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  • 13 Apr

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    Trance: One of this year’s contenders?

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    Every year there are those films that instantly stand out. Often, some of the bigger films get a lot of buzz and excitement before they even come out. Others are underdogs, biding their time until they do
    exceptionally well at the box office.

    Danny Boyle is known for the latter. No one could have predicted the worldwide success of Slumdog Millionaire. The trailer for his latest film, Trance, suggests something of a similar nature. On paper, Trance seems like an ordinary film with a unique twist. On screen, this translates to a unique film that is equally artistic, gritty and perfectly suited to the British director’s style.

    Psychological thriller

    It’s the unique genre and themes that arguably make Trance so exciting. At its base plot, it’s a simple ‘heist gone wrong’ storyline. A theft goes wrong, and a stolen painting is lost. Yet it’s also a psychological thriller. The protagonist, played by James McAvoy, is the auctioneer who knows where it’s hidden, but has forgotten due to head trauma. This leads to the introduction of Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), as a hypnotherapist tasked with uncovering forgotten memories.

    The trailer sets this up perfectly, in a way that only a renowned director such as Boyle can pull of successfully. Comparing it to recent movies, think of something like a cross between RocknRolla and Limitless. One was a typical gangster film, the other explored human nature and the human brain. Judging by the exciting and engaging trailer, Trance seems to be the best parts of both.

    Combining genres

    So why is this so exciting? If you’ve seen any number of psychological thrillers and gangster films, you probably have noticed a number of patterns and repetition in them. Both need some new life and both do this by breathing unique aspects into the other through Trance.

    What’s been shown so far certainly seems to highlight this. Psychological films tease information out, often turning situations on their head. There’s never a defined ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; that’s why films like Memento prove so popular. Taking this approach into a crime or heist film, where such morals are typically more defined, opens up so many possibilities. Trance plays around a three way power struggle between Simon (James McAvoy), Elizabeth and Franck (Vincent Cassel).

    Of course, the only way to tell is to watch the end results. Will it be worth it? We’ll find out when Trance opens wide on the 27th.

  • 07 Apr

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    Review: From Up on Poppy Hill

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    poppyhill-poster

    Director: Goro Miyazaki (Tales from Earthsea)
    Story: Tetsurô Sayama
    Screenplay:Hayao Miyazaki, Keiko Niwa
    Producers: Tetsurô Sayama, Toshio Suzuki, Chizuru Takahashi, Geoffrey Wexler
    Starring (voices): Sarah Bolger, Anton Yelchin, Gillian Anderson, Christina Hendricks, Aubrey Plaza, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bruce Dern
    MPAA Rating: PG
    Running time: 91 min.

     

    (4/5)

     

    Review courtesy of Geir Friestad

     

    The world was very unkind to Goro Miyazaki when he took the unexpected leap from landscape architect and museum manager to director in 2006. Tales from Earthsea had its fair share of weaknesses and outright faults, but the yardstick by which the younger Miyazaki was measured and found lacking was downright unfair and cruel. The recent documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi contains a musing from a food critic that’s strikingly relevant: 86 year old Jiro is still in charge of his restaurant, and the eldest son, 50-something Yoshikazu, remains his apprentice at an age when most people would start planning their retirement. The critic opines that, once Jiro finally retires and the son takes over, he’ll be considered an equal if he’s twice as good as his father, or a failure if he’s just as good as his father was. Either way, he’ll never attain Jiro’s legendary status in people’s minds. Goro Miyazaki is not (yet) as good as his father, but it’s worth keeping in mind the impossibly high bar that has been set for him. Jiro’s sushi restaurant is the only one in the world deemed worthy of an inclusion in the Michelin guide. Hayao Miyazaki’s status as an animation director is comparably exclusive. Expecting Goro Miyazaki to reach his father’s level in just a few years is foolish, deeply unrealistic and nothing but a source of unnecessary disappointment.

    Happily, he seems to be acutely aware of this himself, and the path he’s following is not that of his father, but that of Hayao’s senpai and colleague – Isao Takahata. Tales from Earthsea, while deeply flawed, mined inspiration from Takahata’s early The Little Norse Prince (a.k.a. Hols, Prince of the Sun), and for his sophomore effort he seems to have looked to Takahata’s subsequent, more down to earth movies. Yoshifumi Kondō’s exquisite Whisper of the Heart too. From Up on Poppy Hill, adapted by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa (Tales from Earthsea and The Secret World of Arrietty) from a 1980 shōjo manga, takes a low-key look at a mid-Showa era school in Yokohama, focusing on the first stirrings of young love and early student politics.
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 05 Apr

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    Review: Chasing Ice

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    Director: Jeff Orlowski
    Writer: Mark Monroe
    Producers: Jerry Aronson, Paula DuPré Pesmen, Jeff Orlowski
    Starring: James Balog, Svavar Jonatansson, Adam LeWinter
    MPAA Rating: PG-13
    Running time: 75 min.

     

    (3/5)

    Review courtesy of Cramer K.

    Here is a movie that once again proves how freaking difficult it is make a good feature-length documentary. At its heart is a fascinating story about photographer James Balog’s quest to document the shrinking of the world’s glaciers via time-lapse photography. It’s a story that should be told, as we get a first-hand look at how far and how fast various glaciers in the northern hemisphere are receding, accompanied by various academic talking heads explaining exactly how dire the situation is around the globe. But a great and necessary story doesn’t necessarily translate to a great film, and the filmmakers of Chasing Ice largely come up short in crafting a strong narrative.

    Most of the problem derives from the fact that the film can’t decide whether it wants to focus on Balog’s work or on Balog as an individual. Instead, it kind of vacillates between the two poles, at times being an Inconvenient Truth-style “message picture” and at others a study of one man’s dedication to his craft. Personally, I would have preferred much more of the former than the latter. While Balog is certainly commendable for being the intrepid sort who scales terrifying glaciers in order to document proof of climate change, he’s still not a tremendously interesting documentary subject. He’s a driven artist, but doesn’t have the kind of personality that demands our attention (unlike, say, Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man, a film that shares a little of its DNA with this one). As such, interspersed interview scenes where he talks about malfunctioning equipment or the strain that his hikes put on his injured knees don’t really resonate, and there are a lot of those scenes in the film.

    But in those moments when Chasing Ice lets Balog’s images (and the science behind them) speak for themselves, the movie soars. Watching three-plus years of photographs turn into a few seconds of time-lapse video, where we witness giant glaciers deflate like a balloon, is gripping stuff. It’s beautiful, terrifying, surreal, and absolutely succeeds in giving the audience a closer work at how climate change is affecting the planet. The strength of these images alone are enough for me to recommend the film. It’s disappointing, though, that the rest of the movie feels bloated (even at 80 minutes) and surprisingly uninteresting. Towards the end of the film we see clips of Balog delivering a TED Talk, describing the science of climate change and pairing it with his photographs, and all I could think was that I’d rather be watching that instead. As it stands, Chasing Ice is half of a good documentary that begs to be delivered into the hands of more assured filmmakers.

      

  • 26 Mar

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    Review: Spring Breakers

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    Director: Harmony Korine (Kids, Gummo, Trash Humpers, Mister Lonely)
    Writer: Harmony Korine
    Producers: Charles-Marie Anthonioz, Jordan Gertner, Chris Hanley, David Zander
    Starring: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 94 min.

     
     

    Tom Clift’s TIFF review can be found here

     

    This review is brought to Row Three courtesy of
    Jeremy Wilson from 411mania.com

    (4.5/5)

     

    The MPAA rating for Harmony Korine’s first feature, 1997′s Gummo, was “Rated R for pervasive depiction of anti-social behavior of juveniles, including violence, substance abuse, sexuality and language.” While some might blanche or seek to soften that kind of description, Korine wears it as a badge of honor and uses it as his mission statement in almost all of his films. The latest example of young adults behaving badly is also one of the year’s must-see movies – a first for Korine – Spring Breakers. The rating and description might be the same, but the execution and finished product feels very different and – thankfully – a more mature artistic statement from one of the true agent provocateurs in filmmaking.

    Harmony Korine broke onto the scene with 1995′s Kids, a screenplay he wrote at the age of 18. That film was one of the most controversial of the 1990s, frankly depicting a day in the life of sexually active teenagers whose casual attitudes and use of sex and drugs during the HIV crisis in New York City was scandalous and taboo. That film (featuring the debuts of Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson) originally received an NC-17 before being released without a rating, but the film has remained a controversial landmark of that era ever since. Korine eventually moved behind the camera directing numerous independent films that were squarely outside the mainsteam such as Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely and Trash Humpers, the latter of which was shot on VHS and followed a group of sociopathic elderly degenerates in rural Tennessee who literally humped trash containers (among other things). Korine has, to this point, been an acquired taste even among the most open-minded cinéastes, with many dismissing him as nothing but an empty poseur simply interested in provoking and shocking on the basest levels.

    And some of that Korine is still in his latest feature Spring Breakers. In fact, the first 40 minutes or so of the film is a parade of debauchery, drinking, drugs and dizzying slow-mo closeups of breasts that will probably make many start to wonder if Korine is at it again, trying to be as in-your-face and loathsome to his audience as has happened in previous efforts. However, this film is different and proof of that arrives in the form of James Franco the Great and Powerful. Referring to himself as “Alien,” Franco’s arrival essentially restarts the picture, turning the naïveté of these girls and of what we’ve seen of the “dream” Spring Break on its head and showing what Korine believes to be the natural extension of that aggressive bacchanal mindset. What started as bored college girls who rob the local chicken shack to pay for their excursion to paradise, suddenly breaks free of what these pictures usually look like and goes down a darker, more serious path.
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 16 Feb

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    Review: Identity Thief

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    Director: Seth Gordon (King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters, Horrible Bosses)
    Screenplay: Craig Mazin
    Story: Jerry Eeten and Craig Mazin
    Starring (voices): Jason Bateman, Melissa McCarthy, Jon Favreau, Amanda Peet, T.I., John Cho
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 112 min

     

    (1.5/5)

    This review is brought to Row Three courtesy of Brandon Wall-Fudge of Sanctuary Review

     
    Mainstream comedy is in a terrible rut. Last year offered less than a handful of watchable genre entries, and those worth taking away from that bunch were even more scarce. So far, 2013 hasn’t tried its hardest to offer something fresh, or even slightly humorous, to push things in the right direction. After the year’s first two comedy offerings, Move 43 and A Haunted House, Seth Gordon’s Identity Thief might look like a fresh breather. In fact, while the film is not as repulsive as most recent comedy films, Identity Thief is just as repugnant we have come to expect from the genre in 2013.

    In 2011, Seth Gordon offered an original, albeit not entirely effective concept to the big screen with Horrible Bosses. While the film was mostly poor, it came with its share of humor that didn’t feel completely forced. The same might be able to be said for Identity Thief, but those rare flashes of genuine laughter are even more scarce this time around. The film is filled to the brim with unoriginal jokes, along with those coveted moments of unnecessary raunch to try and satisfy pervy high school freshmen.
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 07 Jan

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    Online Gaming Can Be More than Just Physics or Adventure

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    One aspect of gaming we haven’t talked much around these parts is the genre of “getting rich!” OK, so that’s probably not the best way to approach your finances, but hey, nothing wrong with laying down a little scratch for your entertainment; and if the possibility exists of making a huge score while playing, then all the better for it!

    waltz-bingoI’ve played some online poker with my phone and even competed in some adventure challenges than earn real dollars as well. But after a trip to the casino to kill some time last summer with friends, we discovered the awesomeness that is B-I-N-G-O! We played for some time and had a ball doing it. But the time was cut short and we had to actually leave for a wedding.

    When I got home I got to thinking that there must be a place to play online and basically do the same thing, but from the comfort of my own home (or office, heh heh). Sure enough; I was able to spend a lot of time gaming away without really having to break the bank. One of the places I found that was pretty fun was partybingo.com – it was just a cool way to spend a quiet evening at home but also interact with other and have a good time… without the noise, chaos and cigarette smoke you have to deal with at the casino.

    I also do some mobile gaming as well so it’s fun to attack these types of site while on my commute (train or bus) as well. How bout you guys? Do you feel like Vegas is the devil incarnate or is something like this worthy of your time and money? For the same price as a movie you can get just as much bang bingo for your buck in my opinion!

  • 23 Dec

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    Lessons from 2012: What Hollywood Can Learn from This Year

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    2012 has been a funny ol’ year for cinema. Some titles which we thought were going to be sure-fire winners failed to impress (Prometheus), some movies which should have gone down in flames blew us away (Cabin in the Woods) and – for better or worse – some curious source material made its way to the silver screen (Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi).

    It hasn’t been a bad batch at all, but as always Hollywood continues to make some questionable decisions. So, what can be gleaned from their outcome this time round?

    Lesson One: If You’re Going to do Superhero movies, Do Them Properly

    2012 has been a delight for comic book fans the world over, regardless of alignment – Marvel scored a homerun with The Avengers, and the Batman finale was a triumph for not only DC but for modern cinema in general. The pair rightfully earned their place as the two highest grossing films of 2012.

    Producers are always going to back superhero movies because if you put a cape on anything, you have to do something seriously wrong to not at least get your money back. But while it’s historically been a fine marketing strategy to dumb the film down to appeal to the masses at the risk of annoying the purists, as of last year it seems that the masses no longer care. The woeful Green Lantern movie, for example, showed that the average viewer was now well-trained enough to spot a generic origins story from a mile away and steer clear.

    The Amazing Spider-Man reboot of this year did make it to the Top 10 highest grossing list, but with lackluster reviews and puzzlement as to why the movie was necessary, it’ll be surprising whether Marc Webb will convince anyone to come back for the sequels. Consider that Spidey had roughly the same budget as The Dark Knight Rises (around $250m) – the latter took over $300m more at the box office, and that was the third movie in a trilogy.

    It goes to show that it’s time for Hollywood to put a bit more heart (and brains) into their superhero movies if they want to get both pedestrians and fanboys to buy into their franchises with any loyalty, and therefore achieve some real bang for their buck.
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 16 Dec

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    Try Something New at the Movies

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    When you go to the movies, do you tend to always go and see the same kind of films? While there’s a lot to be said for knowing what you like and liking what you know, cinema is an area of life where there’s plenty of opportunity to try new things. And if you end up not enjoying what you’ve paid to go and see, what have you really lost? The price of a movie ticket and a box of popcorn, that’s all!

    Most movies that get to the cinema are worth watching – even if they don’t actually really chime with your tastes.

    For example, if you search through the Edinburgh cinema listings for this week, you’ll find action movies, dramas, movies for kids and perhaps an epic historical piece or two. And of course, whichever town you’re in, you’ll find a similar diversity in what’s on at the movies. With Christmas just around the corner, there’ll be more than the fair share of kids’ films and, of course, the big film this Christmas is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Now fantasy may not be your thing, but when you get a film with this much hype hitting the big screen, you almost feel you’re missing out if you don’t go and see it.

    There are some interesting new releases on the way over the next couple of months. Life of Pi might not be classified as mainstream, but this fantasy feature is a story of a boy shipwrecked with a Bengal tiger on a tiny lifeboat – you’re dying to know what happens!

    Similarly, there are a couple of dramas on the way – Great Expectations is a great story, and it’s always interesting to see what the next production of this classic tale turns out like. And Lincoln promises much – even if you’re not a history buff.

    Watching a film in a different genre to your usual choice is often a good experience, and it may open up a whole new raft of films to you that you’d never considered before. Just as with food our tastes can change – it’s worth experimenting to see if you can widen your cinematic palate!

  • 03 Dec

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    Review: Hitchcock

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    Director: Sacha Gervasi
    Screenplay: John J. McLaughlin
    Novel: Stephen Rebello
    Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Danny Huston, Toni Collette, Michael Stuhlbarg, Michael Wincott, Jessica Biel, James D’Arcy, Richard Portnow
    MPAA Rating: PG-13
    Running time: 98 min

     

    (3/5)

    This review is brought to Row Three courtesy of Joseph Belanger of Black Sheep Reviews

     
    If you’re going to make a movie about one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, your movie had better be good. To put it plainly, Alfred Hitchcock is simply one of the best and most famous film directors in history. And Psycho is arguably his most notorious film. It is an unfortunate shame, to say the least, that both the man himself, and this brilliant film, have been over simplified and stripped of all actual suspense and drama for the attempted biopic, Hitchcock. It is even more regrettable I’m afraid, to see two winning performances buried in such a middling movie.

    Hitchcock adapts the modern style of biography filmmaking, choosing to focus on one particular period in the man’s life instead of a more strict adherence to portraying his life from birth to death. This approach worked quite well in films like Capote and My Week with Marilyn because, even though we only got a glimpse at their lives, we still got a grander sense of who they were and how they became these people. Screenwriter, John J. McLaughlin (Black Swan), chooses to focus all of his attention on the period where Hitchcock made Psycho, but it seems to me it could have been any movie really. After all, all he did was take all these popular ideas of who Hitchcock was as a person, from his obsession with blondes to his overeating to his control issues, and plop them into the behind the scenes of Psycho. A setting should have a purpose; this slice of his life should have been so particularly telling that it would also inform on what came before and where the man would go after. Instead, we get in and out of Hitchcock’s life without getting to know very much about him at all.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 02 Dec

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    Review: Rise of the Guardians

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    Director: Peter Ramsey
    Screenplay: David Lindsay-Abaire
    Book: William Joyce
    Starring (voices): Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Isla Fisher, Hugh Jackman
    MPAA Rating: PG
    Running time: 97 min

     

    (3.5/5)

    This review is brought to Row Three courtesy of Brandon Wall-Fudge of Sanctuary Review

     
    DreamWorks Animation has a pretty strong track record. With the release of each one of their new films, the studio has either found themselves a box office smash or exceptional critical reception, with most releases actually drawing both these outcomes. Though the studio has been working away on feature films for 14 years now, this year marks their first foray into a holiday themed feature. Many of their beloved characters have found themselves in direct-to-DVD or made for TV holiday spinoffs, DreamWorks Animation’s Rise of The Guardians sees the studio dropping a multi-holiday offering to theaters just in time for the most anticipated holiday season of the year.

    It’s not uncommon for this time of year to see its share of holiday themed releases. It is impossible to think of a time when there wasn’t some kind of holiday film popping up sometime between November and December. While Rise of The Guardians may be this year’s go to film for your holiday fix, it sets itself apart from recent releases by not sticking entirely to Christmas as its holiday of choice. With both Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny as principal characters, Rise of The Guardians does its fair share to spread the holiday wealth. In fact, the film doesn’t even take place during this time of year, rather it is set in April, the weekend of Easter. This may give Rise of The Guardians a unique twist on a classic holiday story, but it also leads to much messiness in the story, especially when the other “Guardians” are taken into consideration.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 01 Dec

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    Review: Killing them Softly

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    Director: Andrew Dominik (Chopper, Assassination of Jesse James…)
    Screenplay: Andrew Dominik
    Starring: Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 97 min

     

    (2/5)

    This review is brought to Row Three courtesy of Jeremy Wilson of 411mania.com

     
    I don’t know how Andrew Dominik will feel about his latest film Killing Them Softly twenty years from now, but one would hope he realizes what went so terribly, terribly wrong with it sooner than that. Dominik has technical skills – as so many current young wanna-be auteurs do – but those skills aren’t what’s wrong with Killing Them Softly. No, here is a film whose so-very-obvious technical tricks are in the service of the most sadly derivative themes to come along in an art house crime drama in quite awhile. From start to finish, Killing Them Softly plays as some poor undergraduate’s self-serious nihilistic treatise. Crime is like capitalism, man, and we’ve got to fight the power and we’re all just pawns in the game, man, and violence isn’t pretty, man, and criminals are just like us regular people dude…and so on and so forth. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what Dominik is going for or wants you to think about. He tells you…and tells you…and then, as if you hadn’t figured it out in the film’s first hour and a half, he tells you one final, head-shaking, finger-wagging time, in what is both his film’s conclusion and its very loudly spelled-out theme.

    America, man. It’s fucked up.

    Frankly, I’m kind of stunned that Dominik went in this direction. His last film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, isn’t perfect, but it is at least more subtle and nuanced than this. Killing Them Softly is about as subtle as a punch in the face. Brad Pitt (who also starred in Assassination) stars as Jackie, a charismatic, if non-plussed hitman brought in to clean up a local mess. Frankie and Russell are two incompetent goons (played by Scott McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) hired by a dry cleaner gangster named Johnny Amato – aka “Squirrel” (Vincent Curatola) – to rob a mob protected card game. Their supposed “foolproof” plan would work, because the game was run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who had somehow escaped punishment for flaunting the fact that he had once robbed his own game years earlier (in much the same way as this robbery goes down). The mob would lay the blame at Trattman, never knowing it was Frankie, Russell and Amato who had done it. However, it doesn’t take long for Jackie to figure things out when Russell later admits to another low-level gangster who works for Jackie’s predecessor/mentor Dillon (Sam Shepard – who appears in a brief cameo) of the daring heist they pulled off. Jackie struggles to get the go-ahead from the gangster head honchos who run things more like a safe-playing corporation, represented by a middleman played by Richard Jenkins. Eventually, he has his orders and goes about cleaning up the mess of people – both above and below him – who he sees as incompetent and inferior.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 28 Aug

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    Films To Come In 2012

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    These days, there are nearly endless options for personal entertainment. Much of this is thanks to the expansion of the Internet and the ability to have access to it at all times through smart phones and other mobile devices. Now, if you have some time to simply entertain yourself, or you get bored or have a break, you can easily pull up a gaming app, head to a favorite site like Party Poker, or even watch an episode of your favorite TV show on a device small enough to fit in your pocket! However, despite all of these advances in entertainment convenience, there is still no substitute for the enjoyment of seeing a great film at the cinema – and the second half of 2012 is looking like a great time for film. Here are a few specific films to keep your eye out for.

    • The Master – Already generating a great deal of buzz for the major awards of the year, The Master tells a dramatic story of a World War 2 veteran who decides to create his own religion after the way. Philip Seymour Hoffman will play the role of “The Master,” heading up a cast that also includes Amy Adams and Joaquin Phoenix in what is sure to be a brilliantly acted film.

     

     

    • Cloud Atlas – The latest effort from Matrix creators the Wachowski brothers will be a sprawling drama that deals with how decisions and events affect the lives of other people in the past, present and future. Specifically, the film will center on a former killer who is transformed into a hero by the events that surround him. Cloud Atlas stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, and Susan Sarandon, among others.

     

     

    • Lincoln – Though the film is perhaps more relevant to American audiences, it is sure to be a very engaging picture regardless. Directed by Steven Spielberg and featuring Acadamy Award winner Daniel Day-Lewis as President Abraham Lincoln, this has the ingredients to be one of the most powerful historical biopics in recent memory.

     

     

    • Skyfall – The 23rd James Bond film is finally almost here, and will feature Daniel Craig in his 3rd turn as the tougher, more brooding Bond character debuted in Casino Royale. In this installment, Bond must choose between his allegiance to M (Judi Dench once again) and MI6 itself.

     

     

    • The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – The majority of the world of entertainment mourned the end of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, as it was seen as one of the most stunning achievements in modern film. This is why fans are extremely excited for Peter Jackson’s return to J.R.R. Tolkien’s world. “The Hobbit,” the adventurous prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has been developed into its own film trilogy, and this first new film ought to be the most significant remaining cinema event of 2012.

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