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REVIEW: Ice Age: Continental Drift Hits for Uninspired Blockbuster Average

REVIEW: Ice Age: Continental Drift Hits for Uninspired Blockbuster Average

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted was an unexpectedly charming addition to the summer's kiddie flick franchise pile-up, better and stranger than, honestly, it needed to be in a subgenre that is, Pixar aside, usually just about merchandising potential and providing enough bright moving objects to occupy young attention spans for 80 minutes. People hoping for the same pleasant surprise when escorting offspring to Ice Age: Continental Drift might as well pre-crush those hopes in advance before donning their 3-D glasses — the film, the fourth in the series from Blue Sky Studios, is just a sugary jumble of goofy voices, hyperkinetic action scenes and rote plot elements that rolls forward just enough to get us to the de rigueur pop song that plays over the closing credits.
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REVIEW: Why Can't All Comic-Book Movies Be as Sexy as The Amazing Spider-Man?

REVIEW: Why Can't All Comic-Book Movies Be as Sexy as The Amazing Spider-Man?

Comic-book movies can be many things — ridiculous, entertaining, stupendously dull – but very rarely are they erotic. I’m not talking about the garden-variety sexually neutral charge thrown off by a fit actor, man or woman, who happens to look good in a latex suit. Even in the best comic-book movies, made by filmmakers who know what they’re doing — people like Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, Guillermo del Toro and Jon Favreau — sex is often treated as a mild embarrassment, a thing that just doesn’t mix well with action inspired by comic-book panels. And so amid all the questions about whether or not the Spider-Man franchise ought to have been rebooted just 10 years after Raimi kicked off his own spin on it, maybe the real question to ask of Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man is — when it comes to sexual chemistry, why can’t more comic-book movies be like this one?
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