Friends, it is my sad duty to verify reports that Isaac Florentine’s ASSASSIN’S BULLET (formerly titled SOFIA on IMDb, and out on DVD today) is no good. I guess it played a couple of theaters at some point, and it has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t say I really disagree. It’s dull and amateurishly written and even though it has a weird thing going on with being a vanity project for some lady I never heard of, that’s not enough to make it very fun.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Archive for the ‘Thriller’ Category
Assassin’s Bullet
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012Crimson Tide
Friday, September 21st, 2012
What more high pressure situation could there be than two men in a submarine arguing over whether or not to launch a nuclear missile? I guess the only thing that would make it more tense would be if they also had to get home in time for a kid’s birthday party. Luckily the birthday party happened at the beginning of the movie, right before they were deployed to take part in “the worst standoff since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
(read the rest of this shit…)
Past Midnight
Thursday, August 23rd, 2012
Do you guys know about this one? How come I never knew about it? Not that PAST MIDNIGHT – a 1991 thriller starring Natasha Richardson, Rutger Hauer and Clancy Brown that went straight to video in ’93 – is very good, but it holds an important enough place in cinematic history that I figure I should’ve heard of it before.
On his commentary track for TRUE ROMANCE, Quentin Tarantino talks about the time before he sold that script and directed RESERVOIR DOGS. He mentions a job at the production company CineTel, where he says he would do punch ups on scripts “which were really page 1 rewrites.” I don’t know if he’s exaggerating that part or not, but I’m sure it’s true that he rewrote a line here or there. So did any of those ever end up getting produced?
Yes, at least one did, and it is PAST MIDNIGHT, Tarantino’s first film credit besides production assistant on Dolph Lundgren’s MAXIMUM POTENTIAL workout video. Associate producer Catalaine Knell thought his contributions to the script were important enough that she shared her credit with him.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Ca$h (the Sean Bean one)
Thursday, June 21st, 2012
An Avenger and a Throne-Gamer butt heads over a suitcase of money in this mediocre DTV thriller
Wasn’t that awesome? I wrote a headline.
Chris Thor Hemsworth plays Sam, a Chicago knucklehead who thinks the Lord is smiling on him when a suitcase full of money is thrown over an overpass and lands on the hood of his station wagon. He’s not a streetwise tough guy of any kind, not a guy that knows how to handle the situation. He’s just a dipshit who thinks since nobody saw him take it as far as he knows he can just live off the money and there will be no consequences. At first his wife Leslie (Victoria Profeta) is nervous about it, but she decides to go along with it anyway. They pay off their debts in cash, buy a new Range Rover, a new house, new furniture, new TV. (read the rest of this shit…)
We Need To Talk About Kevin
Thursday, June 7th, 2012
You know what, I’m not sure we do. I don’t want to give that little bastard the satisfaction.
Director Lynne Ramsay’s gritty reboot of the PROBLEM CHILD franchise is a beautifully shot, cryptically edited suspense story about a woman (Tilda Swinton) who just can’t seem to connnect with her son (Ezra Miller). Even as a baby he’s a total asshole, almost Michael Meyersian in his silence and lack of emotion. Nobody else seems to notice – the doctor says “I wouldn’t worry about it,” the dad (John C. Reilly) seems to think she’s being paranoid. (read the rest of this shit…)
Rider on the Rain
Friday, March 23rd, 2012
I wanted to watch a Charles Bronson movie, accidentally picked one where he doesn’t show up until 25 minutes in. He doesn’t ride in on the rain – the title refers to a different dude, a bald weirdo who a lady named Mellie (Marlene Jobert) sees getting off of a bus. Later he starts peeping on her and then actually attacks her. (read the rest of this shit…)
Schindler’s List
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
You know what movie’s good? SCHINDLER’S LIST! Why did nobody tell me this before?
Would you believe this was my first time seeing SCHINDLER’S LIST? It’s getting toward 20 years old and I remembered I hadn’t gotten around to seeing it yet. It’s kind of a heavy decision to make one day: hey, I got 3 hours before I gotta leave for work, maybe I should watch SCHINDLER’S LIST? Never had the urge I guess. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Grey
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
Okay, the first thing you’re gonna have to do is completely forget the trailer for THE GREY. It deliberately tricks you into believing something cool is gonna happen in the movie that is not gonna happen in the movie, and it gives away most of the major events, including the very end. It’s a mean trailer. (read the rest of this shit…)
Haywire
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
Steven Soderbergh’s take on an action/spy thriller – built around “The Face of Women’s MMA” Gina Carano after he saw her on Strikeforce while flipping channels around – lives up to my high expectations. It’s written by Lem Dobbs and it’s like the kid sister of THE LIMEY, mixing the style of that Soderbergh classic with kind of a more upbeat ex-Marine-badass-operative-betrayed-and-on-the-run type of story. It has THE LIMEY’s sense of quiet, deliberate pace and dread and also its dry you-just-fucked-with-the-wrong-person type of humor. Of course, professional fighter Carano has different strengths as a performer than Terence Stamp does, so her movie has less emotion and more punching, kicking, choking, armbars, heads broken through furniture, foot chases, etc. Gina’s not gonna mourn the loss of the daughter she never knew, and Terence isn’t gonna climb up onto a roof. In my opinion. And it’s great to have both of them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Killer Elite
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
(KILLER ELITE is enjoyable if unspectacular. Luckily it’s more in the vein of the sort-of-classy studio action thrillers like THE BANK JOB than the gloomy Millennium Pictures joints I halfway expected it to be like. So it co-stars Robert DeNiro, the legendary actor, and not Robert DeNiro, that old man from the 50 Cent movies. But the star is definitely Jason Statham, looking exactly the same in 1980-81 as he does in any other time period (minus the track suit). (read the rest of this shit…)
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