Movie Review: Logan (2017)

by Tony Dayoub


When Ryan Reynolds was beating the bushes for an Oscar this past year, he dropped the tantalizing tidbit that even if his pattern-breaking, adult-oriented Deadpool failed to garner any nominations, he was sure Logan would have its turn at the awards dais. Wouldn't that be something, to see the childish superhero genre graduate to the same fully respected mythos status as the Western? Well, Logan is not the awards worthy graphic novel-based film Reynolds touted it as. But it is a damn good stab at that kind of a movie.

Movie Review: The Wolverine

by Tony Dayoub

Up until its over-the-top, meta-power-laden ending, The Wolverine is so unlike the prototypical superhero genre film one wishes it were as good in execution as it is conceptually. As dark and exotic as its setting in Japan promises, much of The Wolverine plays like a 70s style crime thriller with the feral Logan (Hugh Jackman) in the role of the gaijin outsider in over his head. Echoes abound of Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza (1974) and Ridley Scott's Black Rain (1989), both films featuring a world where ritual is inextricably tied to methods of conducting business and clan warfare starring deceptively low-key Japanese actors who outflank their iconic American co-stars. And at least in this role, after his unprecedented fifth outing as Wolverine (sixth if you count his X-Men: First Class cameo), Jackman has crossed over into something close to superhero icon.

DVD Review: Walk the Line: Extended Cut - Extra Features Illuminate the Man in Black

by Tony Dayoub

Just caught a preview copy of Walk the Line: Extended Cut, courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. It is the Johnny Cash biopic directed by James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma) which stars Joaquin Phoenix, as the Man in Black himself, and Reese Witherspoon, in her Oscar-winning performance, as June Carter-Cash.

The pair vividly embody the roles of the country singing performers, singing all the songs themselves. Phoenix's smoldering intensity suits the haunted Cash perfectly. Witherspoon's own history as a child performer no doubt informed her portrayal of June, who had sung in the public eye since quite young.