Archive for the ‘Drama’ Category
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008
I like where Stuart Gordon is coming from. Always thought of as a horror director because of REANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, now he’s just this low profile indie director, doing his own thing, making little movies with playwrights and obscure writers, usually with gore and dark undertones but not really horror anymore. Not that he has disowned the genre – he’s still trying to do another REANIMATOR sequel.
And this new one, STUCK, is an interesting idea. It’s inspired by that horrible case you may remember reading about a few years ago where a nurse’s aide was driving under the influence, ran over a homeless guy, and parked the car in her garage with him still stuck in the windshield. She left him there to die (it was originally reported as taking two days, which is how it’s portrayed in the movie, but from what I’ve read it was actually 2 hours). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Mena Suvari, Stephen Rea, Stuart Gordon
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
I am not a history buff. I am not highly educated. I don’t necessarily have what you would call “a curious mind” when it comes to history. And I don’t really dig on civil war movies. It all just seems like a bunch of dudes running around in muddy fields yelling and stabbing. But for some reason lately I caught a weird case of interest in that era. I don’t know man, I understand that slavery was a way of life for those people and they were raised to be racist, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around that whole concept. How can somebody be willing to die to take away somebody’s freedom? How can that be the thing you really believe in?
I just don’t get it. But so much of that conflict still echoes in our lives today: in race relations, class relations, politics, institutionalized racism, relations between different regions of the country. So it’s important shit. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Lance Henriksen
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
A couple years ago Shane Black, the hot shot wunderkind enfant terrible wave of the future 22 year old millionaire kid who wrote LETHAL WEAPON and a couple other movies, then got burnt out and disappeared for years, suddenly resurfaced as the writer-director of this well-received if not smash hit smart-alecky mystery comedy. I heard alot of good things about it so one Wednesday afternoon I checked the movie times and went downtown to see it. Unfortunately this was the day that movie about 50 Cent came out and all the showings of KISS KISS BANG BANG had been dropped without the movie times being updated online. I was so hurt that I didn’t watch the movie until just the other day.
Fortunately this one lives up to the word-of-the-mouth. This summer everybody’s excited about Robert Downey Jr.’s funny turn and ad-libs in IRON MAN, but it must’ve been less surprising to people who saw this one. Not only is Downey the star, he is the narrator who possesses the powers of someone recording a DVD commentary. He can skip around, make jokes, apologize for bad narration, complain about movie conventions (specifically comparing one scene to a shot in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christmas, Michelle Monoghan, Robert Downey Jr., Shane Black, Val Kilmer
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 22 Comments »
Monday, May 26th, 2008
BATTLE IN THE SEATTLE
Vern’s thoughts on the movie, the historical event, and Thursday’s
opening of the 2008 Seattle International Film Festival
NOTE: This is another one of those ones I sent in to Ain’t It Cool and they never ran it. But I was kind of thinking of making it a geocities exclusive anyway because I knew as soon as some asshole talkbacker pointed out it was long I would ram my head through a wall.
IMPORTANT NOTICE – RFL/NFW: This will be a Real Fucking Long review that will also talk about my own observations of the actual historical events the movie is based on. You’ve been warned so NFW (No Fucking Whining).
At a glance BATTLE IN SEATTLE might seem like a perfect opening film for this year’s Seattle International Film Festival. For one thing, it has the word “Seattle” in the title. For another it takes place in Seattle. Those are only two of the reasons. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Channing Tatum, Charlize Theron, Ray Liotta, Woody Harrelson
Posted in AICN, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
I try to watch alot of DTV movies, but I don’t always succeed. Most of you have probaly never watched them, and you may assume that they are very good and enjoyable, and capable of adding meaning to one’s life. However, this is almost never the case. In the world of DTV filmmaking it seems pretty clear that nobody gives a shit. Most of them are trying to just reach 90 minutes and throw the shit on a shelf. You could argue that more effort goes into pornography, since some poor girl has to take it in the ass. That’s elbow grease.
So this is an unusual couple of days because I’ve managed to watch a bunch of DTVs and all of them were actually okay. So okay, in fact, that I was able to watch them in two or less sittings. In this world that’s almost a miracle. Either that or I have somehow increased my attention span overnight. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dolph Lundgren, DTV, Jason Statham, Wesley Snipes
Posted in Action, AICN, Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Who the fuck is Michael Clayton and why is he so awesome that a movie is named after him? Well to answer your first question, Michael Clayton is a highly effective “fixer” played by George Clooney who cleans up messes for a big law firm, and to answer your second one I guess they figured coming up with some thriller type name like THE FIXER or DEADLY REVELATION or THE BREADWINNER would be corny so they just said I don’t know, fuck it, use the character’s name, I don’t give a shit. And MICHAEL CLAYTON was born.
The thing I cannot stress enough about this movie is that it’s really fuckin good. I wasn’t prepared for that. I heard it was good, I knew it was nominated for best picture, but I don’t know man. Nobody really properly conveyed it to me I guess. I didn’t expect to be blown away by it. But this is just a great thriller, one that works so well and talks down to you so little it’s hard to believe it was made in this day and age. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: George Clooney
Posted in Drama, Mystery, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Imagine you’re Nicole Kidman (well, a character played by Nicole Kidman) and your husband died ten years ago. (Not Tom Cruise or the country singer guy she’s with or whoever, I am talking about a fictional character played by Nicole Kidman). You’re still sort of getting over this but your boyfriend (the head vampire from 30 DAYS OF NIGHT [but not a vampire, just the same actor]) has proposed to you and you think you’re finally ready and you’re gonna make this work.
And then a 10 year old boy (the kid from X-Men 3 [playing a different character {I think I will stop mentioning what other movies they’ve been in}]) shows up at your apartment and tells you that he’s your dead husband Sean. Hopefully this hasn’t happened to most of you, so just try to imagine what it would be like. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Nicole Kidman
Posted in Drama, Mystery, Reviews, Romance | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
First of all I gotta note that it’s weird this movie exists at all. Walter Hill’s prison/boxing movie UNDISPUTED is not exactly a title that appears in everyone’s home library. It was not a box office hit, it did not catch on huge on video, it does not hold a nostalgic place in anyone’s heart, it did not inspire other movies or hip hop videos or launch a catch phrase. I think I know one guy besides me who saw it, he liked it, I didn’t. He hasn’t seen part 2. I never saw it until now. There’s your audience.
The original got a brief theatrical release, the sequel was straight-to-video. Maybe they could’ve gotten Wesley Snipes to return, since he’s stuck in straight-to-video lately. Instead it stars Michael Jai White – you know, the guy who was cut out of KILL BILL who everybody on the internet thought should’ve replaced Wesley in BLADE: THE SERIES. So that’s cool. Except Wesley’s character is not mentioned – White is playing Ving Rhames’s villain character George “The Iceman” Chambers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, DTV sequels better than theatrical originals, Isaac Florentine, J.J. Perry, Michael Jai White, Scott Adkins
Posted in Action, Crime, Drama, Reviews, Sport | 11 Comments »
Monday, February 18th, 2008
I haven’t been big on Ridley Scott post-ALIEN, but when I saw he was doing the real-life gangster epic starring Denzel Washington – the one I already wanted to see when it was Antoine Fuqua that was supposed to direct it – man, I was excited. And the trailer looked great. And then it came out and without exception everybody I knew who saw it said “yeah, it was… pretty good.” Suddenly there was less urgency to see it, and I watched other movies, wrote some stuff, maybe took some naps, ate some food, and then it was gone.
Well, maybe it was for the best. Now I watched it with lower expectations, in its 20-minutes-longer UNRATED EXTENDED CUT (4 minutes shy of 3 hours) and I have to say I really enjoyed it. I see your “yeah, it was… pretty good” and raise you a “it was… pretty fuckin good.” I am proud to review it alongside such other great American films as AMERICAN PIMP, AMERICAN PSYCHO and AMERICAN NINJA. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Armand Assante, based on a magazine article, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding Jr., Denzel Washington, Fab 5 Freddy, John Hawkes, John Ortiz, Josh Brolin, mafia, Norman Reedus, Ridley Scott, Roger Guenveur Smith, Ruby Dee, Russell Crowe, RZA
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.
As much as I agree with Vern’s take on the wretched DIARY OF THE DEAD, I disagree with him here. But I’ll get into it when I publish my review later in the week. For now, here’s Vern, who has been Sweded.
You might know the premise. Mos Def works at an all VHS video store. Jack Black is magnetized (long story). (No, come to think of it, short story. He climbs into a power plant and gets shocked.) Jack Black’s brain erases all of the videos in the store, and Mia Farrow demands to watch GHOSTBUSTERS. So they dress up, go to the library and tape their own ridiculous home-made version of GHOSTBUSTERS directly onto the tape. Because they don’t want Danny Glover to know they fucked up. And it goes on from there. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jack Black, Michel Gondry, Mos Def
Posted in AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »
