How “The Fast and the Furious” franchise is still operational after 12 years is beyond me. The series should’ve crashed-and-burned after 2006’s dreadful third installment, “Tokyo Drift,” which saw the primary cast bail on the fast cars that made them famous.

A lack of success outside of Universal’s lucrative property brought the main players back for a fourth outing in 2009 that proved to be a surprise smash at the box office. Since then, the franchise has been on fire. The last film, “Fast Five,” won over more than just audience approval; this time around, the critics were on board, as well. (It also brought Joseph back to the series in all his hype-loving glory.)

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Everything I seemed to read going into The Place Beyond the Pines tended to focus mainly on the buzzword “ambitious”. For Trance, the buzzword was “stylistic.” While I liked The Place Beyond The Pines much more than Trance, I think they both deserve a lot of praise more for what they tried to do than what they actually succeeded in doing. Read more

Wise Guise contributor Sutter Vaught returns today with a wonderful review of Terrance Malick’s latest film, To the Wonder. He has previously pontificated on the similarities between Don Draper and Jeff Winger, while also debating Joseph about Christmas films in the First Annual Wise Guise Christmas Movie Fantasy Draft. Enjoy! 

I went into To The Wonder with high expectations.  Dangerously high expectations.  In my book, The Tree of Life was hands down the best movie of 2011, and The Thin Red Line is the greatest war movie ever.  I’m pretty admittedly an all-around Malick fanboy, although The New World didn’t really do it for me.  And so I was looking forward to this one so much that I was inevitably setting myself up for a disappointment.

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