Posted in: Disc Reviews by John Delia on July 23rd, 2018
"At the end of the bloody dog wars the vanquished mongrels became powerless house pets: tamed, mastered, scorned. But they survived and multiplied..."
Offbeat, heavy-handed characters, bleak outcast situations, and moody; it’s a marvelous adventure for those who like Wes Anderson movies. This one, however, shows his range with an animated film that’s worthy of most Japanese greats. From the opening drum introduction of Isle of Dogs to the heartfelt finale, Anderson captures a cold, disturbing environment from which his characters can rise up. If you like offbeat stories produced in stop-motion animation in the vein of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie, then this film should not be missed.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on July 21st, 2018
I’m going to go ahead and say Super Troopers is without a doubt one of my favorite comedies of all time. Sure, I know many will disagree with me, and that’s fine. Since I first saw their film back in 2002 when I got the DVD, I was always excited to see what would come next from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe. There was Club Dread, which induced a few chuckles as they tackled the slasher genre, and then they had Beerfest, which was pretty funny but simply didn’t hold up to their performances as Vermont’s Highway Patrolmen. The antics from the first film are simply classic to me, and the film is something I manage to quote from on a weekly basis amongst friends, and when I hear that someone has managed to go all these years without experiencing the film, it’s something I feel the need to remedy immediately. It’s more than just a simple stoner comedy, and rumblings about a sequel have been going on for years, but things seemed to always fall apart. Now after all these years, it’s finally happened.
In case you were wondering, just because the film releases on 4/20, this isn’t a movie that requires you to smoke the green dragon to enjoy. The Broken Lizard gang just knows their audience and simply wanted to be part of the joke. For those who saw the first film and couldn’t stand it, well, there’s no sense in even bothering to check out this entry. As for those who have managed to miss the first one, please check out the first before going in so you can enjoy the film for everything it has to offer.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on July 5th, 2018
“Every time a black woman gets mad, she's a stereotype.”
Taraji P. Henson has been a very good and versatile actress for a long time, but she didn’t become a star until she started getting very angry on screen. Her breakout role came in 2015 courtesy of Fox’s Empire, in which Henson’s Cookie Lyon has been known to get into some scraps. So it made sense for Henson to bring her talent for tantrums to the big screen with the help of a filmmaker who once directed a movie called Diary of a Mad Black Woman. Writer/director/producer Tyler Perry seems to be going for “trashy fun”…unfortunately, he only gets halfway there.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on July 3rd, 2018
Sometimes a movie comes along that has everything going for it: a great cast, a great cinematographer, and a decent plot, but when you watch it, you just scratch your head wondering why it ended up so bad. That in a nutshell is Terminal. It stars Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, and Mike Myers, and for each of them I believe this is a film they quickly want to move past. The tagline for the film is Revenge Never Looked So Good, which is a big part of the problem with the film. I absolutely love the look of the film. It’s beautiful and to a point creates its own style I’d call neon-noir, but unfortunately no matter how good something may look, it doesn’t always mean it will be good.
A good portion of the film is about Bill (Pegg), a teacher who is waiting for a subway train but is told by the night janitor, Mr. Franklyn (Myers) that one won’t be coming for hours. Mr. Franklyn eventually recommends a diner (conveniently called The End of the Line) for Bill to wait. It’s at the diner where Bill meets the quirky Annie (Robbie), who is his waitress but is also intrigued by his illness. To add some more padding to the film, we have a pair of hit men who are introduced in the film’s wonky timeline who take a mysterious job that leaves them locked up in an apartment for days as they are waiting for a phone call to signal when the hit is to go down. How Annie involves herself into the mess with the hit men strays into spoiler territory, but I’ll simply say it was a designed coincidence from sloppy storytelling.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on June 29th, 2018
“Please don't do the whole absent-minded professor thing.”
Even though he’s not anywhere close to the biggest name in Hollywood, Guy Pearce is low-key my favorite actor. The Aussie is probably best known for his starring role in Christopher Nolan’s Memento, the memory loss masterpiece in which Pearce played a man who tattooed helpful(?) clues and reminders all over his body. So when I realized he’d be playing another forgetful lead character in Spinning Man, I was hopeful. But despite some solid performances and interesting philosophical ideas, the film is too downbeat and dull to be an effective thriller.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on June 28th, 2018
When we first meet the Pierce family it is at the Freeland jail, where Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams) is there to bail out his oldest daughter, Anissa (Nafessa Williams). The show doesn’t waste time in tackling social issues as we see them have an encounter with the Freeland police force as they are pulled over for a traffic stop. The reason for the stop turns out to be they are looking for a suspect who just robbed a liquor store, and because Jefferson is black, he of course is a potential suspect. Having this scene early on, not just in the season but in the pilot episode, is a bold and important move by the writers. This shows us that despite being a superhero show, Black Lightning is going to show us a superhero tale unlike anything we’ve seen before on the CW.
Family takes the center stage in this show, and while there is some superhero crimefighting that does get done over the course of the season, watching the Pierce family tackle social issues is just as important. Jefferson Pierce is a high school principal in a neighborhood that is surrounded by gang violence and drugs. It’s been nine years since he was fighting crime as the costumed hero Black Lightning. He’s had his costume stashed away in order to raise his family and help the kids at his school, which has made him a valuable figure in the community. He even mentions early on how he’s saved more kids by being a mentor at his school than he ever did as the masked vigilante. Seeing Pierce confronting gang members and helping his students is an engaging story already, though it’s something audiences have already seen before (Dangerous Minds, Lean on Me, etc).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Jeremy Butler on June 25th, 2018
“If you believe in a goal or dream before it happens, is that real?”
There aren’t a lot of inspirational tales out there for young women who aspire to be athletes. At least not that I have seen. That is why I am sure that Alex and Me is bound to make an impact. This is tale for every girl who aspires for greatness. As a father to an amazing little girl, this really hit home for me. Unfortunately, not so much with my daughter, who is a bit too young to grasp the importance of the message this film is conveying, but I fully intend to keep this movie on hand for when she is old enough to understand.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on June 20th, 2018
Cinematically speaking, the name Eli Roth has been synonymous with murder and mayhem. The director is best known for his work in the horror genre, bursting on the scene with 2002’s Cabin Fever and upping the ante with Hostel and Hostel: Part II a few years later. So it was a bit surprising to hear he’d be taking on a remake of Death Wish — the iconic 1974 Charles Bronson revenge flick — until I started thinking about the bloody possibilities. If the Hostel films gained notoriety as prime examples of “torture porn,” then it seems like Roth has graduated to “revenge porn” with this slick and (intentionally) silly re-imagining.
“People rely on the police to keep them safe. That’s the problem.”
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on June 17th, 2018
When it comes to the Italian western aka the spaghetti western, the first director who comes to mind is Sergio Leone (The Good The Bad And The Ugly); and then there is Sergio Corbucci. While Leone was blazing a successful career, Corbucci first came onto the scene with his film Django. The film was dirty, violent, and mean. For those who are only familiar with the Quentin Tarantino version of Django, well, you’ll definitely see the films are drastically different aside from them both being revenge films. Much later on Corbucci got the chance to follow up his first big hit with another western, The Great Silence. I had gotten to see this dark western before, though it was in the form of a bootleg copy. There was a lot of grain, and the ending attached to the film was radically different from the one Corbucci had intended. Film Movement Classics has done an amazing job at cleaning this title up and giving it a new 2K restoration. As for the film itself, saddle up, because this is like something many have not seen before.
One of the first striking things you will notice about this western is that it is mostly filmed in the cold and in the snow. We meet Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) as he is jumped by a group of bounty hunters whom he quickly dispatches, and when one surrenders himself, Silence manages to shoot off the man’s thumbs. That’s the thing about Silence that’s pretty cool. He kills in self-defense but seems to enjoy crippling bounty hunters so they won’t be able to kill again. We later get to find out just why Silence has it out for bounty hunters, but also the grisly reason why he’s been given the name Silence.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on June 15th, 2018
“Americans are loud, aren't they?”
Oh Lucy! earns the exclamation point in its title within the first two minutes. The movie opens with a shocking leap that is meant to jolt the audience, but barely causes our disaffected heroine to raise an eyebrow. It's played off as a throwaway moment, but it establishes the fact that this quirky Japanese/American dramedy with oodles of personality probably isn't going to go where you expect.
