Action

Jonah Hex is an action adventure about one man’s personal quest for redemption against the canvas of the battle between good and evil. This theme has been a standard of classic Westerns, but here the story also has a supernatural element and is based on a series of DC Comics. Merging comic book and Western took a good sense of balance. To bring Jonah Hex to life, director Jimmy Hayward and the producers worked to create an original world with one foot in history and the other in fantasy. “As he meanders across the West, through the Southwest, and eventually […]

By Karl J. Paloucek What makes a great action film? A lot more than just a bunch of costly, effects-laden sequences. The best pull together great characters and a compelling plot into which the expected explosive scenes fit seamlessly. In 2008, Robert Downey Jr.’s career got an incredible jolt with Iron Man, as the long-troubled actor met the perfectly fitted part of eccentric inventor and weapons contractor Tony Stark. The film blended wit, glamour, spectacle and a lot of really cool gadgetry into one of the best superhero action films in a decade that’s been full of them.

By Elaine Bergstrom The first stories of Robin Hood date to the ninth century. The tales became ballads in the 15th and 16th centuries, and a children’s novel some 400 years later. With the advent of movies and television, the action, romance and nobility of Robin Hood resulted in dozens of films and series. And while another telling of the popular story would certainly attract viewers, Ridley Scott, director of the most recent film adaptation of Robin Hood, chose to look at how the legend may have begun.

Zoe Saldana has had a marvelous recent career — first playing the young Uhura in the 2009 Star Trek and soon after as Avatar’s beautiful Na’vi, Neytiri. In The Losers, she plays Aisha, a mysterious woman who helps a commando group track down an enemy affiliated with the CIA who double-crossed them and left them for dead. As in Avatar, the role was physically demanding. But Saldana, who has a background in dance and had trained in martial arts for her role as Neytiri, was a natural choice to play Aisha. “When we started discussing the role of Aisha, I […]

By Karl J. Paloucek Movie remakes can be a crapshoot. Not all are Psycho-clone disasters, but just announcing the do-over of a popular film can abrade the nerves of the original’s fans and set a wave of sentiment against the new project from the start. In such circumstances, the best thing a filmmaker can do is to make it his or her own and pursue the vision in a totally new way. That’s the good news about director Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans — though telling essentially the same story, it bears little resemblance in tone, pace or color […]