Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 28th, 2006
With all that’s been going on with Tom Cruise as of late, I found myself doubting the integrity of this picture. I was fearful that the happenings of Cruise’s personal life would somehow bring down this movie; the previous two films did set the bar pretty high. So how did the third installment add up, did it fall short of expectations, or did it deliver beyond what I expected?
MI:III doesn’t hesitate a minute to bring us suspense, the picture begins with Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) having Et...an Hunt and a woman (whom appears to mean a lot to him) captive. He means business; she is going to die unless Ethan can come up with something called the rabbit’s foot. The scene closes, and we roll back to the previous week when nothing is amiss.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 15th, 2006
There’s a bunch of people stuck in a bar in the middle of nowhere. Monsters want to eat them. What will they do? That about sums up Feast, a film that’s part comedy, part horror, and all around over the top. This is the winning project from season three of Project Greenlight, a contest and documentary series founded by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck back in 2000. What does that mean? Feast is a low-budget film helmed by a rookie director, based on an amateur script.
Rookie and amateur are often words associated with low quality, but this gore-fest is actually pretty good. This is obviously a film made by big fans of horror movies, as it embraces many of the conventions and clichés of the genre, sometimes twisting them around or turning them upside down. The result is a decent amount of uncertainty for the audience, which helps suck us into the tense and scary moments.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 12th, 2006
Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy tells the famous story based on the poem ‘The Iliad’ by poet Homer. The film recounts the struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans. The Trojan War has quickly begun after young and beautiful Helen (Diane Kruger) is seduced by Paris (Orlando Bloom) while he is on a peace mission to Sparta. Obviously Helen’s husband, Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) is annoyed by this as is Paris’ older, wiser brother Hector (Eric Bana). Paris eventually wins Helen’s heart and sneaks her away from her husba...d back to Troy. Here Helen is declared to be a queen.
Menelaus is naturally furious about this and demands that Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, take ships and men (1,000 ships and about 50,000 men) to bring her back. Here is where the fun begins as the Trojans refuse to give up their new queen. As history tells us the Greeks would lay siege to Troy for nearly ten years. Where poet Homer’s ‘The Iliad’ picks up is around the tenth and final year of the struggle.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 5th, 2006
Something must be drawing Michael Douglas to the upper-crust "man in peril" role. He's been stalked by a woman who likes to boil rabbits, sexually harassed by his sexy boss, and is currently being framed for the assassination of the President in The Sentinel. Douglas plays Peter Garrison, a Secret Service veteran who is also having an affair with the wife of the man he is sworn to protect, First Lady Ballentine (Kim Basinger, still looking good at 53). When Garrison is framed by the assassins (one of who... may be another Secret Service Agent), he must stay one step ahead of former protege Agent Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland, doing Jack Bauer as a SS agent) and rookie agent Jill Marin (an underused but gorgeous Eva Longoria), who are hot on his trail, believing he really is trying to kill the President.
The plot is lifted from dozens of other films and simply injected into different surroundings. Instead of a doctor and a one-armed man, it's a Secret Service agent and a plot to kill the President. Despite the lack of plot originality, director Clark Johnson (The Shield, The Wire) and the professional cast, especially Douglas and Sutherland, always keep things moving at an economical clip. The Sentinel never lingers on anything long enough for us to question it, and it hits all the right marks in its 108 minute running time. It even takes some time to show us the daily grind of a Secret Service agent, which adds to the film's authenticity.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 23rd, 2006
Synopsis
In the mid 90's, poachers are decimating the antelope population in the pristine lands of Kekexili. The locals have organized themselves to fight back, and now one of their patrolmen has been murdered by the poachers. Ga Yu, a journalist from Beijing, arrives to cover the story. Initially rejected by the leader of the mountain patrol, Ga Yu is taken in by the group when he suggests his coverage might help turn the area into a wilderness preserve. A long, grueling, dangerous manhunt ensues.>
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 29th, 2006
While V For Vendetta certainly met with some backlash when it was released in theaters earlier this year, having now seen the film myself, I am shocked that it didn't meet with even more opposition; especially from the White House. Of course, if the White House had come out against the film, it would not only have spurred greater ticket sales, but it also would have placed the government in the position of the film's villain. To speak out against this film would be to be to speak out against basic American values.
Set in the near future, this film tells the story of V, a terrorist that rallies against an unjust government. He is something of a modern-day Che Guevara, except he bases himself on a 17th century activist named Guy Fawkes, who was foiled in an attempt to destroy the English Parliament. Among other acts of terror, V plans to succeed where Fawkes failed.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 27th, 2006
Not being a big fan of Black Hawk Down, I can't really tell you how many releases of the feature this makes from Sony. I know it's a title, which has seen at least two prior offerings. There is nothing new here to recommend the extended cut over the previous three-disc monster edition; however, it may be the way to go if you've yet to add this Ridley Scott war film to your collection. I'll be the first to admit that Scott does some of his finest work as director in this gritty combat picture; but his style is ...lso the reason why I feel Black Hawk Down fails to deliver, and pack the same emotional punch of a Saving Private Ryan or We Were Soldiers. Most of the young stars involved in this film, and in the grisly fighting, stay masked under a thick layer of dirt and grime throughout the 152-minute running time. While that contributes largely to the chaotic and confusing authenticity during battle scenes, it hinders the audience from getting attached to any of the characters.
I know character development needn't be sacrificed on the altar of battle realism; yet that's exactly what happens in Black Hawk Down. It's the kind of film, which needs Mark Bowden's book on which it was based to fill in the gaps left by the dramatization. The contemporary war efforts mentioned above are proof this sacrifice is an unnecessary one. Still, as disorienting as the film is, you can tell Scott is a seasoned director, who knows his way around a camera. And who knows? Perhaps his style creates some of the most realistic battle scenes known to film. And if this is all he wanted to accomplish, then Scott's film succeeds. But I can't imagine a director actively indifferent towards how his audience feels about the characters. And if this assumption rings true in Scott's case, then he can't look back on Black Hawk Down pleased with how it all turned out.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 23rd, 2006
Keanu Reeves really really wants to break out of his pigeonholed role as the charismatic good guy in an action film, but sometimes he just can't help himself, and takes the easy paycheck (Chain Reaction may be a good indication of that). But in the action roles he's noted for, both as Neo in The Matrix trilogy and as John Constantine in Constantine, he's got the "protagonist with an internal conflict" down pat, that's for sure.
Written by Kevin Brodbin (who came up with the initial story) and directed by Francis Lawrence, who was previously well-reputed as a music video director (think Tarsem or David Fincher maybe), Reeves plays Constantine as a man with a conflict. While others may think that he has a gift in exorcising and deporting demons, he sees it as a burden, a duty he thinks he should get into heaven for. With the help of a grizzled priest (Pruitt Taylor Vince, Nobody's Fool) and an aspiring apprentice (Shia LaBeouf, IMDB), he plods along through the days and nights, doing his duty while battling an aggressive form of lung cancer which he doesn't make any better by chain-smoking.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 15th, 2006
The thing that makes the death of Bruce Lee an even larger tragedy is that he virtually set back the kung-fu/karate genre from gaining mainstream recognition by a couple of decades. Set back may not even be the proper word for it, as he would have become a larger than life action star whose dreams were bigger than most anyone had anticipated.
In the case of Enter the Dragon, the film was designed to be Lee's crossover attempt into American films, and it's one worthy of his abilities. Bruce (or in this case, Lee) lives at a temple and is invited to a private island for a martial arts tournament where a man named Han (Kien Shih, Once Upon a Time in China) runs the tournament and possibly some illegal operations. His henchman is Oharra (Chuck Norris protégé Robert Wall, Game of Death), who might have been responsible for the death of his sister. Some of the more colorful characters in the tournament are Roper (John Saxon, From Dusk Till Dawn) and Williams (Jim Kelly, Black Belt Jones), friends from America that are also looking to gain the top prize. Lee isn't there to win the tournament, but to try to expose Han's dealings.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 4th, 2006
The career transformation that Clint Eastwood has endured over the last several generations can be called nothing short of extraordinary. After all, we are talking about a guy who made a steady name for himself in action films of the late '60s and '70s, first appearing in the spaghetti western films of Sergio Leone, then moving onto the Dirty Harry films of director Don Siegel, before moving on again to more of a directing role. Some of his works were hits and others were plain misses.
Then you have the case of Unforgiven a script that, admittedly he hung onto for years as a bit of a security blanket. In case of career drought, break glass, so to speak. The film helped vault Eastwood into the upper echelon of American directors while simultaneously providing a fitting closure to an earlier level of his stardom. With the help of similar top-shelf acting talent in key supporting roles, Unforgiven also perhaps did something that few other films have failed to do, which was to give a reflective farewell to a treasured genre of film.
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