Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 23rd, 2003
Synopsis
Nick Nolte plays Bob, a former high-end thief, now a drugged-out loser living in Nice,France. He still retains the loyalty of his friends, however, and this includes Tchiky Karyo, thecop who has busted him time and time again, and who worries about Bob. He is especiallyworried that Bob will return to crime, because that would mean prison for the rest of his life.Sure enough, Bob is seduced into One More Gig, a complicated heist of valuable paintings.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 17th, 2003
If ever a movie could be negatively affected by monstrous box office numbers, it’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding. When a five million dollar film rides a tsunami of critical buzz and excellent word-of-mouth past the two hundred million dollar box office gross (finally ending somewhere over $230 million), it’s impossible to see it for the first time completely free of expectation. Perhaps this was my mistake, because I went into my first viewing of the king of sleeper hits excited to a super-duper romantic comedy. ...I’m not sure exactly what I was hoping for. Was it a hearty helping of belly laughs? This film offers sparse and modest chuckles at best. Perhaps it was some sort of originality within its predictable story arc. Instead, this is a by-the-numbers romcom with by-the-numbers romcom characters. Maybe I was hoping for a film that could at least approach capturing the profundity of love, or the reality of struggles with culturally divergent family values. Whatever it was, I felt pretty unfulfilled by the time it was all over, even though I found the movie reasonably enjoyable.
Toula, as the film’s narrator, is probably the closest the film gets to a real person, thanks in large part to Nia Vardalos’s writing and performance. Vardalos plays Toula with a fantastic knack for deadpan and a real sincerity about her that makes her a likable and identifiable woman. Her insecurity post-makeover, pre-engagement is particularly noteworthy. It’s everyone around her that I found annoying and worse, poorly drawn. The relatives are all stereotypes (but no one is gay!), funny accents and idiosyncrasies, from father to annoying cousin. Her aunts are all busybodies, her uncles all drink Uzo, everyone is in everyone’s face…they stop just short of having Baklava all over their faces and wearing togas. The character who lacks the most, though, is the betrothed, poor Ian himself.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 17th, 2003
In 1927 Herbert Asbury published a book entitled The Gangs of New York: An informal history of the Underworld. This book would prove to be the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. This film was originally supposed to start filming in the late 1970’s, and after numerous delays and many financial issues, the film finally came to fruition in 2002.
It is an epic film of staggering proportions about a little known part of the history of the United States and New York City. We follow a story filled with both real and fictional characters through the slums of the lower Manhattan’s Five Points. A young Irish immigrant played by Leonardo Dicaprio returns to the Five Points to seek revenge against the man who killed his father Bill Cutting played by Daniel Day Lewis.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 15th, 2003
Film
The film starts out in a comic convention, where we are introduced to Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) and Banky Edwards (Jason Lee), the co-creators of the smash hit book “Bluntman and Chronic.” Holden is an artist who feels trapped into his commercial success, afraid he’ll always be known as “the guy who invented Bluntman and Chronic.” His partner and best friend of 20 years, Banky, is justifiably unapologetic for their success; he likes having his name on something that everyone recognizes. It’s ...t this convention that Holden has his first encounter with the endearing Alyssa Jones. A week after the encounter, a phone call from their mutual friend and fellow author, Hooper, informs Holden that Alyssa has invited him to a bar in the city.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 14th, 2003
Quite possibly the worst Jackie Chan film ever … strike that … quite possibly one of the worst films ever, City Hunter is a live-action film based off of the Japanese anime of the same name. Here, Chan plays private detective Ryu Saeba, who, along with his partner, Kaori (Joey Wong), are hired to track down the missing daughter of a wealthy Japanese publishing tycoon.
Ryu is quite the ladies man and his initial thoughts of turning the job down vanish once he sees a picture of the magnate’s beautiful ru...away daughter, Shizuko (Kumiko Goto). He and Kaori track Shizuko down to a cruise ship and Ryu is immediately smitten with her and it becomes hard to tell if he’s more interested in returning her to her father, or getting in on some of the … ahem … action himself. Unfortunately for Ryu, when some American baddies hijack the ship and hold its passengers hostage, his carnal interests in Shizuko take a back seat to dispatching the bad guys. It’s now up to Ryu, Kaori, and Shizuko to save the day and then make sure that Shizuko is returned back to her father safely.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 13th, 2003
Synopsis
Rosalie Boca is married to Joey, a pizza maker and womanizer. When she catches him with another woman she decides that he must go. With the help of her mother, the new age busboy and drug-addled cousins Harlan and Marlon, she attempts to send Joey on his way to the big pizza pie in the sky. Based on a true story truth really is stranger then fiction in this story of love and infidelity.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 11th, 2003
Joyously unhinged and very inventive, O Brother Where Art Thou? is the latest film from the imaginative minds of the Coen brothers. Based very roughly (and loosely) on Homer’s “Odyssey”, it’s a Depression-era musical about three convicts who escape from a chain gang to unearth a buried treasure, get one of the men home to be reunited with his wife, become overnight musical sensations as “The Soggy Bottom Boys”, and at the same time, elude a bloodthirsty team of Mississippi lawmen. For those of you who don’t ...uite remember Homer’s tale, it doesn’t really matter too much here. However, for those interested in a quick history lesson, Homer composed “The Odyssey” around 700 B.C. as the epic poem takes place over a decade and focuses on Odysseus (aka Ulysses) and his journey home to his wife Penelope after fighting in the Trojan War.
The main character is a loquacious, debonair fellow named Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) who is part of a Mississippi chain gang during the Depression. When he's not slicking back his locks with Dapper Dan hair pomade, admiring the pencil-line precision of his Smilin' Jack mustache, or squeezing nine-dollar words out of his 50-cent brain, he continually thinks he has it all figured out. Ulysses uses the lure of a bogus hidden treasure to con two of his simple-minded chain-gang buddies into escaping with him. He takes charge of this gang because, as he tells his cohorts, he “has the capacity for abstract thought”. Our other tragic heroes in this tale are Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O'Donnel (Tim Blake Nelson), who make a getaway that seems far easier than the one Ulysses himself made from the ashes of Troy. Out on the lam, they encounter a series of obstacles and lucky breaks, bizarre characters and aberrations of nature.
Posted in: Game Reviews by Archive Authors on July 10th, 2003
Written by Jason Franz
I can't remember the last time I've installed a game on my PC that had so many entertaining qualities matched with such brilliant gameplay. All too often PC developers focus on the eye candy and give gameplay little thought. WithGTA: Vice City, Rockstar not only avoided that problem, but they take us back to the glory days of fun PC gaming.
Posted in: 1.33:1 Fullscreen, Action, Artisan Entertainment, Disc Reviews, Dolby Digital 2.0 (English), Dolby Digital 5.1 (English), DVD by Archive Authors on July 10th, 2003
Synopsis
Professional hit man Christopher Lambert is given a new contract, but this one doesn’tinvolve killing. He is to travel from Europe to Cape Town (where his parents were killed whenhe was but a wee lad) and protect Dennis Hopper, a businessman with mob ties who is going totestify against psychopathic gangster Christo. Even in jail, Christo’s reach is long and deadly, andLambert has his work cut out for him protecting the very unpleasant Hopper and his daughter.So far, so conventional... if you can call the sight of Hopper in a bad black toupee and goateeconventional. Then, halfway through the film, the main characters hightail it out of Cape Towninto the countryside, and the movie turns into a stately meditation on guilt, redemption andforgiveness. I’m not entirely convinced the project works: the imbalance of heavy action in thefirst half and hardly anything happening for the second is most peculiar, and the storytelling israther disjointed all the way through. The various subplots all get tied together rather too neatlyas well. Still, the very peculiarity of the film works in its favour, and made for a much moreinteresting viewing experience than I was expecting. The final shot is unlike any you’ll see in justabout any other recent action movie.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 9th, 2003
UHF is one of those cult films that has gained quite a following over the years. Fans of the film have been clamoring for a DVD release for many months now and somewhere in the hallowed halls of MGM, someone did something about it. The company is going to release a full-blown DVD of the film on June 4th that will appease the dozens and dozens of “Weird Al” Yankovic fans everywhere.
UHF is total satire and plays almost like the old Landis Kentucky Fried Movie from the 70’s. It’s target... much like Wayne’s World, is small town, local access television and in order to have fun with the premise of a loser taking over a small UHF station, Yankovic strings together parody after parody after parody to get a laugh – some work, some don’t. (What frightens me is that many of you reading this review don’t even know what a UHF station is! Whipper Snappers!) I would imagine that your all out and total enjoyment of the film depends heavily on your enjoyment of Weird Al in general.
