Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
NCIS is a spin-off, of sorts, from the popular military lawyer show JAG. You could say that NCIS is the Order to JAG’s Law. The NCIS is a real government agency that deals with criminal activity inside or involving the US Navy or Marine Corps. The series has an incredibly global feel and honestly looks damn good for television. Production values are high, and the location stuff is out of this world, or at least all over it.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
Man, has television come a long way in just over 50 years. There was once a pretty strict code that applied to television programs. Men and women, even when married, couldn’t be seen to have shared the same bed. Anything stronger than a “golly gee” was strictly forbidden. You couldn’t even show a woman’s belly button. And the good guys always had to win, while the bad guys got their comeuppance in the end. Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first to push those boundaries by telling mystery stories where the bad guys often appeared to get away with their evil deeds. Even Hitchcock wasn’t brazen enough to completely skirt these rules, and at the end of such immoral plays he would always add, in his spoken postscript, some terrible twist of fate that got the bad guys in the end. Those days seem long behind us now. We have mob bosses, crooked cops, and now a serial killer, not only getting away with their crimes but acting the hero, of sorts, for the show. Vic Mackey and Tony Soprano only helped pave the way. In Showtime’s groundbreaking series, Dexter, Morgan Dexter is a serial killer who happens to kill other killers. The series is based on two novels by Jeff Lindsay. Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter gave birth to the character and world of Dexter Morgan.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 25th, 2008
Current indie It-girl Ellen Page stars in this pre-Juno effort as a similarly headstrong teenager but whose life is far, far worse simply being pregnant. Here she comes from a dysfunctional home, her high school would be called a snake pit if that weren’t disrespectful to snakes, and her baby brother has disappeared while she was supposed to be taking care of him. She plunges into the underbelly of Toronto in a quest to find him, and an unending picaresque nightmare ensues.
But this isn’t called The Tracey Fragments for nothing, and the above summary fails to convey the actual experience of the film. Director Bruce McDonald breaks the screen up into fragments, and Tracey’s story unfolds as a kaleidoscope of multiple frames and shattered chronology. It’s a technique that won’t work for everyone, and that can be horribly misused, but here I found it both intense and exciting. In fact, it made some of the more familiar and/or hard to take/swallow aspects of the narrative itself much more palatable.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 21st, 2008
My mother was a big fan of The Untouchables. I think she really just had a crush on Robert Stack. Years later when Stack was hosting Unsolved Mysteries, I could swear that I heard her murmur a few
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 21st, 2008
There was some speculation from folks out there, myself included, that
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 20th, 2008
What is love worth? How much pain would you endure before you would murder someone you loved to end it? In The Killing Gene our serial killer seeks these answers, reducing it all down to an algebraic equation. The film is actually the American DVD release titles for the British film WAZ or W Δ Z depending on the source. This title refers to the killers equation which translates to roughly W Δ Z = COV. It’s a rather odd indy looking piece, filmed in
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 19th, 2008
Gary Gilmore is most known not for the people he killed so much as for the way that he died. As killers go, Gilmore wasn’t even a serial killer by definition. He was responsible for two deaths, both in the commission of a crime. We remember Gilmore mostly because he fought to be executed at a time the United States Supreme Court had stricken down our nation’s death penalty laws in a landmark decision, Furman vs. Georgia. Most people think that decision declared capital punishment as cruel and unusual. What it actually did was declare the procedures for assigning the death penalty as “fundamentally unfair”. At the time Gilmore was apprehended, death penalty laws had been rewritten to comply with the Supreme Court’s concerns and capital punishment was already well on its way to returning to the American justice landscape. States were being cautious and moving slowly. No one wanted to be that first test case so, while the penalty was back on the books, no state was yet willing to wade into the murky waters of actual executions. Then along came Gary Gilmore, who decided he wanted to be executed. His legal maneuverings and successful bid to be executed tolled an ominous sound on death rows across the country. Executions were back in form, and everybody knew who to blame: Gary Gilmore.
Posted in: 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. He comes across as a completely clueless idiot for the entire film. Of course, the rest of the cast is equally bad. The police department is represented by Timothy Oman as Captain Parker and John Marsden as the lead detective. If these guys are indicative of the way the investigation was handled, it’s no wonder the crime was never solved. They completely sleepwalk through the parts with about as much passion as if they were eating a cheese sandwich. Could they have found two more disinterested actors? The only spark to the film at all is a somewhat dim one in Frank Asarian, the potential “real” killer in the film, played by Kostas Sommer. He’s incredibly stiff and also lacks any life, but he provides some of the film’s miniscule tension moments. Finally, the entire cast suffered from what can only be an intentional exaggeration of the
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 1st, 2008
John Leguizamo needs his own kind of wing in some Movie Hall of Fame. I would not say it is a typical wing, but a varied and interesting one nevertheless. He’s done mainstream movies like Ice Age, Moulin Rouge, & the Happening. John has also found himself in roles you just don’t see everyday. He’s been a Clown (Spawn), a Drag Queen (To Wong Foo), and even a Mario Brother (You really think I would fail to mention that John was Luigi in Super Mario Bros?). In The Take, he has a different character to portray. It’s a serious role and requires him to make quite the transformation and bring home an award winning performance.
John plays Felix De La Pena. Felix is an armored car driver, has a wife named Marina (played by Rosie Perez) and has two kids named Rosey & Javy (played by Jessica Steinbaum & Taylor Gray). First detail of logic: Would it not be easier if Rosie’s character was called Rosey & Jessica could have been Marina? Then again, if it was up to me I would have called Rosie the Hispanic Betty Boop. Anyhow, Felix goes to work and while one of his buddies gets out of the car to grab lunch, Adell Baldwin (played by Tyrese Gibson) gets in the cab of the armored car and points a gun into Felix’s face.
Posted in: 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. You might even grab yourself a film festival award, which along with $5 will get you a coffee at Starbucks. Follow these quick and easy steps and pretty soon you’ll be the talk of the town…
