Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Brent Lorentson on March 14th, 2012
Through the course of time Hollywood has given us a fair share of great sports films. There are even a few baseball films out there I’m sure are on several people’s all time favorite lists. Personally I’m a fan of The Sandlot, and I recently discovered Eight Men Out. I wouldn’t say I’m a baseball fan, and to be honest I haven’t watched an entire game in years, but yet I do love a good baseball movie. I mention this only because after watching Screwball, I seriously will be content never to watch a sports comedy again after the bad taste this left in my mouth.
This mockumentary follows the rise and fall of the great waffle ball player Ted Whitfield. His rise was during the baseball strike in ’94 and as fans turned to waffle ball to fill their baseball void, Whitfield sets out to break the homerun record. Over the course of the film we see Whitfield get involved with enhancement drugs, heavy drinking, and even dabbling into porn. A high point of the film involves Whitfield passing on his cup to his loyal team member Willie Hamilton after winning a big game. Sadly the day after Whitfield smashes the homerun record he is arrested for a DUI on a riding mower, and things just crumble from there. Once a blood test is done and it is discovered Whitfield took enhancement drugs, he is banned from the league for life.
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: No Huddle Reviews by Archive Authors on March 13th, 2012
By Natasha Samreny
"I'm going now. I'm going to smash up the trains. Bye bye, Mummy."
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: The Reel World by M. W. Phillips on March 9th, 2012
“When I saw you, I believed it was a sign... that something new can come into this world.”
John Carter first appeared in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom magazine serial nearly a century ago in 1912. The science fiction pioneering Carter stories captured the imagination of masses and inspired countless authors and directors. For example, George Lucas himself has stated there would be no Star Wars without John Carter of Mars. It took nearly a century to get it to screen and in time countless others have mined the series for inspiration. The result is a massive “been there done that” experience.
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: No Huddle Reviews by Brent Lorentson on March 9th, 2012
The Toxic Avenger is the film most film fans would be familiar with, but Troma has made its name in putting out over-the-top gory exploitation cinema. KILL belongs right up there with the best of the worst that Troma is known for. Unfortunately for us it takes nearly an hour to get to the juicy gore-soaked goodness.
When six strangers wake up in a mysterious house, they have to work together to start putting together the pieces as to how they got there and most importantly why. The set up is nothing unique but certainly can be a fun one. Instead of fun or creepy, we get bad dialog and even worse acting as the characters stumble along room to room trying to find a way out. It doesn’t take long for the six strangers to learn they are being watched as they find several surveillance cameras throughout the house.
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.
