2011 - Page 14 of 14 - Movie SmackdownÂ®

African Cats (2011) -vs- Oceans (2010)

April 24, 2011 The FilmGuru 0

If Disney has learned anything over the years, itâ€™s that lions are kings at the box office. So the House of Mouse has gone back to Africa this year to bring us a new documentary about the king of the beasts. But from a different point of view. Donâ€™t expect to see any singing warthogs or meerkats. This is a true story of life on the Savannah.

A few years ago, The Walt Disney Company established a new film label called Disneynature â€” with a mission to distribute nature documentaries like the old â€œTrue-Life Adventuresâ€ back in the 1950s. In a stroke of marketing genius, they tied the film releases to coincide with Earth Day. The first, appropriately titled Earth, came out in 2009. The next year, they released Oceans. These films looked at our planet in a new way, and they examined our influence on our environment.

It has become a tradition with my family to celebrate Earth Day each year with an outing to the theater to see the latest Disneynature release. This year, we continued with African Cats, a film that examines the lives of the lions and cheetahs of the Kenyan wilderness. […]

The Conspirator (2011) -vs- JFK (1991)

April 23, 2011 Bryce Zabel 1

Two presidents get assassinated, a hundred years apart. Both assassins (alleged, anyway) get killed before they can face trial, and they go down in history firmly attached to their middle names, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald.

In these two films, the main characters are lawyers, drawn into the fray by a sense of justice, who end up arguing unpopular positions (at least to the powers-that-be) in court â€” the earlier film on offense, this latest film on defense. Both men pursue their out-of-step sense of justice to the extreme, so much so that the women in their lives think theyâ€™ve gone quite insane.

At the end of the day, both viewing experiences cause you to consider that maybe itâ€™s not the courts that really decide the winners anyway, maybe itâ€™s just the movies we make about them. […]

Source Code (2011) -vs- Deja Vu (2006)

April 10, 2011 The FilmGuru 3

They say love overcomes all obstacles, but time seems to be one of the most difficult. Time and time travel seem made for romance. Maybe that’s because there is a more of a fantasy quality to it than strict science fiction. Finding two lovers who meet across time has been done before, but Hollywood loves to revisit this idea again and again.

This week, our challenger, Source Code, and our champion, Deja Vu, tackle the problem of finding love in the time continuum. In both cases, what starts out as a case of time-travel observation becomes something more of an obsession for the observer. […]

From the Editor’s Desk

March 27, 2011 The FilmGuru 0

When Bryce asked me to come aboard the Movie Smackdown! juggernaut, my first thought was: “Will there be free popcorn?” Because, let’s face it, being a managing editor of a website requires a lot of […]

From the Editor-in-Chief

March 27, 2011 Bryce Zabel 1

Welcome to Movie Smackdown! 2.0, a film review concept that sees film reviewing as a competitive sport and exists to create moments of film-on-film violence!

The concept â€” 2 Movies. 1 Review. No Mercy. â€” is the same as itâ€™s been since we began six years ago, based on the fact that most people like to talk about and rate films in terms of the other similar films theyâ€™ve seen before. We usually put a new film coming out in theaters in the ring with an older film thatâ€™s available on DVD or download.

That part hasnâ€™t changed but the execution has evolved. First, we have a new look — more of a site and less of a blog.

Second, while you will still hear the opinions of our multiple reviewers as we have in the past, weâ€™re also putting you in the center of the ring where you can make the call. […]

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