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‘ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL’ An Eye-Popping Spectacle Without an Ending

Assembled from the scrapyard of a nine-volume run of cult mangas from the 90s, Alita: Battle Angel is the joint production of director Robert Rodriguez and producer James Cameron. Looking at it from a distance, you might assume the costly mega-manga adaptation were more the work of the later. And that’s anything but a ding. Alita has the look and feel of a Cameron sci-fi epic. The world building is sprawling. The effects are tip-top. The spectacle is massive. There’s a reason the blockbuster guru said that the “only way” to experience his latest was in a theater. He wasn’t lying.  Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘DEADPOOL’

Deadpool has been lurking around the primordial soup of supers since his debut print appearance in February of 1991. Striking a nerve with comic fans fancying some bite with their bark and some rabies to their Cujos, Deadpool arrived on the scene a supervillian before slipping into the moral grays of anti-hero-dom and donning those infamously R-rated wisecracks into his persona like a latex-tight getup. By the time he was leading his own franchise, a cultly rabid surrounded the merc with a mouth like bush flies buzzing around fresh-squeezed dookie. When transported to tinsel town in 2009’s much derided X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Deadpool found himself properly trounced; literally nutless, drained of personality and wit, with mouth rendered useless. The character was as effectively brain-dead as the project he found himself housed within. The tongue-tied, tatted-up war boy that was Deadpool circa 2009 was quickly relegated to the bin of supers who couldn’t withstand the transition to the silver screen and even the suits at Fox did all they could to forget this whole X-Men Origins thing ever happened in the first place.       Read More

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Out in Theaters: THE TRANSPORTER REFUELED

To say that no one asked for a Transporter reboot is putting things lightly. The franchise in which Jason Statham rose to fame hardly lit up the box office when it set off in 2002, barely crossing the 25 million dollar marker on a 21 million dollar budget. The second installment hardly fared better, scraping up 43 on 32 and by movie numero three, the second-rate action/car staple was hardly scraping by. 7 years later, we have the latest addition to the “Why In Hell Was This Rebooted?” pool in The Transporter Refueled, a near abomination of filmmaking, barely held together by flashy Audi commercial tie-ins, gratuitous sexual violence and Ray Stevenson’s equally flashy grin. At least Ray’s having some fun. We in the audience though are not privy to such leisure. Read More