Because Everybody Else Has One

The streak of weak to terrible films continues with the worst film to bear the Marvel name since the awful Fantastic Four reboot.  This review is also up on Channel 24   What it’s about Eddie Brock seems to have it all, including a fiancée who loves him and a massively successful news show, but when he asks the wrong sort of right questions to Carlton Drake, a mega-wealthy geneticist/ business mogul, he soon finds himself out of a job and, having attained his information from privileged files on his lawyer fiancée’s computer, out of love too. Down on his luck and desperate, Eddie decides to take a more hands-on approach at investigating Drake’s experiments but, while doing so, he becomes infected with a Symbiote – an alien parasite that grants him incredible powers.  What we thought Between the initial decision to make a Venom origin story without Spider-man, a trailer that made it look like a c-grade superhero (or is that anti-superhero?) flick from the ...

Brrrr... is there a chill in here or is it just Jake Gyllenhaal in his best ever role? This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about Lou Bloom is a “nightcrawler”, a freelance video-journalist who prowls the streets at night looking for grizzly accidents and violent crime scenes to film and sell to a local TV news station. In such a cut-throat industry, however, Bloom finds himself taking more and more extreme measures to get ahead – a perilous descent down a moral black hole that only feeds into his already anti-social state of mind. What we thought Nightcrawler is, all at once, an edge-of-your-seat thriller, a satire on journalistic ethics and a disturbing probe into the mind of a sociopath and, though it doesn't exactly always make for the most pleasant of viewing, it is compelling as hell. Especially for us (amateur or otherwise) psych-majors and philosophy enthusiasts. Lou Bloom (played with chilling brilliance by Jake Gyllenhaal) seems o...