Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 4th, 2014
"1968, I was twelve years old. A lot happened that year. Dennis McLain won 31 games, The Mod Squad hit the air, and I graduated from Hillcrest Elementary and entered junior high school...but we'll get to that. There's no pretty way to put this: I grew up in the suburbs. I guess most people think of the suburb as a place with all the disadvantages of the city, and none of the advantages of the country, and vice versa. But, in a way, those really were the wonder years for us there in the suburbs. It was kind of a golden age for kids."
With all of the television I've watched over the decades, it's more than a little surprising to me that I missed out on The Wonder Years.
Posted in: The Reel World by J C on November 1st, 2014
A jittery, strikingly blue eye is shown in extreme close-up. It belongs to a woman named Christine, who finds herself naked in bed with a strange man’s arm draped around her waist. She stumbles to a nearby bathroom, where she finds clues about her identity taped to a wall. The man appears shortly after and introduces himself as Christine’s husband. It’s an effective little opening that succeeds in making the viewer feel as disoriented as Christine. The problem with Before I Go To Sleep is that — even as the truth is unpacked — the disorientation turns into disengagement and (worst of all) disinterest. In other words, this is a thriller that isn’t particularly thrilling.
Posted in: Super Round-Up by Gino Sassani on October 31st, 2014
"I met him fifteen years ago; I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience, no understanding; and even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil."
AnchorBay and Scream Factory have tapped into that pure evil. It's the collection we've waited years to see.
Posted in: The Reel World by Brent Lorentson on October 31st, 2014
“On TV it looks so real.”
When I first walked out from the theater after watching Nightcrawler, the thing that stuck with me the most is how great Jake Gyllenhaal was in this film. This isn’t the first performance he’s caught my attention in; he’s an actor who pretty much any time I see him in a film he’s one of the most memorable aspects of the film.
Posted in: The Reel World by Archive Authors on October 31st, 2014
Whiplash has gotten so many raves that I want to make sure I address the things that are bad as well as the things that are good about the film. First thing I will say is that the movie is implausible, and I had a hard time to totally buy into it for different reasons. The film is about a young jazz drummer at a prestigious music academy who gets to play in the band of the top instructor at the school. It becomes apparent early on that the instructor is crazy. He browbeats and actually beats his students into compliance without a hint of mercy.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Brent Lorentson on October 31st, 2014
Just because an actor shares the same last name of their more popular sibling, the talent doesn’t necessarily carry over as well. In the case of The Reckoning, the Australian thriller has two siblings with much more marketable star power. Jonathan LaPaglia comes into The Reckoning and ripping a few pages from his brother’s acting book in playing a detective whose partner is the victim of a heinous act of “random” violence. Also joining the film with famous siblings is Luke Hemsworth, whose brothers Liam and Chris Americans may be more familiar with. Does the hereditary star power help this little Aussie film, or does it flounder down under?
Posted in: Podcasts by Gino Sassani on October 30th, 2014
Free Fall just out on Blu-ray/DVD from Anchor Bay might be Malek Akkad's first feature film as a director. That doesn't mean he's exactly new to the business. You could say he was born to it. He's been officially part of the Halloween franchise since The Curse Of Michael Myers (Halloween VI). His father was along for the ride from the beginning. I got to talk to Malek about both Free Fall and Halloween. I was a bit envious to hear him talk about "running around the set of Halloween as a child". There's even some news on the next chapter to be found here. If you want to hear all of that, just bang it here to sit in on my chat with Malek Akkad.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by John Delia on October 30th, 2014
Well-acted and directed, a surprisingly good action flick Plastic has hit the home video market on DVD. The movie offers its own interpretation of a several million dollar diamond heist that actually took place by a group of men in 1997. The original robbery spanned from Manchester, England to Los Angeles, CA and involving the prestigious Bejon Jewelers on Rodeo Drive. This film’s story adds a little comedy with their creative crime caper and that’s a good thing because if not, it would have been just be another heist movie.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on October 30th, 2014
“Everyone in this story is guilty of something.”
With the exception of bland do-gooder/ dream girl Nina Pennington (Selena Gomez), all of the characters in Behaving Badly seem desperate to live up to — or rather down to — the movie’s title. The plot revolves around strippers, nuns, dead Latin teachers, and Lithuanian mobsters, so it’s clear the filmmakers were going for mindless raunch. But instead of a gleefully debauched 97 minutes, we get “comedy” that lacks wit and laughs that feel totally uninspired.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on October 29th, 2014
As the spookiest holiday of the year draws closer, we're all probably a little more sensitive to anything that goes bump in the night. Almost every creature associated with Halloween is meant to terrify us, but what if some of those horrific-looking monsters were actually tasked with watching over us? In the Japanese animated drama A Letter to Momo, a young girl encounters a trio of mischievous spirits that only she can see and hear. The monster shenanigans, however, were merely one aspect in what turned out to be one of the more affecting family films I've seen this year.
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