Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on February 29th, 2012
I am back! For now. Here to review Insight. Dun dun dun! A psychological thriller type that my husband thought I would like to take a look at. And then he bat his eyes and asked me to review it. Since I am a sucker for him and his gorgeous eyes, I agreed. Was this movie worth the look? Let’s take a look, shall we?
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on February 27th, 2012
What takes 13.7 billion years.? The history of the world. This History Channel special takes two hours to cover everything. Of course, Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, so when we talk about the history of the world, we are really talking about the history of the universe and everything that led up to where we are now. Little things like a gigantic planetary collision which then shoots off molten debris which forms into our moon.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on February 27th, 2012
One of the great things about the movies is that it shows you things you would never see. You get to see a facsimile of people living their lives and get to experience a pertinent slice of their personal problems. We can be entertained by it and we can learn from it. It takes us out of our personal life and our personal problems. The closer to the truth a movie is the more we can identify with it. I have seen so many movies, but I know it just scratches the surface of the life stories out there.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on February 27th, 2012
By Natasha Samreny
“You don’t choose a life Dad. You live one.”
The call no parent ever wants to get, “There’s been an accident. Your child is dead.” When his son Daniel (Emilio Estevez) dies unexpectedly in the Pyrenees, Tom (Martin Sheen) flies to France to claim his body. But instead of returning immediately, he stays to complete an 800-kilometer pilgrimage across the Spanish countryside that his son couldn’t.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on February 24th, 2012
By Natasha Samreny
“The measure of a man is what’s left when fame falls away.”
Nobody can project the path of a bunch of teenagers swinging guitars. When Paul “Bono” Hewson launches a band with friends Larry Mullen Jr. and Dave Evans, some of his friends audition. But classmate Neil McCormick wants his own band; the latter’s younger brother Ivan makes rhythm guitar in his schoolmates’ band and Neil pulls back harder. The older McCormick acts in pride-shocked disbelief as Bonos’ music group shuttles into worldwide success
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on February 22nd, 2012
By Natasha Samreny
“I started doing comedy in the comedy clubs in 1977. I couldn’t wait till I got my face on that doggone wall. I couldn’t wait till they called my name and I walked through a smoke-filled room, the little small tables and pulled that mike out that hole.”
Thirty years after Bernard McCullough entered the comedy circuit by way of his hometown Chicago, I saw him on The Bernie Mac Show and laughed at his take-no-crap approach to fatherhood. You had to smile at those big truth-telling eyes always trying to convince TV land that he would knock his TV kids upside the head if they pushed him too far.
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Posted in No Huddle by Gino Sassani on February 14th, 2012
Catholic priests are used to hearing confessions, but for one particular pastor in Chicago, the usual confessions about using the Lord’s name in vain or stealing a couple of paperclips from the office just weren’t exciting enough. Father Dowling loved reading mystery books, and it appears to have sharpened his own powers of observation and deduction. As luck would have it, crimes and mysteries would simply fall into his lap. With the help of Sister Stephanie, better known as Sister Steve, he would step away from his pastoral duties to track down clues that were elusive to the Chicago Police Department.
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Posted in No Huddle by J C on February 12th, 2012
People — especially nerds like me, who have been writing about movies for years — often complain about the predictability and clichés that seem to be permanently embedded in certain types of movies. However, the not-so-dirty little secret is that we enjoy wrapping ourselves up in that comfortable blanket of familiarity more often than we’d like to admit. Horror movies and romantic comedies are certainly among the most notorious offenders, but I’d make the case that sports movies belong at the top of the list.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on February 6th, 2012
It would be nice if we were to get films as good as The Graduate from time to time. That’s asking a lot, but it would be nice. Another Happy Day is no The Graduate, but nothing is. Nothing could make such a seismic hit to a generation again. At least, I don’t think so. Another Happy Day did win the Best Screenwriting award at the Sundance film festival, and it seems well deserved. The film has a great cast, and you usually only get that if you have a great script or you spend a billion dollars.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on January 18th, 2012
Written by Joe Gause
Where to begin? I guess I’ll tell you the plot (if you want to call it a plot). The Ghost. (Daniel Baldwin) is a crazy kidnapping murder, who loves young girls. But not hot girls; average, boring girls. (This isn’t my opinion, they state this in the film.) Trying to catch him are two detectives (enter the beyond bad acting). The female detective played by Jessie Metcalfe is something out of a made for TV movie
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on January 18th, 2012
Frozen World is a four-part History Channel mini-series about the Ice Age. The History Channel tends to have a sensationalistic bent to a lot of its programming. That’s one way of saying that they like history to come alive. This series begins with the battle between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal human cavemen 40,000 years ago in Clash of the Cavemen. It outlines the differences between these totally different kinds of humans. The Neanderthal is stronger. The Cro-Magnon is smarter
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on January 12th, 2012
Dirty Girl has a nice little cast because it has a nice little script. It has also been produced by the famous Weinstein Brothers, who try to have one of their picture win the Best Picture Oscar every year. Dirty Girl won’t be winning the Oscar, but it’s not bad. Dirty girl Danielle is in high school in Norman Oklahoma in 1987. She goes to the principal’s office after being to frank in sex education class. He sends her to a class for special kids called challengers. He hopes she’ll get back on track quickly.
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Posted in No Huddle by M. W. Phillips on December 23rd, 2011
“Check it out, someone is selling a ghost online at Ubid!”
You know those ghost story movies where the victims not only do incredibly stupid things which further endanger them, but they are so thick they refuse to believe in ghosts even after they have been physically thrown across the room by something invisible and people around them are dying in mysterious unexplained ways? Kill Katie Malone is one of those movies.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on December 19th, 2011
I have nothing against a heartfelt inspirational film. I have nothing against a film that wears its Christian values on its sleeve. I certainly have nothing against a film that has Robert Duvall as its star. I don’t even have anything against golf movies. The thing is, some people do, so I mention these things up front.
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Posted in No Huddle by Gino Sassani on December 13th, 2011
“There must have been some magic in that old straw hat they found…”
Wait a minute. That’s not the way I remember the song. Well… it’s not the same Frosty you remember, either. Frosty’s Winter Wonderland was one of a few sequels that followed the 1969 classic animated special by Rankin & Bass. This one showed up in 1976 and just never did find the same magic that we all remember from the original special. There’s even a good chance you’ve never heard of this one. It’s a kind of Bride of Frankenstein version of the original story.
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Posted in No Huddle by David Annandale on December 12th, 2011
Two more episodes from Elvira’s Movie Macabre. The two films have little in common, but they do have odd little claims to fame. Scared to Death (1947) is Bela Lugosi’s only colour film. Tormented (1960), meanwhile, is actually pretty good for a Bert I. Gordon film, and features no back-projection-enlarged insects or people!
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Posted in No Huddle by David Annandale on December 12th, 2011
This particular double-bill of offerings (in the form of rather muddy, scratched prints) from Elvira’s Movie Macabre makes a certain odd kind of sense: each film features one of Victor Frankenstein’s female descendants up to no good: his daughter in Lady Frankenstein, and his granddaughter in the inaccurately titled Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter.
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Posted in No Huddle by David Annandale on December 12th, 2011
In the late-19th Century, we find Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) as much in love with the idea of being a showgirl as she was in the original Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988). But given that Las Vegas doesn’t exist yet, she is on her way to Paris to be a can-can dancer. Elvira and her maid, Zou Zou (Mary Jo Smith) take a detour through the Carpathians (naturally), where they wind up at the castle of Lord Vladimere Hellsubus (Richard O’Brien). It transpires that Elvira is the spitting image of Lord Hellsubus’s deceased first wife, and all kinds of scheming and counter-plotting begins on the part of the various factions in the spooky old castle.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on November 30th, 2011
A baby’s soft and contented voice is heard over a white screen as the credits begin. Two young teenage boys dote over the happy child. These are the opening moments of Submarino, which quickly devolves into a story of total despair. It turns out the mother is a worthless and degenerate alcoholic. These two well-meaning boys are forced to be the parents. They wake up in the morning and the baby is blue and lifeless.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on November 23rd, 2011
By Natasha Samreny
Funny how movies sometimes offer a more real perspective of life than experience itself. Sexual politics change and sometimes improve over time, culture and geography. But watching Rape Squad made me sick in disbelief at how disgusting, clueless and misogynistically men could treat women in mainstream America at the country’s social climax of the women’s lib age of the 1970s, and get away with it.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on November 23rd, 2011
If you try to look at the state of independent films in the modern age, it would be a huge undertaking.
Let’s look at a film called Bellflower. It just came out and is a good example of what the state of independent films is like in the year 2011. It is very low-budget project in which everyone sweats blood, especially the writer/director/star, to get the movie done. It has some novel ideas, some youthful energy, and way too many rough edges.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on November 22nd, 2011
By Natasha Samreny
Santa Claus is neither jolly elf with rosy cheeks nor heart of gold. He doesn’t reward the good kids and he tortures the bad ones.
When Young Pietari Kontio (Omni Tommila) and Juuso (Ilmari Järvenpää) stumble upon a mysterious excavation site inside reindeer country of their native Finland, Pietari catapults into his own dark uncovering of the original Kris Kringle.
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Posted in No Huddle by David Annandale on November 8th, 2011
Two private investigators (Dany Gehshan and Vanessa Broze) are hired to look into the disappearance of a young woman. There search leads them to the small town of Kennyville. They have barely arrived before Gehshan is beaten bloody and Broze is kidnapped. Gehshan’s only ally in his search is a local (Michael Scratch) who wants nothing more to do with the town-wide conspiracy of silence. It seems Kennyville is home to a brainwashing outfit that transforms attractive young women into lethal, programmed assassins, and that is exactly the process that Broze is undergoing.
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on November 7th, 2011
“For the first time in the history of the world, man has sent a rocket 1500 miles into space. You can’t expect such an experiment to be perfect.”
There’s this home video of my sister as a strawberry blonde toddler at a family picnic. Sticky watermelon caresses her cherubic face as she sings the phrase she captured that day, “And again? And again and again, and again?” Yes, chipmunk-voiced Bela: again and again. That’s how often I’d watch Quatermass Xperiment. It’s so rich in storytelling and layered delivery that I’ll watch it more than once to fully appreciate it
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Posted in No Huddle by Archive Authors on November 1st, 2011
Colin Hanks is a serial killer. If you watch Dexter on Showtime, you know that already. On Dexter, Hanks is playing a conflicted messenger of God who is dour and unhappy and under the control of another to do horrific and brutal murders. In Lucky, he seems more like a regular guy. That’s the kind of guy that Hanks normally plays. He is usually someone who is kind of smart and nerdy with a somewhat preppy and fussy edge. He is different than his father, Tom.
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