Monthly Archives: September 2011
Review – Dream House
Dream House (Jim Sheridan, 2011): Horror fans are by nature a forgiving lot, willing to overlook balsa-grade characterizations and visible zippers for a few decent jolts. When a scary movie fails to provide on that most basic level, however, the theater floor … Continue reading
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Reviews – Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, Dexter Season 5
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (Eli Craig, 2010): Slapdash Scary Movie cycle aside, the slasher genre has proven fairly resistant to effective satire, mainly because the movies themselves already go so far over the top. (After Jason goes to space, where … Continue reading
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Review – Killer Elite
Killer Elite (Gary McKendry, 2011): Of all the possible complaints to be lodged against a film starring Jason Statham, “too convoluted” would seem to be at the bottom of the list. Nevertheless, this commendably 70’s thriller suffers from an overly tangled narrative. … Continue reading
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Review – Brighton Rock
Brighton Rock (Rowan Joffe, 2010): A hydrochloric religious satire disguised as a cracking gang thriller, Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock is best remembered for its main character, a 17-year-old arrested-development sociopath named Pinkie, who was terrifyingly brought to life by Richard Attenborough in 1947’s film … Continue reading
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9/14/11- Don’t Go In the Woods
Red State (Kevin Smith, 2011): Kevin giveth, Kevin (majorly) taketh away: Potentially terrific lengthy Michael Parks monologue annihilated by barn-broad reaction shots, possibly ballsy ending squibbed out via a coda featuring some of the worst writing of the filmmaker’s career, and so on … Continue reading
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9/12/11 – Low Blows and Mod Cons
Warrior (Gavin O’C0nnor, 2011): Cathartic, in the literal sense, with an ending that’s close to dead-solid perfect. Pretty superb, especially when you factor in all of the ways that it could have flown off of the rails. Joel Edgerton the quiet … Continue reading
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The Icky Shuffle: Contagion Movies
And what turned out to be a fairly productive week closes out with a tie-in piece to Contagion over at Amazon’s blog. Check it out, why don’t you? (They could use the traffic.)
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Reviews – Columbiana, Scream of the Banshee, Monogamy
Columbiana (Olivier Megaton, 2011): As a producer, Luc Besson (The Transporter series, Taken, District B-13) has made extremely profitable B-movie hay out of a fairly strict formula incorporating whisper-thin femme fatales, parkour, Gaultier, and guns. Colombiana, another Besson collaboration with director Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3), doesn’t … Continue reading
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Review – Contagion
Comfort food of a very peculiar sort, the all-star disaster movie cycle of the 70’s derived no small amount of guiltless fun from an iron clad formula: Large-scale bloodless apocalypse at the end of the first reel, followed by a series … Continue reading
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