Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on March 16th, 2012
Sometimes you just know. As a movie reviewer, I always strive for an open mind. I work for the idea that even if the cover screams snorefest or if the movie has a star I can absolutely not stand, perhaps just perhaps there is a nugget of cinema goodness underneath. Then I received Tooth Fairy 2 on Blu-Ray. After I screamed at the heaven’s above and drank myself into a deep coma, I decided that an open mind was a terrible thing to waste.
We open up to the Boardwalk Bowl and apparently they run a weekly contest where some lucky guy or gal could bowl for the chance to win a new Camaro. Here at a bowling alley, I was expecting a Ford F150, but I digress. Larry Guthrie (played by Larry the Cable Guy) ogles the car but his girlfriend Brooke (played by Erin Beute) reminds him of her niece’s birthday party. BTW, for those scoring at home, Larry has played Larry quite a few times in his acting life.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on March 14th, 2012
“You already started reading the evil words, didn't you? Then could you pass me my blood mop? I'm gonna need it later.”
Somehow I was never aware of Todd & The Book Of Pure Evil: The Complete First Season until I received the DVDs to review. Based on the 2003 short film of the same name, Todd & The Book Of Pure Evil debuted on Canada's Space Channel in September of 2010 and was picked up for broadcast in the United States by FearNet, which started showing the series in August of 2011.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 13th, 2012
A tragic accident after an uncannily choreographed dance party in the country leaves a carload of teens dead, and their hometown vows to ban all public displays of dancing and loud music. Big City hunk Ren MacCormack arrives in town to challenge this outlawing of music and dance by...mostly dancing to music.
This is a modern update of the 1984 hit film of the same name that starred Kevin Bacon in the role of Ren. Young actor Kenny Wormald steps into these dancing shoes and does a decent job being a youth who charms us through his rebellion. His look is much more James Dean-ish than Bacon's version, but still an acceptable doppelganger of the original Ren.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on March 13th, 2012
I don't think I'm breaking any news when I say that director Paul W.S. Anderson's latest action spectacle, an update of Alexandre Dumas' classic The Three Musketeers, is junk. So far, the director has specialized in taking established properties — including the Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat videogames, as well as the Alien and Predator franchises — and re-working them to fit his own shallow, highly-stylized, quick-cutting sensibilities. The result is basically the cinematic equivalent of junk food: people know those Resident Evil movies are bad, but they just can't stop consuming them.
That's why I was mildly shocked when this latest adaptation turned out to be surprisingly and sneakily faithful...well, except for the part where Da Vinci's Flying War Machine becomes a significant plot point. (This was a guy, after all, who didn't include a single character from the Resident Evil game in the first movie!)
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on March 12th, 2012
"What must it be like to be the most famous woman on Earth?"
In My Week with Marilyn, one character relays this very question — apparently asked recently by Queen Elizabeth II — to Marilyn Monroe herself. The main problem with this movie is that it is less interested in exploring that query with a great amount of depth, and more interested in answering the considerably less provocative question, "What is it like to hang out with someone super famous?" (That's what Entourage was for.)
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on March 12th, 2012
I like to think I know more than a little bit about sports. I wake up to Mike and Mike in the Morning, drive to work while listening to The Dan Patrick Show and rush home to catch Pardon the Interruption. I've played organized football, baseball, basketball and soccer throughout my life, and I always make the playoffs in my fantasy football leagues. (Let's skip the part where I've never actually won.) Unfortunately, I have somewhat of a blind spot for sports that are more popular outside the United States. As a result, I know very little about Formula One racing and I knew absolutely nothing about Brazilian F1 champion Ayrton Senna until I watched the engrossing and spectacularly thrilling documentary about his life.
Senna eschews many of the conventions of documentary filmmaking, most notably the use of talking head interviews. (We do get sporadic voice-overs from key players, including Senna himself.) Instead, director Asif Kapadia tells Senna's story entirely through an awe-inspiring collection of archival footage that chronicles both his professional triumphs and failures, as well as his personal life and the massive impact he had on his home country. There are even some relatively private, truly gripping moments involving the dynamics of a racing team and the behind-the-scenes politics of Formula One, a topic that I guarantee I wouldn't have found even mildly interesting in almost any other context.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on March 9th, 2012
“It has skin like silverfish.”
After suffering through the vast majority of low-budget indie horror films whose only motivation seems to be to make a quick buck on distribution deals, it is truly a delight when you stumble on to something wonderful like writer/director Mike Flanagan’s Absentia. Building on a cast of unknowns, with the exception of an incredibly creepy cameo by genre fave Doug Jones, Flanagan weaves a web of creepy, atmospheric horror in this effective low-budget chiller.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 9th, 2012
It has not been over 40 years since the inception of the band Queen, but it and its members Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon, continue to be one of the most popular bands in the world, despite losing lead singer Mercury to AIDS some 20-odd years ago and not creating new material since then. This documentary tells their story in two episodes, spanning nearly 4 hours.
Narrated mostly through a small group of new and old interviews with the band and their friends, both episodes chronicle the band album by album. Fans will already know the history of each album inside and out, but it is still engaging to see their creative energies bouncing off of each other, and drawing in thousands of fans at each concert.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 8th, 2012
An infant chimp is taken out of his natural environment to be raised like a human by a family of curious, rich folk. Upon learning that this chimp, now named Nim, is capable of learning sign language, this family turns to professional educators to research and experiment with this concept further.
I promise to give praise to the filmmakers handling adept handling of their craft later in my review, but I cannot discuss the contents of this film without injecting my own personal opinion because this film, much to it's credit, stirred a very visceral reaction from me. The family that first adopted (adopted being an extremely delicate term, as many could easily argue that “nabbed” or “stole” would suite their actions better) Nim were a wealthy family, said wealth stemming partly from the father's success as a poet. They named him Nim Chimpsky (as a parody of Noam Chomsky, who theorized that language is inherit only in humans, and Nim was their attempt to disprove said thesis). This family dressed Nim in children's clothes and eventually tried communicating with it on a person to person level using American sign language. This experiment, albeit spurred some interesting results once true experts from Columbia University became involved, was born out of ignorance and arrogance. This family did what they did because they had the financial means to offer themselves the opportunity, without considering the unnaturalness of it. By unnatural I don't mean that their antithesis to Chomsky's idea is wrong or implausible. What I mean is the manner by which this animal was taken out of its mother (granted, not born in the wild but a facility) and treated like a human.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 8th, 2012
A group of high school girls heads off into the woods to make a movie for their film club. What only the two organizers know is that they are heading for the site of a previous film club’s massacre. Their shoot descended into madness, with a participant in a deigan mask killing all the others, and the whole thing was recorded on tape. It isn’t long after the girls arrive that things start to go wrong, and it seems that history might be repeating itself.
I do like the footage we see of the earlier film – it has a genuinely disturbing quality, and when it arrives, it raises one’s hopes that the perhaps the terminally pedestrian set-up is going to give way to something livelier. No such luck. Much in the way of squabbling, wandering around on one’s own, and off-screen murders transpires. The characters are caricatures when they can be distinguished at all, the cinematography is dishwater dull, and the plot, by the end, makes little sense, though it is very unlikely that most viewers will care one way or the other by then.
