Archive for the ‘Alliance Films’ Category
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 11th, 2010
Laurel & Hardy. Abbott & Costello. Martin & Lewis. And now… Harold & Kumar? Perhaps the comparison is a bit forced, but that latter day pair certainly follows the classic set-up: best friends who are also polar opposites (Kumar is the confident, slacker stoner; Harold is the shy, conservative stoner); one has mad schemes (Kumar); the other (Harold) suffers for those schemes, and so on. At any rate, here we have the complete oeuvre of these two characters (and since Kal Penn, who plays Kumar, has subsequently gone on to a couple of season of House before taking a job for the White House, I think it safe to say that we are unlikely to be seeing any further episodes).
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 26th, 2010
Every seven years, thirty assassins descend on an unsuspecting city and slaughter each other, all the while being observed by hijacked security cameras for the benefit of the high rollers who are betting on the outcome. The previous winner was Ving Rhames, and he thought he had walked away from the life after that tournament. But then his wife was murdered, and he learns that the killer is in the new contest (taking place this time in England). Also taking part is the fatalistic Kelly Hu, who winds up being the reluctant protector of drunken priest Robert Carlyle, who even more reluctantly has become a long-shot competitor in the tournament after accidentally swallowing a tracking device that paints him as a legitimate target.
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Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on February 15th, 2010
This film chronicles the career of Maurice “The Rocket” Richard, an NHL player for the Montreal Canadians, from his childhood days in a Junior hockey league, to the season in 1955 where his suspension from playing for the remainder of that season led to violent riots in Montreal. This film is more than just an examination of Richard as a French-Canadian citizen and legendary hockey player (many still argue as the greatest ever to play) but also a look at his impact as an icon and living legend to the people of Quebec.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 13th, 2010
Years after his wife’s unsolved murder, Norman Reedus has retreated within himself, carrying on a morose existence in a low-end apartment, gloomily taking part in unofficial greyhound racing. His neighbour, Emmanuelle Béart, is in love with him. Since Reedus is obsessed with solving the murder to the exclusion of any other human interaction, Béart decides to present him a solution. Based on the tiny bits of information Reedus has on the suspect, Béart picks cabbie Harvey Keitel as matching the profile well enough to make for a good target. She begins a relationship with him in order to put him in the frame and give Reedus, though murder, the catharsis he needs.
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Disc Reviews by Jay Macdonald on November 27th, 2009
Don’t You Forget about Me is a documentary/tribute to the late John Hughes. Four amateur filmmakers set out to find answers to the questions, why did you leave? How did you capture adolescence so perfectly in your films? Why do your films remain a fixture in popular culture? After obtaining interviews with many of the John Hughes alumni such as Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Alan Ruck and Andrew McCarthy, the filmmakers came to the realization that they required an interview with John Hughes to complete the film. The documentary combines the interview footage as well as covers the filmmaker’s road trip from Toronto to Illinois to acquire an interview with the reclusive director.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 23rd, 2009
We are in the late 1920s, and to the family manor comes Ben Barnes, in the company of new wife, Jessica Biel. That this woman is both American and a race car champion does not sit well with the very conservative mother Kristin Scott Thomas. That her nose is out of joint delights husband Colin Firth, a veteran of the Great War who, thoroughly world-weary and disillusioned with just about everything, wants nothing to do with the petty concerns and squabbles of his family. What follows is a clash of cultures and generations, veering between slapstick comedy and something rather darker.
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Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on November 23rd, 2009
This is the story of an unfortunate underachiever who is left with his niece after his even less fortunate sister abandons them. Unhappy with social services and the places they are forced to live, they take what little money they have to fund an aimless trip across the country until arriving at the home of his abusive father.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 22nd, 2009
Some thirty years after seeing his father killed by a car bomb, Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) is a dealer in explosives. When he is imprisoned in Yemen along with members of a militant group he was about to make a sale to, he is drawn in and becomes an integral part of the group’s terrorist activities. But wait – is he in fact an intelligence agent who has infiltrated the group in order to bring down their leader? Meanwhile, FBI agent Guy Pearce is hot on Samir’s trail, but if he catches up, will that be a good thing or a bad one?
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Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on November 17th, 2009
This is the comedic tale of a grocery store’s young assistant manager (Seann William Scott) who believes he is the prime candidate to take over the soon-to-be built addition to the chain. This leads him to buying a house before the job is secured and lo and behold a hotshot Canadian (John C. Reilly) shows up in town from their sister company and begins campaigning for the job himself.
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Disc Reviews by Dale Krawchuk on September 1st, 2009
Already languishing in the $6.99 bin at my local Blockbuster, and with dismal reviews on its release, my hopes for The Haunting of Molly Hartley were not high. However, after viewing the DVD I can safely report that the movie falls firmly into the ‘not anywhere as awful as I thought it was going to be’ category.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 6th, 2009
When Terence Malick’s latest effort hit the theatres, he had trimmed it down to 135 minutes. Early critics had seen a version running 150 minutes. This version is longer yet, clocking it at 172 minutes. Most of what I said about the previous DVD release holds, and so I’m reproducing it here, with additional comments as necessary.
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Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on June 8th, 2009
The main plot of the film is that of a young woman from Brazil named Priscilla, whose student Visa expires and is lead into working as an exotic dancer. The title of the film comes from the ad posted by the pimps and promoters of exotic dancers “Waitresses Wanted.” The film is bookended by the profiles of all the dancers featured in the film, all of whom are from a different nation, all beautiful, and all arrived in Canada with different careers in mind than to get involved with Columbian pimps or Russian mob lords.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 4th, 2009
In a village where there is a great deal of time (there are months whose days are numbered in the 40s), the local witch gives birth to the title character. Twenty years later, Babine is the Village Idiot. Though he is a thoroughly gentle soul, he also becomes the scapegoat for every ill, real or imagined, that befalls the villagers. Fortunately, he has some champions, including Toussaint Brodeur (played by director Luc Picard), the local fly-raiser. But then the church burns down, and terrible trouble looms for Babine in the person of the new, fanatical village priest.
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Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on June 1st, 2009
This film’s plot, on the surface, reads like a letter sent to Penthouse Forum. Strangely, said letter could have been written by either gender. Two out of work slabs of charming beefcake are mistaken for gigolos at a bar by two gorgeous and successful women. The women discover the truth about their one-night-stand partners but soon propose the idea of keeping them in the pool house as ‘cabana boys’ that will be fed beer and satellite TV until they are called inside for sex.
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Disc Reviews by Jay Macdonald on May 12th, 2009
The Caller is a film starring Frank Langella and Elliott Gould. It is a tense thriller about corporate foul play and voyeurism, wait, what year is it? With the recent critical acclaim of Langella, it seems only fitting to market his name on a low-budget film. Unfortunately for the film, Langella’s performance is one of the only shining moments. Langella plays an aging VP of an energy company that decides to blow the whistle on the corporate wrong doings that are going on. Understanding that he’s written his own death certificate, Langella hires a private investigator (Gould) to follow him to help catch his eventual killer.
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Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on May 11th, 2009
Based on a play by Wallace Shawn (who also co-wrote the screenplay), this film is a day in the life of an unhappily married couple, played by Juliane Moore and Matthew Broderick, who don’t know what to do about said unhappiness. The story is simple but the paths each character take is not. After a bitter breakfast scene, they separately go about their day before meeting at a party in the evening where Marie may or may not leave Bruce once and for all.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 5th, 2009
Dustin Hoffman is the titular Harvey, a morose jingle composer who, with his job hanging by a thread, arrives in London for his daughter’s wedding. He is a complete outsider at the rehearsal dinner, and feels even more cut off when his daughter informs him that she wants her stepfather to give her away. Meanwhile, the scarcely more cheerful Emma Thompson spends her time being set up for disastrous blind dates and being constantly harangued on the phone by her mother. These two losers at the game of love meet, and something blossoms between them.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 14th, 2009
Alan Rickman, in a stunningly unexpected bit of casting, plays an arrogant, womanizing SOB of a chemistry professor who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize. While he and wife Mary Steenburgen jet off to Sweden, their son (Bryan Greenberg) is kidnapped. Before long, the parents receive are sent a severed thumb as proof of the kidnapper’s serious intent. But nothing is quite what it seems.
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Disc Reviews by Dale Krawchuk on April 1st, 2009
What would you get if you were to cross the films Dangerous Minds and Waiting for Guffman? Well, add a liberal helping of High School Musical and you might end up with Hamlet 2 (though it is difficult to imagine the High School Musical drones belting out songs like “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” and “Raped in the Face” with such gusto).
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 28th, 2009
Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) have been friends since school, and are now terminally broke roommates. As their utilities are turned off one by one, and they face the prospect of eviction, Zack hits on the idea of shooting a porn flick to get out of debt. They gather together a motley collection of actors and crew, and, letting no setback stand in their way, start making their movie. But the real question is not whether they will succeed, but whether they will come to terms with their feeling for each other.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 9th, 2008
Rob Zombie’s enthusiastic but terminally misguided remake scores yet another DVD release. This one is identical to the previous unrated edition, apart from the fact that there’s an extra disc. More on that later. But in the meantime, as everything else is the same, that will also be true for this review. What follows is what I said about the last version.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on October 23rd, 2008
Hagar Shipley (Ellen Burstyn) is in her twilight years, and her son (Dylan Baker) is trying to get her into a home. Fiercely independent, possessed of a will that has been both a strength and a weakness (making life miserable for herself and all around her), Hagar fights back. She also looks back on her life, and in the flashbacks (where the young Hagar is played by Christine Horne) we see the tragic relationships that have brought us to the fractious family we see now.
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Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on October 13th, 2008
Standup comedians live interesting lives. The typical stand-up comic performs for fifteen to thirty minutes, two or three times a week. For many their sole purpose in life is to make people laugh. Many often suffer from depression when their acts bomb or they go through dry spells where they can’t get gigs or write new material. However, the best ones make their own breaks and find their way into their audience’s heart. Sometimes that can be accomplished through a MC. This MC or master of ceremonies can often take a grand event such as a tour that lasts 30 days & 30 nights and turn four men into superstars.
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Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on October 13th, 2008
The day that Bruce Lee left us was truly a tragedy. The Game of Death was Lee’s pet project, the one where he could truly show off his skills for the world to see. He never finished it. Even though there was ninety minutes of footage, it was never completely restored to make a complete film. Instead, a mere eleven minutes and seven seconds was used in a 1978 movie called Game of Death. The plot was revised and every camera & stand-in trick was used in the book to finish the movie. The rest of the footage was either lost or found its way into the documentary, Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. One has to often wonder what the casting process behind casting a body double & stand-ins were like for somebody as unique as Bruce Lee. One also has to wonder how easy it would be to make fun of it.
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Disc Reviews by David Annandale on September 5th, 2008
Denys Arcand’s conclusion to the loose trilogy whose first two parts were The Decline of the American Empire and The Barbarian Invasions takes place in a near-future Quebec of soulless bureaucracy and nonexistent human relations. Our hero (Marck Labrèche) is a civil servant with a wife whose job leaves no time for him, two iPod-dependent teenage daughters, and a giant suburban house that is not a home. He retreats from his dead-end life into a series of fantasies which see him as hero, shiek, rock star, celebrated novelist, and so on, always with women rushing to have sex with him.
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