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Posts Tagged ‘Riley Smith’

Make It Happen

Tuesday, December 21st, 2021

As you know, I sometimes enjoy the dance movies. So when I was preparing my review for KATE a while back and realized there was one starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, I knew I had to see it.

It’s called MAKE IT HAPPEN and it’s about a young lady who tries to make it happen. It came out in 2008, when Winstead had just done DEATH PROOF and LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD and was about to do SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD. She plays Lauryn Kirk, a small town Indiana dancer who dreams of going to a prestigious dance school in Chicago. It’s the standard “Ever since Mom and Dad died…” situation: her and her older brother Joel (John Reardon, WHITE CHICKS, FALLEN, later “Young Kevin Flynn / Clu [body double]” in TRON LEGACY) only had each other and are very close and he’s overly protective of her. They run their dad’s garage, with her working as bookkeeper, but she’s going to Chicago to audition for the school, and he’s in denial that she might really be leaving.

Of course, the auditions are hard, and she fails to impress the openly snobbish admissions guy (Gordon Tanner, HOME ALONE: THE HOLIDAY HEIST). To be fair, her standard hip hop moves don’t seem impressive, but he really should be more friendly when giving her the terrible advice to be “softer, more sensual and feminine.” (read the rest of this shit…)

Gallowwalkers

Thursday, October 24th, 2013

tn_gallowwalkersThis has been a source of mystery for a couple years now, the weird sounding horror-western that Wesley Snipes filmed right before he got convicted. In fact the prosecutors tried to accuse him of running when he flew to Namibia to film it. Were they just trying to fuck up his life, or did they really believe he was crazy enough to start over there, become the African DTV Roman Polanski? I mean, that would be kinda cool though.

From the early descriptions it sounded like they were trying to do Cowboy BLADE, the promotional materials were amateurish, the director is an unknown and there was always the possibility that “Andrew Goth” was not his real name but a fake one that he actually thought sounded cool. Also, there was reason to believe Wesley needed money and was not necessarily being picky about which projects to do. And then it didn’t come out for six years. So I never had any faith at all that this would be good.

And yes, it’s a mess. First and worst example is the narration, which could be Snipes sounding really weird, but I’m pretty sure it’s a Steven Seagal OUT OF REACH situation. I just thought it was a third person narrator until the last sentence of the opening chunk, where it sounds like a pretty good Blade imitation. Later he’s saying “I” and it’s clearly supposed to be Snipes’s character Aman talking, but it sure doesn’t sound like his voice. (read the rest of this shit…)