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.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Archive Authors on March 7th, 2012
Oh for the love of waffles. Here we go with another simple disc review. This time for a movie called Bounty Hunters. The fact that it has Trish Stratus in it, is just asking for awfulness. I was kinda of surprised that Michael didn't take this one seeing as it has a female wrestler in it. But hell, this ought to be easy right? Then I put in the DVD, and I am started with some very awful previews (this is not looking good). Somehow, I think those will end up in my husband's review pile. Hopefully, not mine. Well the load screen is here, let's jump in shall we?!
Movie starts out with a gun to Jules' (Trish Stratus) head. In a school girl costume?! Seriously? Dude, who we later learn is Mario Antonio (Enrico DiFede), tries to take a bag full of money. Whoops, we don’t wanna start there! 10 hours earlier! Jules and Chase (Boomer Phillips) are working out in a gym. She is in FULL makeup. Shenanigans. Chase sounds like he is trying to be Ryan Reynolds and Dane Cook meshed together, but is failing hardcore style. They tell a guy working out in the gym that they are going to take him in. He says “no” and here starts a fight. Jules starts beating him up. Finally, after a while, she gets him down.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on March 5th, 2012
“Exactly, you're a kid. So go and be a kid... go and, I don't know, go ahead and steal me something.”
The Tribe is a New Zealand/British post-apocalyptic, young adult soap opera, beloved around the world. So I had to put on my young adult glasses and watch it through those. In the near future, an unknown virus wiped out all the adults on Earth. Left to raise themselves, the kids form tribes in a Lord of the Flies type society. Now, being that the average viewer is probably between 12 – 17 years old, it is a very mild Lord of the Flies society.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on March 5th, 2012
Isn't it odd how movies with similar story lines tend to get released around the same time? For example, no one has gotten the urge to release another major motion picture with a volcano as its main antagonist since the Dante's Peak/Volcano Battle of 1997. (Though that might have more to do with the fact that, my slight soft spot for Dante's Peak notwithstanding, both those movies are terrible.) We've been treated to the Great Deep Impact/Armageddon Debate, dueling Truman Capote biopics and the upcoming Snow White Smackdown of 2012. In that same spirit, I'd like to unofficially — and belatedly — declare 2011 as the Year of Has Anyone Seen My Keys?
I'm assuming you've, at least, heard of Best Picture nominees Hugo — where the young protagonist needs a heart-shaped key to finish a project he and his late father started — and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which pulls somewhat of a reverse-Hugo by giving its young protagonist a key, courtesy of his own late father, but no lock. I'm also assuming, unless you have kids, you probably haven't heard of Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on March 4th, 2012
Most people that regularly read my work can probably see my love for the Transformers. We are not talking about the movies either (the first one was decent, the rest were abominations), but instead it is the cartoons that I enjoy so much. Generation One, Beast Wars, Cybertron all hold a special place in my heart. So, when my webmaster mentioned he had season one of Transformers Prime on Blu-ray for me, I think I literally jumped through the ceiling in anticipation. Let us take a look.
Before we begin, I must make mention that this Limited Edition Set includes a full length graphic novel (in digest size) that acts as a prequel to the show. It centers around two main Autobot characters, Arcee and Cliffjumper who start out on the planet of Cybertron but find their way to a strange planet thanks to Spacebridge technology. The main antagonist is Starscream and the story is actually really good. Recommended reading before one even throws in the first disc.
