Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on January 23rd, 2017
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: single gals looking for love — among other things — in the big city. On television, the trope dates back to the days of Laverne & Shirley and continues with more contemporary entries like Sex and the City and Girls. It’s an effective, timeless story hook that has gotten a funny, druggy, tremendously weird spin thanks to the queens kweens of Comedy Central’s Broad City.
The stars of the show here are Abbi and Ilana (co-creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer), a pair of uncommonly attached besties living and playing in NYC. (Except for Ep. 6/“Philadelphia”, which finds the pair visiting Abbi’s suburban childhood home in Wayne, Pennsylvania.) Season 3 kicks off with a bit of literal toilet humor, as we get an amusing split-screen montage of Abbi and Ilana in their respective bathrooms.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on January 19th, 2017
“My husband used to tell me I have an overactive imagination…”
The idea at the core of The Girl on the Train is equal parts provocative and relatable: a lonely commuter observes an attractive couple from a distance and imagines what their seemingly perfect lives must be like. Anyone who’s ever done any people-watching will recognize the appeal of inventing a backstory for a stranger, and the story is a healthy reminder that things are never quite what they seem from the outside. But despite a powerhouse lead performance, this Train is ultimately derailed by an unsatisfying mystery and a lack of flair that causes this potentially juicy story to lose steam as it chugs along.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on January 16th, 2017
It would seem as though Ben Affleck is finally starting to shed the stigma of doing bad films. He’s been on a roll since he took on the role of George Reeves in Hollywoodland and has also in the process become an accomplished director. When the trailer first dropped for The Accountant, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but as you look at the laundry list of talent that fills the cast, it quickly became a film I had my eye on. What is surprising is despite there being franchises that seem to cover the same territory i.e.: Jack Reacher and the Jason Bourne films, is there room for another lone-wolf killing machine film? Before going into this it was a question that bothered me; heck, I’m already burnt out of the Jason Bourne films, and with a new Jack Reacher film on the horizon, the saturation is noticeable. But thankfully, The Accountant doesn’t just come out swinging but exceeded all expectations and has raised the bar for this brand of action film.
Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is, as the title would lead you to believe, an accountant. He runs his own firm and is exceedingly good at what he does when it comes to solving accounting problems people may have. He’s exceptional at solving problems, and what makes this all the more impressive is he does all of this as a high-functioning autistic. This may be one of the first times I’ve seen a character with a disability on screen, but not once is it ever played as a way to sway sympathy; instead, it’s just another layer to this character. We see the everyday hell Wolff goes through, but we also see how far he’s come from his childhood after his mother gives up hope and abandons her family.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on January 11th, 2017
“I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore, and I don’t know how to get out.”
A TV show’s fifth season is around the time it starts to feel like you have to see things through to the bitter end. I mean, it seems downright irresponsible to ditch a series after five years of investing in its characters’ lives, no matter how flawed and frustrating they are. And there’s no doubt the self-absorbed millennials on HBO’s Girls are among the most flawed and frustrating people on TV; so I was delighted to find that the series produced one of its strongest seasons as it nears its conclusion.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on January 10th, 2017
In 1999 The Blair Witch Project was released, and it was a horror film that created a stir like I had never seen before. I remember going to Tampa Theatre to see it opening week. The line was wrapped around the building for the sold-out screening. Discussions were going on in the line about the film actually being real, some even talking about how they heard the bodies of the three filmmakers were never found. It’s this kind of mindset going into the film that made it such an impact as I walked out of that first showing. At the time I knew I had seen something unique, but I never would have expected it to spawn an entire style of genre filmmaking that would be copied over and over again. Now nearly two decades later, director Adam Wingard (You’re Next) attempts to inject new life in the found-footage genre and into the film franchise that started it all.
The film picks up years after the disappearance of the film students in the first film. James (James Allen McCune) has been looking for evidence since his sister first disappeared. A digital video has surfaced that may have more clues as to what happened to his missing sister. It’s this hope that takes James and his friends to the woods where is sister vanished and where the legend of the Blair Witch continues to flourish. Lisa (Callie Hernandez) makes plans to document the trip to the woods as they hope to acquire this new evidence, and she comes armed with an array of high-tech gadgets to document the journey.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on January 9th, 2017
There is something about a Rob Zombie film that will always be a draw, and it is always the realism that he brings to the screen. Whether it’s The Devil’s Rejects or his version of Halloween, he always presents it in a way that I feel is grounded in reality. Perhaps it’s also because I live in Florida, and there are some small towns that you don’t want to break down in at night for fear of crossing some crazed backwoods types. To put it out there, I was a fan of Rob Zombie before he was putting out movies, and I have all of his albums; he’s just a guy who does stuff that I really dig. That being said, I can be objective in saying his films have been a bit all over the place, but Lords of Salem was a piece of work that I simply loved, and I felt it showed a lot of growth from his previous films and worked well as a slow burn. Now he’s released 31 upon the masses, a Kickstarter film that was initially (if not mostly) financed by fans. Is it worth the investment? Well, it depends on what you were hoping for.
The film opens in a static shot with Doom-Head (Richard Brake) approaching the camera and unloading a menacing monologue. This is the kind of opening that should get any horror fan excited and anxious for the kind of violence that is about to be unleashed in the film, yet sadly the film never quite lives up to this scene. This doesn’t mean the film is bad; I just mean that the opening is just THAT good, and it just leaves you with anticipation to see so much more with this character.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on January 4th, 2017
“America is the only industrialized nation with a higher murder rate than countries at civil war.”
2016 might technically be in the rearview mirror, but it feels like last year left an indelible mark on the psyche of the United States. In addition to the most polarizing presidential election in a very long time, last year was marked by the deadliest shooting in U.S. history about an hour away from where I’m currently sitting, along with other highly-publicized instances of gun violence. So it feels like an appropriate time to revisit The Killing of America, a 1981 documentary that was never granted a commercial U.S. release after being deemed too exploitative.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on December 30th, 2016
It’s been just about four years since Savages (2012) hit the big screen. For me Savages was Oliver Stone simply having a blast, shooting an over-the-top action film fueled by sex, drugs, and violence. Now it seems Stone has stepped back into the paranoid, government-conspiracy form that he seems to be best known for with Snowden. Whether you view him as a traitor to the United States or a self-sacrificing lamb to expose the government and its illegal wiretapping, it’s a choice that is up to you going into this film. Personally, while I feel his intentions were good, still, he did betray his government and committed treason. What I had hoped with this film is that Oliver Stone would capture both sides of the coin, but as the title would suggest, Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is front and center on this ride, and that’s not my only problem here.
When we first meet Snowden, he’s locked away in a Hong Kong hotel room getting ready to give an interview to two journalists, Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewan McAskill (Tom Wilkinson) along with documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) to film the event. It’s this interview that sets up the rest of the film that is told mostly in flashback form. The dynamic of this opening sequence works so well simply because of the elevated bar of talent on the screen; it sets up for what one could only expect will be filled with snappy dialog exchanges as these figures discuss what Snowden is about to unleash to the world. Instead we get a whimper of what could have been.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on December 23rd, 2016
“There's a man comin', and he aims to bury you.”
That sort of threat — especially when it's made within the trigger-happy Western genre — usually refers to a wronged hero looking to rain vengeance upon some dastardly villain who wronged him in an extremely personal way. The only most interesting thing about Stagecoach: The Texas Jack Story is that our presumed hero is the one being hunted...and the “bad guy” has a legitimate gripe.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 21st, 2016
Clint Eastwood is 86 years old. He is also one of the best film directors working today. His latest film shows no signs of a man winding down his life, let alone his career. I obviously hinted that most other actors (or directors) his age have long ago died or checked into a nursing home. Eastwood looks lean and mean and still directs that way. Eastwood is interesting, as well, because he tends to pick projects that are outside the Hollywood studio corporate thinking. In other words, Eastwood is his own man and does pretty much anything he wants. His films as an actor and director have courted controversy way back to the days of Dirty Harry and A Fistful of Dollars. His films as a director and his personal political views are always full of contradictions that suggest a vibrant, searching mind. Sully is Eastwood’s latest film, starring Tom Hanks, and it is deceptively complex as well. On one level, Sully is a textbook depiction of a famous true life event.
On January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) piloted a US Airbus A320 from LaGuardia airport. Three minutes into the flight, both engines are unprecedentedly hit by a flock of Canada geese (which is the subject of a pretty good joke later in the film) and create 208 seconds of hell for Sullenberger and the other 154 human beings on the US Airways flight. The film starts with a bang, with Sullenberger struggling to control the plane under the worst possible circumstances. This is part of the nightmares that hound the rigorously professional pilot. The fact is that the world is full of people who do difficult and dangerous jobs, and piloting a giant passenger airliner is certainly one of them. But the film also pays tribute to hundreds of other first responders who have to rush to life-and-death emergencies every day.
