Archive for the ‘Weinstein Company’ Category
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Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 15th, 2009
Janky is a term that means shady or dishonest. An adjective that is anything but tasteful. Throw that in with the noun promoters and what you have is possibly the biggest revelation since somebody discovered Jon & Kate would have marital issues with eight children & a camera crew running around. Oh really? So, when I received Janky Promoters in the mail with Ice Cube and Mike Epps smiling ear to ear, all I could think was “Janky Promoters indeed.”
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 15th, 2009
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name: Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame . ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she with silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The inscription above can be found inside the pedestal of The Statue Of Liberty,
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 9th, 2009
“You’ve gotta know what you’re doing when you go in. You gotta have it figured out. Those are the rules. How you get in. How you get out. How many shots you’re gonna need. Make sure you know where everybody is. Make sure nobody sees you. Don’t hang around. Don’t get interested. Then you don’t make mistakes.”
How many times have we seen some criminal looking to do that one last job that can get them out of the business forever?
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 2nd, 2009
“A short time ago in a galaxy not so far, far away…
The year is 1998 and it is a period of galactic civil war. Scratch that. There is no civil war. That would be crazy! However, the past 15 years have been a dark time for Star Wars fans. But there is hope. A new Star Wars film is on the horizon. In 199 days, 34 hours, 33 minutes and 28 seconds the most anticipated movie of all time will be released. In the remote state of Ohio, two best friends and lifelong Star Wars fans have drifted apart. Little do they know that on Halloween Night, their paths will cross again.”
Too many cooks can spoil the broth.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 11th, 2009
The international horror market is becoming quite the money maker. It started with the Asian Invasion. We started seeing American remakes of these mostly Japanese or Korean ghost stories. They usually had a common thread that featured some type of technology. It started with Ring, the American version of Ringu. Here it’s a videotape that demands to be reproduced or you’re dead in 7 days. Eventually we’ve seen films where ghosts inhabit everything from computers to video games to cell phones and digital cameras. It seems the dead just can’t let go of their hi-tech toys.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 27th, 2009
I get worried when I see box art make claims like they have on the recent release of Dorothy Mills. It claims that this film is a contemporary take on The Exorcist. The problem is that we don’t really need a contemporary take on that classic film. It’s a bit pretentious and arrogant to think that this low budget affair can come close to reproducing what that film did back in the 1970’s. Why can’t the folks who make these kinds of films allow the film to stand on its own and aspire to something unique and exciting for its own merits?
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 25th, 2009
“They’re not leaving till they get dessert.”
Director John Gulager might be the son of famed cult B movie star Clu Gulager, but that’s not how he broke into the business. He was a Project Greenlight winner. Project Greenlight is a competition for up and coming directors. They compete in a reality show style setting for the opportunity to direct a major release film. Now, I didn’t say it was a big budget film, but it does get backed and released by a major studio.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 19th, 2009
“You’ve got Samuel L. Jackson. You’ve got Bernie Mac. Just turn on the camera and I guarantee you got something you can keep.”
During an August weekend in the past summer of 2008 the entertainment world lost two of it’s brightest stars in just two days. On August 9th comedian extraordinaire Bernie Mac died from complications of pneumonia. The Mac-Man, as his friends liked to call him, was little more than 50 years old. Just a few hours after Bernie Mac passed, on August 10th legendary soul man Isaac Hayes also died. Hayes was 10 days shy of his 66th birthday.
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Disc Reviews by Aric Mitchell on February 9th, 2009
Woody Allen lands a terrific cast with his latest attempt at comedy, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but there is something very off about the way these characters are written. Annoying pretentious dialogue renders a whimsical, fairy-tale-like backdrop ineffectual, causing each moment of silence to come all too slowly.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 16th, 2009
“It’s not about monsters, or zombies, or vampires. It’s about kids.”
One of the horror trends going around involves the isolation of a young couple who find themselves suddenly terrified. The pursuer can be a creature or undead vengeful spirit, but more often than not the attacker is very much human. The location can be a desert or even a hotel room as it was in one of the better examples of the subgenre, Vacancy with Kate Beckinsale and Luke Fox.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 31st, 2008
“Gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss gazes back at you…”
The original Pulse film was a remake of an Asian horror film, part of the recent trend of converting many of these titles into American retellings. That trend appears to also include strong warnings against technology and linking ghostly apparitions with some form of technology, from video tapes to cell phones.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 22nd, 2008
This modern retelling of the classic fairy tale is brought to you by a division of the Jim Henson Company called Unstable Fables. I think that whoever came up with this idea is the unstable part. This is actually causing me some pain to write. I never thought the day would come when I would be totally disgusted by a Jim Henson labeled release.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 18th, 2008
The Longshots is one of those sports films that in many ways you see coming from miles away. It certainly feeds upon that against all odds sports cliché that you’ve likely seen a hundred times if you’ve seen it once. But in so many other ways, this is a story with more than a champion’s heart and courage. In many ways it’s about family and redemption. While the film is based loosely on the story of Jasmine Plummer,
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Disc Reviews by Aric Mitchell on December 12th, 2008
Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride plays like a childhood fantasy I might have had in the third grade had I known more about boobies and the joy they bring to my basest male desires. As a film, however, it’s terrible. It’s like Bishop set out to honor the bad movie genre by laying a turd so rancid the qualities of those other films shine brightly alongside it. Sitting down to watch Hell Ride a second time
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2008
There seems to be some confusion over the title of this 2008 direct to video release. The release is simply called The Nutty Professor, like the original Jerry Lewis vehicle from 1963. It appears the working title of the film was The Nutty Professor 2: Facing The Fear. It is still listed under that title in the IMDB. Whatever the title, you should know that this isn’t your father’s Nutty Professor. This version is a CG animation feature, but don’t expect Shrek or Pixar quality work here. It’s a considerably lower budget affair, and that shows pretty clearly in the final product.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 3rd, 2008
December 3, 2008 11:07 A.M.: Dear Diary. Today I had a very harrowing experience. I think this event has left me feeling rather shaken, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to forget the horrors I have just witnessed. It all started when I decided to watch the new direct to video horror film Zombie Diaries. I just couldn’t wait. As I picked up the box and read the interesting description, my heart just went pitter patter in my chest. The box promised the best zombie film since 28 Days Later, maybe even the best zombie movie ever.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 1st, 2008
The first huge mistake this new film on The Boston Strangler makes is in the casting. If I were to mention to you The Boston Strangler and Bundy in the same sentence, who would you think about for the latter reference? I’d bet most of you would be thinking about Ted, the infamous serial killer finally electrocuted here in sunny Florida a few years back. Unfortunately that’s not who I’m talking about here. It’s none other than Bud Bundy, that hapless young pervert from Married With Children. That’s right, folks. David Faustino plays Albert De Salvo, the suspected killer.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 26th, 2008
Welcome to Gino’s school of film art. Today I’m going to teach you how to make a modern art film. You know the kind. The type of film that no one really likes, but a lot of folks pretend to like because they think it makes them look cool. Just think how cool you’ll look when you can make one of those pretentious pieces of crap and watch phony critics go on and on about how brilliant it was. Meanwhile you laugh your behind off and cash in on the phony baloney.
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Disc Reviews by Ryan Keefer on July 4th, 2008
Todd Haynes continues to dazzle and amaze with his body of work. In Velvet Goldmine, he told the story of a fictitious glam-rock band in David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust style. Far From Heaven found him taking the Douglas Sirk films of the ‘50s into a nontraditional turn. In his follow-up film I’m Not There, his first directorial effect in five years, Haynes examines the persona and essence of Bob Dylan without actually really using the name or the words together at all in the film in a film released in 2007, where features like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood earned a slew of awards, I’m Not There was an understated gem, and yet summing it up is a little difficult.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 17th, 2008
So I find out I’m going to review a film called Meerkat Manor. My research tells me it’s actually a television show on Animal Planet, but I still didn’t know much. Was this some kind of animal version of The Tudors? And what exactly is a meerkat, anyway? The answer to all of these questions arrived one sunny morning via UPS on my front door. I yawned my way to the door and picked up the nondescript package that fell over with a flop as I opened my home to the bright Florida sunshine. “What’s this?” I asked myself.
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Disc Reviews by Sean Jester on June 17th, 2008
It’s nice when a movie lives up to its expectations and even surpasses them because it rarely seems to happen anymore. Such is the case with Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis bio-pic, Control.
I’ve been waiting to see Control for a long time. From the start, the film sounded interesting, since I am a huge fan of post-punk alternative rock music, the genre that Ian Curtis and Joy Division practically invented in the late 1970’s. But when I heard that long-time band collaborator and renowned music video director Anton Corbijn was directing the film, my anticipation rose to even higher levels.
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Disc Reviews by Sean Jester on June 6th, 2008
It’s ironic that 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake (which was originally a George Romero film), have jump-started Romero’s long-running “Dead” series that started in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead.
Since 28 Days Later and the Dawn remake were released, Romero has released two new installments: Land of the Dead in 2005, and now Diary of the Dead in 2007.
It’s also quite ironic, and perhaps a little sad, that 28 Days Later and even the Dawn of the Dead remake were better movies than any of Romero’s “Dead” films since the original Dawn of the Dead was released in 1978. But with Diary of the Dead, Romero clearly isn’t putting this series to bed any time soon. And according to IMDb, a sequel to Diary of the Dead is on its way.
So, is Diary of the Dead any good?
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 14th, 2008
Anesthetic Awareness is a phenomenon where a surgical patient is completely aware and able to feel pain while under anesthesia. It occurs in about 5 out of every 1000 patients, with about half of those 5 aware enough to feel excruciating pain. Apparently the condition is not readily noticeable by the surgical team and is only discovered through recounts of the experience after the procedure. Patients are often able to tell doctors details of conversations they had while the patient was supposed to be completely out of it.
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Disc Reviews by Sean Jester on March 29th, 2008
In The Mist, Frank Darabont returns to familiar territory, directing another movie based on a short story by Stephen King. Darabont struck gold in 1994 with The Shawshank Redemption and then came close to, but did not equal, that magic with 1999’s The Green Mile.
Is the third time a charm for Darabont working with King material? The answer is a resounding “yes”.
The Mist is near-perfect on every level.
Horror movie? Check.
Morality tale? Check.
Metaphor for today’s world? Check.
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Disc Reviews by Tom Buller on December 2nd, 2007
What we have here is an average film based on what I’m told is a great little bestseller, The Nanny Diaries. There’s a lot of talent at work in this romantic dramedy, with stars like Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation), Laura Linney (Kinsey) and Paul Giamatti (Sideways), and the directing talents of husband-and-wife team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (American Splendor), so I expected more.
But are there any disappointments lurking on this widescreen DVD? Read on to find out.
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