Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on February 26th, 2013
Here’s how hot Jennifer Love Hewitt is in The Client List, Lifetime’s breezy, sexy hit dramedy. My wise, eternally-patient girlfriend and I watch the show together, and she doesn’t even get jealous or make any sort of catty remarks at our TV. Instead, she figuratively tips her cap to Hewitt’s hotness the same way a golfer might compliment an opponent for making an impossible shot. (Game recognizes game, I suppose.)
The Client List stars Hewitt as Riley Parks, a Texas housewife who is abandoned by her husband Kyle (Brian Hallisay) during tough financial times. Riley begins working as a massage therapist at an upscale day spa called The Rub, owned by the savvy Georgia Cummings (Loretta Devine). Unfortunately, no one told Riley certain clients expect, ahem, “extras” with their massages. (Maybe Riley’s first clue should’ve been that her boss’s name is “Georgia Cummings.”) Faced with having to support two children, Riley eventually decides to, um, hand out extras.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on February 24th, 2013
“If the average civilian had been through the same stresses that you have been through, undoubtedly they too would have developed the same nervous conditions.”
The first time I saw The Master, I really didn’t like it. It was a terrible feeling. I’m a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan, and Boogie Nights is one of my 10 favorite films of all time. So I walked into that theater excited to see what was being called a landmark achievement: the “Scientology movie” that wasn’t really about Scientology (but actually kinda was) helmed by one of the most talented directors working today.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on February 22nd, 2013
And you thought Thanksgiving dinner with your family was tense. For most of us, it doesn’t get much worse than critical parents, competitive siblings or that weird side dish no one really wants to try. (There always seems to be about a gallon of that stuff too.) Consider yourself lucky: unlike the poor souls in Deadfall, you’ve probably never been chained to the dinner table — not literally, at least — nor had a psychotic Eric Bana point a gun at your face.
On the surface, Deadfall kind of looks like the wintry crime thriller the Coen Bros. never bothered making. Addison (Eric Baan) and Liza (Olivia Wilde) are brother-sister crooks fresh off a big casino heist. One grisly car accident and a dead state trooper later, Addison decides splitting up would give them a better chance of reaching the Canadian border. Liza is picked up by Jay (Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy) a recently-paroled former boxer on his way home for an awkward Thanksgiving dinner with his retired sheriff dad (Kris Kristofferson) and his loving mom (Sissy Spacek). Everything comes to a head during the aforementioned Thanksgiving dinner.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on February 20th, 2013
“We never found a single body. Now they’re just missing girls that nobody missed.”
Fictional serial killers have to work extra hard these days if they want to stand out or shock us. Network shows like Criminal Minds bring us a different sicko every week, and a certain popular pay cable hit actually has viewers rooting for the killer. So the best thing I can say about The Factory is that it gives us an exceptionally sick premise. Unfortunately, the straight-to-DVD thriller is ultimately derailed by a sloppy screenplay and a truly preposterous final act.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on February 19th, 2013
“There’s a king in every corner now.”
Game of Thrones is definitely one of the best shows on TV right now, and it might be the most ambitious television series ever produced. Ambition and quality don’t always go hand in hand. (See, Cloud Atlas. No, seriously…watch it. I’m one of the people who really enjoyed that convoluted mess.) The second season of Game of Thrones — a massive undertaking that took its cast to Iceland and Croatia, in addition to its Belfast base — performed a minor miracle. It deepened, expanded and improved upon an already excellent show.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on February 17th, 2013
“You think football builds character? It does not; football reveals character.”
The open secret about sports movies is that they’re not really about sports. Most of the great ones use the games people play as a dynamic arena to tell universal stories about struggle, underdogs overcoming impossible odds, greatness and redemption. You don’t have to know a nose guard from a mouth guard to enjoy a football movie. By that same token, Undefeated may chronicle a grueling real-life high school football season, but I wasn’t surprised to see it play out like a lot of fictional sports flicks.
Posted in: The Reel World by J C on February 14th, 2013
Even among the crowded field idyllic meadow of big-screen romances, the “Nicholas Sparks movie” has become its own lucrative sub-genre. The only other contemporary authors I can remember achieving that sort of name brand recognition are Stephen King and John Grisham. (When people went to watch a Harry Potter film, they didn’t usually say, “Let’s go see the new J.K. Rowling movie.) It’s easy to spot a Nicholas Sparks movie: the lily white leads usually live in or around one of the Carolinas, where they inevitably get drenched by a romantic, cleansing rain before coming across a pivotal letter.
The fact that Safe Haven hits every single one of these checkpoints should, in theory, make it the ultimate Nicholas Sparks movie experience. Instead, the new film — the eighth big-screen adaptation of the author’s work — comes off as a pale imitator.
Posted in: The Reel World by J C on February 14th, 2013
The conclusion of the wildly popular Twilight saga last fall left a nation of haters high-fiving each other, but it also created a giant, heart-shaped vacuum in Hollywood. Where is the industry’s next big young adult-oriented, human-on-supernatural romance franchise going to come from? Valentine’s Day seems as good a time as any to find out if Beautiful Creatures — based on Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s “Caster Chronicles” series — is up to the task.
Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich) can’t wait to get out of Gatlin, South Carolina. Thanks to some nimble narration, Ethan explains why he feels trapped in his fictional dead-end town, where virtually every important piece of literature is on the banned list and people enthusiastically re-enact the Civil War as if they’re expecting a different result. Ethan’s spirits brighten when he meets moody outsider Lena Duchaness (Alice Englert), who is literally the girl of his dreams. You see, Ethan has been having the same dream every night about a mysterious dark-haired beauty; unfortunately, he always dies at the end. After a rocky start (is there any other kind?), the two grow closer and Ethan discovers that Lena is a witch.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on February 12th, 2013
The image of what a bully looks and sounds like has changed drastically in recent years. When you and I were growing up, a “bully” was probably someone who looked like this and demanded your lunch money. Mean Girls came out less than 10 years ago; but if Tina Fey were trying to get the exact same movie made today, she’d probably have to deal with notes from a nervous studio exec worried that the Burn Book would drive one of the characters to suicide.
Bully — director Lee Hirsch’s heartbreaking and intensely-personal project — has lofty aspirations. In presenting five affecting stories of abuse that don’t necessarily involve black eyes or bloody noses, the documentary seeks to eradicate bullying by inspiring and educating the current generation of elementary, middle and high school students.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on February 9th, 2013
I didn’t know what to make of this Pig/1334 double bill when I took it on as my latest assignment. All I had to go on were the aggressively grotesque images on the Blu-ray case. I wasn’t yet familiar with the work of Dutch filmmaker Nico B. or former Christian Death frontman Rozz Williams. I did a bit of research, mostly because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being handed a real-life version of the videotape from The Ring. (Surely, there would be a less drastic way of informing me my services were no longer required on this site.) What I uncovered instead was an intriguing and haunting back story.
Pig is a 23-minute short co-directed by Nico B. and Williams, a pioneer of deathrock. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to too many deathrock records when I was growing up in Puerto Rico.) The short was filmed in 1997 and tells the story of a pig-masked serial killer (Williams) who ritualistically murders an unidentified man (James Hollan) in an abandoned house in the middle of Death Valley. Williams never saw the completed product because he hanged himself on April 1, 1998, shortly after finishing work on the soundtrack. (Pig premiered in Los Angeles in January 1999.)
