Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

  • 09 Nov

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    Flyway Film Fest Review: “Death of the Dead”

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    Director: Gary King (What’s Up Lovely, New York Lately)
    Writer: Bo Buckley
    Producers: Bo Buckley, Justin Soponis
    Starring: Christina Rose, Jack Abele, William Lee, Michael Blaustein
    MPAA Rating: NR
    Running time:

    (3.5/5)

    Midnight madness festivals and screening were made for exactly this type of fare. A feature film not penned by the director himself really tests the waters of ingenuity and creativity in the film maker. New ideas and interesting ways of tackling familiar territory must be employed to give the audience something new. For the most part, King’s first feature film without the benefit of his own personal script manages to do just that. That isn’t to say you might not want to imbibe a stimulant or two before your screening.

    Death of the Dead is essentially a farce movie for zombie and martial arts fans and has all the requisites needed for a good midnight romp. Jokes galore, half-naked pudding fights, testicle nun-chuks, explosions, hot chick in leather kicking ass and of course flesh-eating zombies. The film is never really all that scary, but the gore gets amped up quite often and the make-up effects for the creatures is absolutely top notch. Genre fans looking for some popcorn fun should have a really good time howling along with the cast and crew members who are all obviously having a really good time making this film.

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  • 07 Nov

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    Review: Due Date

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    Director: Todd Phillips (The Hangover, Old School)
    Screenplay: Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland, Todd Phillips
    Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Michelle Monaghan
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 100 min

    (3/5)

    With Due Date, you are bound to get what you expect – a road trip comedy from the guy who brought the world Old School, The Hangover, and well, Road Trip. If you’re looking for something worthy of awards, move on. If you’re looking for something smart, move on. If you’re looking for a movie you will probably only watch once, but get a few low-brow cheap laughs amongst friends, well, you could do much, much worse than Due Date

    First and foremost, the screenplay for the movie is cookie-cutter at best, right out of the Hollywood comedic scenarios Mad Libs (or an early draft of the classic Planes, Trains and Automobiles). As it goes, a cooler-than-you and dickish soon-to-be businessman father (Downey Jr.) must find his way from Atlanta to Los Angeles in a short amount of time in order to make it to the birth of his first child after mistakenly being put on the “no fly” list. Conveniently, the strange man who caused all of his woes (Galifianakis) offers him a ride and the two embark on your typical comedic zany cross-country adventure.

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  • 05 Nov

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    Celluloid Screams Festival Roundup

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    Celluloid Screams is a horror film festival based in Sheffield (in England) that enjoyed a successful second year at the end of October. I was there to catch (pretty much) every ounce of blood, gore and other such depravities the festival could throw at me. Below are a handful of short reviews for everything that screened other than I Spit On Your Grave, which I skipped due to tiredness and the thought that it’d get released soon enough anyway.

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  • 04 Nov

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    Review: Change of Plans

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    (3.5/5)

    “Everyone pretends they’re fine.” So says one of the characters toward the end of Danièle Thompson’s new ensemble comedy Change of Plans. It’s not a particularly profound statement or one that can’t be found in plenty of other movies, but it does describe pretty accurately the state of affairs among the characters in the film. They first meet attending a dinner party put on by Marie-Laurence (nicknamed ML) and Piotr (played by Micmacs‘ Dany Boon), a married couple struggling a bit with their marriage. The other guests include ML’s sister and her new beau, a potential new boss, some old friends, and a flamenco teacher – in other words, various backgrounds, degrees of connection to ML and Piotr, and a wide range of intimacy with them.

    As they gather for dinner, it becomes clear that potential boss Lucas and his wife Sarah (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly‘s Emmanuelle Seigner) are very not happy together, that friend Melanie is about to leave her husband Alain, that one of the guests has had an affair with ML, and that sister Juliette’s new beau is as old as their father – who, by the way, drops by nearly unannounced, much to Juliette’s chagrin. She hasn’t spoken to him for years. The dinner party continues, focusing on building character, relationships, and drama through dialogue. Dialogue which both hides and reveals each character’s unhappiness, joy, and desire – the ways they’re pretending to be fine and the ways they really are not.

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  • 29 Oct

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    TIFF Review: Inside Job

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    (4/5)

     

    [Now Playing (at least in Toronto). Go see it!]

    A more apt title for Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job would be: Everything You Wanted to Know about the Financial Crisis but Were Afraid to Ask. More so than the heist movie the title suggests, this definitive documentary on the origin, impact and repercussions of the global financial meltdown of 2008 attempts to provide an oral history of the event for future generations to heed. The messages of films like Collapse, The Corporation and here, Inside Job, challenge more than a particular group or issue, they make us confront our very survival and way of life. We ignore at our own peril.

    A talking heads documentary? Sure, but with one hell of a story to tell. Inside Job showcases a who’s who of economic and political personalities (those culpable and/or unwilling to be interviewed are called out by name). A considered and comprehensive inquiry into the crisis, the documentary never shies away from explaining the minutiae of the ‘heist’, whether by making intelligible the predatory tactics of derivatives, the bubble of bank leveraging, or the incestuous relationship between credit rating and insurance agencies with mortgage-backed securities. Not exactly a sexy subject, and no amount of Matt Damon’s narration and tongue-in-cheek musical cues can alleviate the weight of what this film is burdened to tell, but by design Inside Job appeals to the mind more than the heart. » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 29 Oct

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    Review: Monsters

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    [Because the film opens theatrically in NY and LA today, and has been available online for a month on VOD, here is a re-post of my review for Gareth Edwards' Monsters. Also check out Jandy's take on the film and if you want further Monsters reading, check out my interview with the director posted up over at Twitch.]

    There are monsters amoung us – figuratively and literally – in the simple yet aptly titled not-quite-creature-feature, Monsters. Sometime in the near future a wee spot of primordial alien matter got all tangled up with a returning man-made space probe. After about 6 years the effects of the tag-along DNA have resulted in some rather large and terrifying beasties that call about half of Mexico, from Mazatlan to Tampico and all the way north to the American border, home. The Americans respond by building a towering and intimidating 30 meter high concrete wall that makes the $1.2 billion 2006 mandated (by Bush and company) fence looks like no more useful than to pen in goats. The term “Fortress America” is starting to sound rather closer to reality. It being the US-Mexico border, stuff is bound to penetrate and be met with an overabundance of force. Not quite Don Johnson in Machete, but you have to wonder if the response creates half the problem. While Monsters is no Starship Troopers, it is about as far from the crazy violence or anti-fascist bombast as possible, there is a satirical streak hidden under it all that probably would make Paul Verhoeven concede a knowing nod to its sub-textual, humanist slant.

    Apparently, it was director Gareth Edwards’ goal to make the most ‘realistic’ movie about gigantic monsters invading earth as possible. If that means a quieter, more mundane tone, more a movie of our collective environment altered by the presence of alien beings rather than the typical crash-and-smash mayhem caused by invaders from Mars then so be it. He has succeeded in an act of alternate-future that feels real, it feels lived in, and there is a sense of the mundane and normalcy that is almost always lacking in pictures of these type. Shooting in the central American wilderness and small towns therein make for a gorgeous movie on top of its unconventional execution. To say it defies expectations, the constant comparisons to District 9 are, on one hand, appropriate yet still quite misleading. Monsters is not an action picture, it is a contemplative road picture. That it defies easy comparison is simply because there are not enough of these movies made to draw accurate comparisons. I was rather reminded by the opening hours of the 1980s TV miniseries “V” or perhaps Alien Nation; where the presence of extra-terrestrials make a large-scale change on society merely by existing in it. But it also evokes the social journey-films of Alfonso Cuarón, pick either Y tu mama tambien or Children of Men, there are similarities to both. We exist in our environments even as a collective societal shift from panic to uncertainty to ‘the new normal’ follows any major global ‘sea change.’ Of course, all of this inferred shock and awe happens offscreen, only implied by a few title cards. The Monsters could just have easily been another country’s military occupation of modern Mexico, or how the world at this point is rather used to the quagmire in Iraq after 6 years of US entrenchment. As it stands, the gigantic walking squids are here, and they have left their mark, but are now simply a part of the fabric of North American life. This is the greatest achievement of the film, and one that allows for a bit of consideration and politics, although, really the joy is simply existing in this plausible new world order. Part of me wishes that if someone is going to make Max Brook’s overcooked novel World War Z, Gareth Edwards would be the man to leaven out the breathless hyperbole of the ‘letters from the front’ and make it a mature allegory for adults.

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  • 25 Oct

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    DVD Review: The Trotsky

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    The Trotsky Movie Poster

    Director: Jacob Tierney
    Writer: Jacob Tierney
    Producer: Kevin Tierney
    Starring: Jay Baruchel, Geneviève Bujold, Emily Hampshire, Colm Feore, Saul Rubinek, Kaniehtiio Horn, Ricky Mabe
    MPAA Rating: PG
    Running time: 120 min.

    (3.5/5)

    Leon Bronstein is a visionary, a revolutionary and a high school student. He also thinks he’s the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky.

    That’s the basic premise of Jacob Tierney’s The Trotsky which stars Jay Baruchel as Leon, the high school student that goes around causing all sorts of trouble for himself by trying to make the world a more equal place. It starts with a hunger strike gone wrong at his father’s factory which lands him in, gasp!, public school where he teams up with the ineffective student union to start a mini revolution. After all, the school administration, particularly Mrs. Danvers (who Leon has quite a selection of wicked nick names for) and Principal Berkhoff (played by the illustrious and always fabulous Colm Feore, seem to be gunning for a few specific students.

    With the help of his student union members Caroline and Tony (played by The Wild Hunt duo (Kaniehtiio Horn and Ricky Mabe), his new friend Skip, his soon to be wife Alexandra and a former lawyer and leader of the Canadian Communist Party, Leon sets in motion a series of events in support of the forming of a student union at Montreal West. Each of Leon’s attempts are more outlandish than the last with the final stand taking the proverbial cake.

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  • 25 Oct

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    DVD Review: The Last Rites of Ransom Pride

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    The Last Rites of Ransom Pride Poster

    Director: Tiller Russell
    Writer: Tiller Russell, Ray Wylie Hubbard
    Producers: Michael Frislev, Duncan Montgomery, Chad Oakes
    Starring: Dwight Yoakam, Jon Foster, Peter Dinklage, Scott Speedman, Kris Kristofferson, Lizzy Caplan, Cote de Pablo
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 82 min.

    (3.5/5)

    Though westerns have been making a small come back since the release of 2005’s The Proposition, few outside of John Hillcoat and Andrew Dominik have managed to bring anything new to the table. You can add Tiller Russell’s name to that short list though whether his additions to the genre are anywhere on the same level of Hillcoat and Dominik is disputable (even I can’t go that far), he is bringing something new to the well worn chaps.

    Admittedly, Russell’s The Last Rites of Ransom Pride is batshit crazy and I can’t even begin to comprehend how the production team can explain the usage of modern weapons, a car and even a motorcycle but it works with the zaniness of the rest of the production.

    The film stars Scott Speedman as the titular Ransom Pride, a lawbreaker who gets killed in Mexico. His girlfriend Juliette Flowers (the fabulous Lizzy Caplan) has promised to return Ransom home and lay him to rest with his mother and so begins the adventure. Flowers turns up at the Pride home where Reverend (Dwight Yoakam) isn’t much interested in Flowers’ quest and he certainly doesn’t want his “good” son involved but Champ (Jon Foster) has other plans and he takes off with Flowers. The story soon gets ugly when Champ turns into more of a gunslinger than his brother ever was and all the while, he and Flowers are fighting off the bad guys of the wild wild west, including a group on orders from his father.

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  • 25 Oct

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    DVD Review: (Untitled)

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    Untitled Movie Poster

    Director: Jonathan Parker
    Writer: Jonathan Parker, Catherine DiNapoli
    Producers: Catherine DiNapoli, Andreas Olavarria, Matt Luber
    Starring: Jonathan Parker, Marley Shelton, Eion Bailey, Lucy Punch, Vinnie Jones
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 96 min.

    (3.5/5)

    Ever feel like you don’t really “get” modern art? That it’s pretentious, full of itself and the people that make it? If you responded yes to any of these statements, (Untitled) is just the movie for you.

    Adam Goldberg stars as Adrian Jacobs, a music school graduate trying to make a name for himself in the music business. He has a plan: if he doesn’t get anywhere in three years, he’s going to kill himself. How… dramatic. Eion Bailey plays Adrian’s brother Josh, a successful artist whose artwork has been selling well to businesses looking to adorn their walls as well as a hotel chain who has been buying up his pieces for various locations across the US. His girlfriend Madeleine (Marley Shelton) owns the art gallery that represents Josh but she refuses to host an opening for him, finding his work “too commercial,” she peddles his stuff out of the back office while using her space to show the modern works of the up-and-coming and undiscovered, a mish-mash of garish and pointless artists.

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  • 25 Oct

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    Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

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    (3.5/5)

    The Millennium Trilogy of films has been a bit of a rollercoaster for me – first chapter The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo remains among my favorite films of the year, while its follow-up The Girl Who Played With Fire left me cold and disappointed. Going into the final film in the series, I was pretty much just hoping I would like it better than I did The Girl Who Played With Fire. And I did, though how much of that is due merely to tempered expectations I’m not entirely sure. In any case, if you did like The Girl Who Played With Fire, you’ll probably quite enjoy The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, as it’s a really good sequel to that film, though still not up to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo for me in either story or style. Okay, enough with the trilogy comparisons. I’m tired of typing these titles out.

    The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest picks up right where the previous film left off, with a badly injured Lisbeth Salander being taken off to the hospital by a medivac crew. But her troubles aren’t over yet – she’s to stand trial for the murders pinned on her in the second chapter, plus the attempted murder of her father Alexander Zalachenko. Yeah, he didn’t die, though he’s in pretty bad shape, too. While she recovers in the hospital before her trial, Mikael Blomkvist returns to Millennium to put together a special issue intended to prove Lisbeth’s innocence as well as reveal her mistreatment at the hands of the state throughout her life. In a way, it covers similar plot ground to the second film, but more so, and to an actual conclusion.

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  • 20 Oct

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    VIFF 2010 Review: The Woodmans

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    VIFF Reviews Headline

    The Woodmans

    Being outside of the art world, aside from the occasional sensation that comes erupting out of some gallery and to national (and sometimes international) notoriety, the Woodmans were outside my limited vision, but the image that accompanied C. Scott Willis’ documentary in the festival catalogue haunted me.

    The Woodmans is just as haunting as the image that presents it, an untitled photograph taken by the immensely talented Francesca Woodman who died at the young age of 22, before her art was really recognized. But Willis’ film isn’t simply a documentary of a young, fragile, despondent artist but an exploration, via a look at Francesca’s life within her family and in the art world, of the pressure, often self inflicted, of success.

    Predominantly told through interviews with her parents, both successful artists, we come to meet a talented, self assured young woman who was sure of her talent and tackled her art form head on. She was ahead of the curve and as is usually the case, the art world was slow to take notice, but what of her parents? They’re not portrayed as villains, uncaring parents who saw their daughter’s suffering and didn’t step in to help, but the dynamic in this family of artists shaped the driven person Francesca became and her parents, particularly her father George, seemed to see their daughter as more of a colleague than their daughter.

    The Woodmans is, essentially, the story of a young artists’ early passing and how her family has managed to overcome the tragedy of loss through their work and how their work has been affected by the death of their daughter. Accompanied by many of Francesca’s photographs, diary entries and films, along with a beautiful score from David Lang, The Woodmans is an immediately engaging, enlightening look at the life of an artist.

    See VIFF screening schedule for show times.

    Trailer tucked under the seats.

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  • 19 Oct

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    VIFF 2010 Review: Carlos

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    VIFF Reviews Headline

    Carlos

    It doesn’t seem right that Olivier Assayas’ new film should be shown as one film rather than a three part miniseries as it was originally intended. The reason this doesn’t seem fair, or perhaps “right” is the better term, is the running time. Clocking in at over five hours (regardless of which cut you’ve seen) Carlos is a marathon session of film viewing but seeing it in one sitting (with one break) is perhaps the only way to truly appreciate the spectacular achievement of Assayas’ film.

    Carlos the Jackal was an international terrorist, a product of his time who, like his Argentine counterpart, fought on the side of liberty and was willing to do whatever was necessary for his beliefs but Carlos took his fight internationally, aligning himself, to various degrees, with various groups and eventually, as the film tells it, buying into some of what he was fighting against.

    Starting with Carlos’ first assignment, Assayas’ film outlines the rise and fall of a charismatic revolutionary, a man who wowed men and women with his speech and passion and who, for a number of years, was at the forefront of international terrorism. Bringing Carlos to life is Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez who, over the course of five hours, speaks countless languages and woos the audience with his appeal, bringing us into close quarters with a terrorist and presenting a likable persona we find ourselves liking despite our better judgment.

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