Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on March 10th, 2015
I’m starting to wonder if it is time we officially made a sub-genre for kidnapping films. It’s a storyline that has been played out for decades but continues to offer up some engaging and oftentimes heart-wrenching tales that for the most part have happy endings but that seems to be a far stretch from reality, though I doubt audiences are looking for these bleak realistic endings and mostly prefer the Hollywood ending where everyone is rescued in just the nick of time. When Prisoners came out, I had hopes that it would be a film that wouldn’t shy away from the harsh realities, and for the most part it succeeded, but I still felt it held back. Now we have Atom Egoyan throwing his hat into the murky subject matter. Let’s face it; kidnapping is a horror no parent wants to experience and would much rather not think about.
Matthew (Ryan Reynolds) is the unfortunate parent who in the moment of doing something as trivial as running into the shop to grab dinner for the family, his daughter is taken without so much as a trace of evidence. Not only does he have to face the guilt of losing his daughter while being only yards away from her, but we see how he is on the receiving end of blame from his wife Tina (Mireille Enos) and a suspect by the police. Sometimes films like to dangle the shadow of doubt that the parent could be involved with the disappearance. Though in this case where we know Matthew’s innocence, we are able to feel his frustration as all this time wasted while looking at him as a suspect and the real criminals are only slipping farther away.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on February 26th, 2015
Despite being a fan of just about everyone involved with Horrible Bosses, I was more than a little disappointed by the first film. It wasn’t awful or unwatchable by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt with a cast like Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis, it just should have been better. But the movie gods have spoken and decided that the first film performed well enough that it deserved a sequel. What worked for the first film was the idea behind finally having enough of your bosses and being pushed to the point where murder seems like a viable option. We’ve all had bosses at some point that pushed our buttons to the point that these thoughts may enter our daydreams, so a movie that takes it to the next level will of course have its appeal. Sadly, the sequel doesn’t have that appeal.
This time around Dale (Day), Kurt (Sudeikis), and Nick (Bateman) are working together to release a new shower product, and after the trio make an appearance on a morning news broadcast they get the call from an interested investor. Rex (Chris Pine) claims to see promise in their product, as does his father Bert (Christoph Waltz). The father and son duo end up scheming the trio out of their product, which results in them going $500,000 in debt. With their options limited, the trio decides the best way to avoid going into debt is to kidnap Rex and hold him for ransom. It doesn’t take much thought to realize how bad an idea this scheme is, but the film wouldn’t be much of a comedy if this were a good scheme to begin with.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 25th, 2015
"There's been some trouble with the women hereabouts...it's bad."
What exactly is a Western? That's the question that the cast and crew of The Homesman struggle with here. They appear to be divided on the subject, and the same sentiment will likely make this one a little harder to pigeonhole. That's not necessarily important except when it comes to marketing a film. An audience wants some kind of an idea what they're getting when they see it on the shelf of their local video store. Tommy Lee Jones wrote, directed and stared in this period piece, and he'd rather you not call it a Western. Others connected with the film are on board with the genre label. I guess I fall somewhere in the middle. Westerns often deal with cowboys and Indians. Well... there are some brief Indians here. They don't figure too prominently in the story, however. Other times the genre deals with gunslingers, bandits, or outlaws of one kind or another. Not so much in The Homesman. There are horses, and the cinematography certainly lends itself to the wide open spaces of the traditional Western. Usually Westerns take place in the period just after the Civil War to about the end of the 19th century. The Homesman takes place earlier, in 1854. One thing is for certain. It's a frontier movie with Western elements that, in the end, might not really matter. Let's call it a redemption story and leave it at that, shall we?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on February 5th, 2015
“You want me to fall back in love with you? How do I do that if I never stopped?”
Or, in my case, how do I do that if I never started? Nicholas Sparks’ fans love the author as passionately and unabashedly as the lead characters in his best-selling books fawn over each other. But even though I think The Notebook is the ideal sappy romantic drama, I’ve never been part of that club. In fact, his stories — and the movie adaptations they spawn — seem to be getting worse. And yet I was somewhat intrigued by The Best of Me…at least until the movie’s monumentally dopey conclusion, which likely inspired the release of this “Tears of Joy” mea culpa Edition.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on January 29th, 2015
“Love is an endless act of forgiveness.”
May Brennan is the best-selling author of a successful book centered around Arabic proverbs. She is played by Cherien Dabis, who is also the writer/director/producer of May in the Summer. Both Dabis and her fictional counterpart use short, pithy phrases like the one above as the basis for exploring familial and romantic relationships. But while May encounters rousing success with her (fictitious, unseen) book, Dabis' picturesque, breezy, ultimately disposable film is a little bit more of a mixed bag.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 28th, 2015
"Did that just happen?"
I have to confess that I entered The Judge expecting a different kind of film than I actually saw. After seeing the trailer, I was reminded of some of the classic courtroom dramas I'd seen over the years, from 12 Angry Men through ...And Justice For All. On the ride to the screening I found my mind was swimming with the "closing arguments" Al Pacino delivered in ...And Justice For All and was trying to image how Robert Downey, Jr. was going to try to top that. In the end, Downey didn't top that wonderful monologue. In the end, The Judge simply wasn't that kind of a movie after all.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on January 19th, 2015
What if Elvis Presley had an identical twin brother no one ever knew about? (It would certainly help explain all those Elvis sightings years after the King's death.) That's the kooky conceit at the center of The Identical. Unfortunately, rather than embracing the absurdity of its premise, the movie is an amateurish, uninspiring combination of “by-the-numbers musical biopic” and “painfully-earnest family drama.”
In the Depression-era South, financially-strapped parents William and Helen Hemsley (Brian Geraghty, Amanda Crew) struggle to raise their twin babies. William seeks guidance from tent revival preacher Reece Wade (Ray Liotta), who has been unsuccessfully trying to have a child of his own with wife Louise (Ashley Judd). The Hemsleys decide to let the Wades adopt one of their children, who is given the name Ryan.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 13th, 2015
"Since the beginning of civilization, dolls have been beloved by children, cherished by collectors and used in religious rites as conduits for good and evil."
The Conjuring was one of the best horror movies to come along in years. Why? Because it was a good scare with a story that didn't totally insult our intelligence or leave us scratching our heads too many times. The movie also dealt with its own red herring of sorts in a possessed doll kept under wraps by that film's hero couple. We're treated to a tease of her story before we move on to other matters. It was used more or less to establish the expertise of Ed (Wilson) and Lorraine (Farmiga) Warren, who would play a central part in the film. After a rather chilling tease and more than enough establishing shots of the doll in a case with all sorts of ominous warnings, we moved on to the story that film was setting out to tell. No question James Wan delivered yet another frightening film that did not really involve the Annabelle doll at all, as it turned out. For the next 90 minutes we forgot about Annabelle, but after a while we went home, and the creepy image of the doll wouldn't shake from our slumber. There was really only one thing for a studio to do, either to exorcise the distraction from our minds or mine a little coin in the doing. The result is the highly anticipated Annabelle.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 1st, 2015
What if two radio guys sat around and made up a movie on the air? In this case it actually wasn't radio guys, because they weren't broadcasters, but podcasters. I guess the fine distinction between broad and pod is that pod goes out to the world through the internet. It's kind of like Indie radio. Kevin Smith is a very indie guy and even calls his podcast a smodcast. Smith and his buddy, producer Scott Mosier, were doing their smodcast and talking about a post on GumTree.uk about roommate advertisements. It evolved into crazy talk about what might happen. The guy in one ad said he would like his roommate to wear a walrus suit from time to time.
Kevin Smith is synonymous with the advent of the modern independent film movement since his film Clerks opened 20 years ago. Smith has always been a clever writer and an interesting geek/nerd hero deeply immersed in all things lowbrow and counterculture. He runs a comic book store among other things and even had a reality series based in the store. He does seem to be going a bit crazy over the last few years, and part of that seems to be his dive into heavy marijuana use. I believe he wasn't always a heavy user. I don't mean to imply that marijuana makes you crazy, but in his case it led him down some strange and paranoid roads. Smith did a movie a few years ago called Red State, which was part of a rant against Hollywood. He was taking that movie on the road and releasing it by himself. With Tusk, Smith is going back to normal, but only in the broadest sense of that word.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on December 18th, 2014
“Everybody's sad or angry or lying or cheating.”
That seems to be the state of the four adult Altman children even before they are thrust back together following the death of the family patriarch. This Is Where I Leave You has all the makings of a great dysfunctional dramedy. It has a terrific cast and is based on the very popular book by Jonathan Tropper, who wrote the screenplay. Yet the movie comes up well short of delivering on its promise. Despite some strong acting, a handful of funny beats, and a passing similarity to another ensemble movie where characters who were formerly close are brought back together by a funeral, this movie is less Big Chill and more “Big Shrill.”
