Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on July 10th, 2013
Oregon may have been the 33rd state to join our union — and Portland may be its most populous city — but Portlandia is a (dog-dressing, raw milk-drinking, Seattle-hating) state of mind. And after three seasons of lovingly mocking upper middle class indulgence along with the denizens of the Pacific Northwest, Portlandia — created by stars Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein and director Jonathan Krisel — feels more like a fully-realized destination than ever.
Armisen and Brownstein still star in almost every sketch, and the versatile duo has created a solid stable of recurring oddballs to anchor the show. The Portlandia “Winter Special” — which aired a few weeks before the season 3 premiere on IFC — features some of their most popular creations: feminist bookstore owners Toni and Candace try to get Candace’s son to accept (another) vagina pillow, while a Peter and Nance sketch finds ineffectual Peter deciding to cut pasta from his diet to hilariously disastrous results.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on September 30th, 2012
Oregon may have been the 33rd state to join our union — and Portland may be its most populous city — but Portlandia is a state of mind. And according to the surreal IFC sketch series created by stars Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein and director Jonathan Krisel, that state of mind is happily stuck in the simpler time represented by the '90s.
Armisen and Brownstein co-star in almost every sketch, and each segment lasts no more than five minutes. That shrewdly gives the audience multiple opportunities to laugh within one episode even if a particular concept isn’t working or is too bizarre. (One especially painful skit consisted of Armisen and Brownstein repeatedly calling out “Sacagawea!" Thankfully, it was over relatively quickly.)
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on March 31st, 2012
I think most of us can agree that being buried alive would be a horrible way to go. Several movies — Kill Bill: Vol. 2, The Vanishing (not the soft American remake) and, of course, Buried — have exploited that terror to varying degrees of success. Though the action in A Lonely Place to Die centers around a girl found buried in the Scottish Highlands, the camera frequently pulls way back to show us the desolate beauty (and danger) of the mountainous setting. I really wish director Julian Gilbey had kept the action on those mountains.
A group of climbers, led by Melissa George (The Amityville Horror, TV's Alias), discover an Eastern European girl named Anna buried in an underground chamber. Anna is unable to explain what happened because she can't speak English, but the group correctly surmises that the girl was kidnapped and being kept alive by the breathing pipe sticking out of the ground. Eventually, the group has to deal with the vicious pair of kidnappers, as well as the mercenaries hired by the girl's war criminal father to get her back.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Archive Authors on March 19th, 2012
Oh, Peter Facinelli, how I hope that this movie that just landed in my lap does NOT feature you with glitter thrown all over your body. This movie is called Loosies, and no not as in loose like Kristen Stewart. I am hoping that the tag line, “Love is not a crime”, does not mean complete suckage, but from the description on the back... I am not hoping for much. I loathe chick flicks, and this reeks of one. But on we go with an open mind and an open beer (Okay, okay, so it's a root beer! Geez!)!
Holy wow! The music that rolls during the menu screen is absolutely awful. This can not be a good sign. Woosa! This is ok with me, Bobby (Peter Facinelli) and Lucy (Jamie Alexander) are in bed. She is passed out after a romp in the hay. Next, we see him walking around a red room. He gets dressed, writes his number on a bunch of pieces of paper and walks out. He's walking around town pick pocketing people. Oh that is a lovely job. Jax (Vincent Gallo) is doing some whacked form of martial arts?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on September 26th, 2011
The Durr household often enjoys a good vampire flic to warm the candlelight around the old HDTV (hey, shouldn't I be writing this for the 31 days of October delight?). The taste of blood, the price of your soul, nothing can prepare you for the demons that are right outside your door. Sure, they can promise you sexual pleasure and immortality but that blood is really hard to get out of your clothes. This evening we explore the title We Are the Night featuring four ghoulish women on the cover. Will they sate our palette for blood or perhaps share with us grooming tips? Let's find out.
We open up to a plane on auto-pilot that is witness to a horrifying display of murder and blood letting. Three girls, Louise, Charlotte, and Nora (played by Nina Hoss, Jennifer Ulrich, and Anna Fischer respectively) survey the damage. Unfortunately, none of them really know how to fly a plane, but that's what they get for killing the pilot. They get ready for their departure but Louise hears one more voice from the back of the cabin. She finds a stewardess and looks deep into her eyes before snapping her neck. The three women soon depart for the ground below.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on September 26th, 2011
Romantic comedies are the bane of most male's movie watching lives. Imagine everything that turns your stomach into sour grapes. A handsome leading guy, a wining leading lady and more holes in the plot than that one pair of underwear that you just can't get rid of. Well, despite the court restraining orders, despite the risk of self-mutilation, I review a harrowing title today named simply Love, Wedding, Marriage. May the gods help us through this one.
Love, it is a many splendid thing that causes men to act like complete idiots. Enter, Charlie (played by Kellan Lutz) who is on camera and trips over his tongue a bunch to proclaim his love to the woman of his life. Who is this woman you ask, well that would be Ava (played by Mandy Moore). We are soon treated to the wedding where Ava's father Bradley (played by James Brolin) leads her down the aisle while Bradley's wife, Betty (played by Jane Seymour) looks on.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 14th, 2011
This documentary tracks a year in the life of Joan Rivers. We begin at a relatively low ebb in her career, with her finding it difficult to land desirable gigs. She throws herself into the production of an autobiographical play that debuts in Edinburgh, and her hope is that the London reception will be glowing enough to provide enough momentum for a Stateside production. Meanwhile, she and daughter Melissa are contestants on Celebrity Apprentice. As the film follows the ups and downs of these efforts (concentrating particularly on the play), Rivers opens up about her life and career.
This is a very smart, enormously entertaining, and very funny documentary. There is plenty of footage of Rivers in performance from all stages of her career. For those whose exposure to her has been limited to snippets of red carpet interviews and jokes about her plastic surgery (and I am one of those benighted souls), this film will be a revelation. There's a reason why this woman became famous in the first place – she is one ferocious stand-up comic, and as good as the footage here is, it leaves the viewer hoping for more. That's a good thing. There are, though, one or two less felicitous gaps in an otherwise very revealing doc, most notably what, precisely, was behind the erratic behavior and unexplained disappearances by Rivers' long-term manager. But this is a trivial quibble. The film is a piece of work indeed: sterling work by directors Ricki Stern and Anni Sunderberg, and brave work by Rivers.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on January 2nd, 2011
8 corporate hopefuls gather at a mysterious location and are instructed to take one final exam as a final test to see which one will walk away with a prestigious job at a major company. The trouble is their exam papers are blank, and it would seem that there is not even a question to answer. For 80 minutes each must solve the puzzle without being disqualified by breaking one of the few rules, all of which double as a riddle/clue to solving the exam question and answer.
There are no set changes, no flashbacks to see more about the character's past, not a single thing that takes us outside of the tiny exam room. As our young hopefuls are slowly eliminated from the competition, the story becomes all the more engaging. The cryptic, “think WAY outside the box” puzzle solving (along with an interesting science fiction angle to the story that is revealed about midway through) makes this film resemble a film like Cube more than 12 Angry Men. Normally a film like this would hinge on the characters, but the riddles and their manner of deducing then trying to solve them is ample for maintaining the audience's interest. Like how the setting was far more interesting than the characters in Cube, the riddles are more interesting than who is trying to solve them.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 23rd, 2010
In Macao, a trio of gunmen butcher a family. Only the mother survives (barely), and her father (aging French rocker Johnny Hallyday, looking as hardboiled and grotesque as Mickey Rourke), a restaurateur who knows altogether too much about how to get by in the violent underworld, comes to town and sets out on a mission of vengeance. He hires a trio of hit men, and works with them in tracking down his enemies. They have to do so quickly, though, because Hallyday has been shot before, and the bullet lodged in his brain is gradually stealing his memory away. He wants his revenge while he can still remember why it is necessary.
Johnnie To's crime thriller is as stylized as anything John Woo did in his prime, and shows, post-Woo, that there are still new ways of choreographing violent shoot-outs. A massive showdown in a junkyard is a set-piece of such visual beauty as to be worth the price of admission in and of itself. The mix of gangster film, revenge saga, Memento, and fable will understandably be a bit rich for some palates, but taken in the right spirit, this is intense, deliriously excessive entertainment.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on September 16th, 2010
Manchuria, the 1930s. The Japanese army has just acquired a treasure map, and are transporting it across the desert wastes by train. But the man who sold the map wants it back, and engages a snappily dressed killer (Byung-hun Lee) to steal it back. He is, of course, the Bad. He stages a spectacular (and spectacularly violent) train robbery. As fate would have it, at precisely the same moment, the Weird (Kang-ho Song) is also robbing the train, and the Good, in the form of a bounty hunter (Woo-sung Jung) is on board, too. The Weird makes off with the map, and what follows is a series of chases as the various factions scramble to get that map.
Director Ji-woon Kim's tribute to Serio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly follows its model's characterization, with the leads' cold-eyed killer, wacky scoundrel and cold-eyed hero clearly standing in for Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood, only much prettier. The financial motivation and the setting of a country in chaos is similar, too. But while the film was a huge hit in Korea (outgrossing, it seems, the likes of The Dark Knight), it lacks the heart and brilliance of Leone's film. There are some wonderful moments during the train robbery and other set pieces, but the film gets draggy in between. The tone is a little uneven, too – the intent seems to be entertaining, cartoonish violence, but the dismissive ways in which women are killed smacks rather uncomfortably of genuine misogyny. There's a lot of visual pleasure to had here, but to ultimately mixed effect.
![Love Wedding Marriage [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/love-wedding-marriage-blu-ray-large.jpg)
![The Good, the Bad, the Weird [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/the-good-the-bad-the-weird-blu-r-large.jpg)
