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Lady Vengeance….Vicious
Lady Vengeance Review Park Chan Wook concluded his revenge trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy) with Lady Vengeance. This disturbing film is more stylistically assured than Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and closer in tone to Oldboy than to Mr. Vengeance. It tells the story of Geum-Ja (played by Yeong-ae Lee), imprisoned for kidnapping and killing…
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Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle Succeeds with Visuals and Story
Slumdog Millionaire Danny Boyle is one of my personal favorite filmmakers around, in fact right below this review posting on the main page should be a feature appreciating him. Visually, the guy is a really distinctive force. He has so much range of expression you can’t necessarily pick out a Danny Boyle film from a…
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Appreciating Danny Boyle in Wake of Slumdog Millionaire
Peerless How many distinctive directors pack as much storytelling heft as visual panache? Few if any have the track record of Danny Boyle. I had considered putting Boyle in the Under Appreciated Page, but I just have so much to say about him I figured he deserved a front page spot. In film circles Boyle…
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Despairing in advance of The Punisher
My colleague at the University of Maryland demolished Ray Stevenson’s The Punisher in his review, and most critics have been similarly ill-disposed towards the new film. http://media.www.diamondbackonline.com/media/storage/paper873/news/2008/12/04/Diversions/A.Punishing.Viewing.Experience-3568157.shtml I for one had marshaled some hope, after the goofball camp of the Thomas Jane Punisher, that this seemingly more serious incarnation might be worth seeing. This does…
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Ray Stevenson Joins Strong Cast for Book of Eli-Hughes Comeback?
Hughes Brothers The writing directing team of Allen and Albert Hughes delivered powerful and distinctive, if flawed, work with Dead Presidents and Menace II Society. Since then they’ve done From Hell with Johnny Depp and some TV work, as well as being involved in New York, I Love You, but they haven’t really had their…
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Bourne 4-The Bourne Redundancy
Variety reported that Universal was moving ahead with a 4th Bourne film, based on an original story instead of a Robert Ludlum novel. They also mentioned that Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon were attached. What’s funny about this is Damon himself commented on how ridiculous a 4th Bourne film would be, and in doing so…
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Pablo Francisco-Great Example Clip
Pablo Francisco is one of my favorite comics working, and his rant on William Hung is a great example of what he does best. As you’ll see in the clip, Pablo is really talented at using different voices and sound effects in his comedy and can switch between them with ease. Much like the hilarious…
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Frank Caliendo-A Mostly Succesful Clip
In my general encounters watching Frank on TV I’ve found him sometimes funny, sometimes grating. He is a talented comic, but his impressions are more about exaggerating several trademark gestures or vocal inflections of the people in question, he is by no means able to do an impression to any deeper level than that as…
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Fight Scenes That Make No Logical Sense
Probably the most inexplicably popular trend is the confusing fight scene. Most likely conjured up by a poor director with a low budget and martial arts-limited actor, these scenes have become absurdly over-used. Dark Knight had them. Why? The movie cost over a hundred million to make. They couldn’t let us see what’s going on…
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Korean Remake Fever
It seems Hollywood is well aware that South Korea makes some of the most engaging, freaky, genre-defying, chock full of life films around. The above movies are set to be remade…but wait…it’s a little more complicated. Will Smith and Steven Spielberg are names being tossed about for an Oldboy remake, but word around the web…