Month: January 2009
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Kindly Remove Your Brain and Simplify Your Morality
Taken Review This movie is mostly what you’d expect, standing out largely in ways that value brute violence over logic and moral/political responsibility. Liam Neeson plays an ex-spy in retirement whose daughter just happens to be kidnapped by Albanian sex traffickers who sell kidnapped tourists to vaguely Arab men. This should play very well in…
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It’s Actually Stupider and Worse Than You’d Expect
The Uninvited Review PG-13 horror. These two things don’t have to be incompatible, despite Hollywood’s best attempts to make you think they are. The Uninvited is a fairly good example of the subgenre I call bullshit-PG-13-not-actually-scary-studio-horror. Seems kinda specific right? Trust me, there are many examples of this, ones I’ve seen include remakes of When…
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A Lesson For Screenwriters From Fireproof and Marley and Me (No, Seriously)
Honest Emotion As screenwriters we are almost encouraged to be a little too cute. Complex intersecting storylines a la Crash are popular, as are twist endings, red herrings, and self-referential wit. But what about real honest, unabashed emotion? Not subdued, not put in quietly, but loud and not embarassed about it? The films from such…
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Austin Powers For Black People
Michael Jai White is probably most familiar to the average filmgoer for playing Gambol in The Dark Knight (“Enough, from the clown!”) but he also stars in and has a writing credit on Black Dynamite, a blaxploitation spoof that just recently sold for around 2 million at Sundance. You can watch the goofy trailer by…
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Lamenting the Silent Death of Killshot
What if I told you they had made a movie adapting a pretty decent Elmore Leonard novel (Killshot), and that it starred Thomas Jane, Diane Lane, recently Oscar-nominated (and a good pick to win) Mickey Rourke, rising actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Rosario Dawson and it had been sitting on the shelf forever. Oh yeah, and…
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Bang Your Head!
The Wrestler Review A simple story well told. The Wrestler is a story of an underdog sports hero you’ve seen before (specifically, Mickey Rourke plays has-been wrestler Randy “The Ram”), and will see again. A few things set it apart from the pack. It’s of a higher quality. This is evident in the script (by…
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Not As Awesome As You’ve Been Led To Believe
My Bloody Valentine 3D Review Before I begin, let me just say I saw this in 2D, which likely made a huge difference. But since many of you will see the movie in 2D, consider this fair warning. Reading some of the reviews on this, most of them being web-based, gives the impression this is…
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Crank 2 Trailer–Enough Said
No really. I vehemently argued against the notion there would be a Crank 2. Friends tried to convince me, “No man, he blinks at the end. He’s alive.” I said no way in hell. I assumed it was budgetary constraints that kept the filmmakers from having Jason Statham simply explode in a million pieces at…
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Watchmen Is A Go!
Variety’s website reported today that Warner Bros. and Fox have settled. Fox is being given the equivalent of a “movie star’s gross participation” but Warner Bros. keeps its release date of March 6. For any fan of movies or graphic novels, this is a huge deal. Yippee!
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Ultimately, It’s Actually Pretty Good
Doubt Review Not to use the cliched press puns I try to avoid on this website, but, hell it kinda fits here. Doubt gives you plenty of reasons to doubt it’s a good movie. It’s about two nuns, Sister James (Amy Adams) sees the priest Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) doing some shady stuff after…