It is, in that respect, a perfect candidate for a reboot - just good enough for you to wish someone had put in the work to make it better. Now, almost twenty years later, someone has. Continue Reading →
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
SimilarA.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Aliens (1986), Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002), Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), F9 (2021), Face/Off (1997), From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964),
Shrek the Third (2007) Watch afterBarbie (2023) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), The Flash (2023),
StarringColman Domingo, Cristo Fernández,
The blockbuster landscape shifted with Michael Bay's 2007 Transformers movie. It fit his directing style, with his love of explosions and male gazing, but what it amounted to was a guy playing with big, expensive cinematic toys. There was knowledge gained from those five previous installments when the 2018 spin-off Bumblebee had more personality and excitement than any of its predecessors. Continue Reading →
Nightmare Alley
SimilarBasic Instinct (1992), Cube (1997), Cube Zero (2004), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), The Silent Partner (1978), Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995), Vertigo (1958),
Watch afterLicorice Pizza (2021), West Side Story (2021),
StarringWillem Dafoe,
StudioSearchlight Pictures,
Back in 1998, Gus Van Sant released his remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It wasn’t a good movie, but it provided two decent critical talking points. Firstly, was it actually a remake, or was it another adaptation of Robert Bloch’s novel? Given that Van Sant’s film was a shot-for-shot recreation of its 1960 predecessor save for two or three differences, it was a rarity in that, given its context, it ended up being the former. It, for all its failures in execution, used semiotics to circumvent the aforementioned semantics of its identity. Continue Reading →