Quick Review – Lockout

Posted in movies by - Apr 15, 2012
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Quick Review – Lockout
  • Rated:
  • Release Date: 4/13/2012

‘Lockout’ is to ‘Escape from New York’ as Frank Stallone is to Sylvester Stallone. Similar in design, but somehow inferior in all measurable aspects.

To say ‘Lockout’ is derivative is a bit of an insult to all of the superior movies it’s cobbled together from. The central plot will be familiar to everyone who saw ‘Escape from New York’. The protagonist is heavily cribbed from John McClain in the ‘Die Hard’ movies. The film’s energy level is clearly jacked from some kind of corporate training movie. Hot garbage in every direction.

Guy Pearce is Snow, a vaguely defined badass who gets wrongfully …

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Quick Review: The Dead

Posted in movies by - Apr 13, 2012
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Quick Review: The Dead

Our popular culture is suffering from a zombie glut. There’s no getting around it. Zombie novels, zombie movies, zombie episodic television; we’re clearly only a step or two away from a zombie sitcom.

‘The Dead’, however, deserves your consideration in spite of all this overexposure of the undead.

First of all, it’s not set in dystopian American suburbia. It’s set in dystopian rural Africa. That may not sound like much, but it adds some interesting texture to the proceedings.

It’s also quite ballsy in its way. It’s a Romero-esque slow-zombie flick. There is no explanation of the outbreak, and there is no hope …

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Quick Review – Phenomena

Posted in movies by - Apr 13, 2012
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Quick Review – Phenomena

I’ve written a few hundred of these little movie reviews. You do a thing like that, and you start to see patterns. The same complaints repeat themselves, none more so than the disappointing, focus-grouped third act.

Well, whatever its failings, ‘Phenomena’ is categorically not one of those. ‘Phenomena’ is the diametric opposite of a Hollywood horror flick. The first two acts float lazily by in a fog of stilted dialogue and minor scares. Baby Jennifer Connolly’s character has been shipped off to a generically creepy Swiss boarding school. Someone (it’s not clear early on) gets killed with scissors. We learn that …

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Quick Review – The Raid: Redemption

Posted in movies by - Apr 13, 2012
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Quick Review – The Raid: Redemption

Holy crap.

‘The Raid: Redemption’ has about as much plot as Donkey Kong, but you aren’t going to care.
There isn’t a lot of acting on display, and you’re not going to care. The twists are all familiar to fans of action film, and you’re not going to care.

None of that stuff is the point here.

The point is that Silat, the national martial art of Indonesia, is astonishingly photogenic. So photogenic and bad-ass that you will gladly watch people use it against each other for 90 minutes even though there’s very little else going on.

Our hero is a SWAT-type policeman. He’s sent …

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Quick Review – The Hunger Games

Posted in movies by - Apr 01, 2012
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Quick Review – The Hunger Games

At this point, everyone with even a passing curiosity has probably seen ‘The Hunger Games’. It’s that kind of phenomenon.

That doesn’t mean it’s great, of course. It just means that the movies are a thin gruel in the late winter, and it’s the first event movie in a while. The film is also based on an implausibly popular Young Adult trilogy about kids forced to fight each other to the death, and who doesn’t love child gladiators?

‘The Hunger Games’ serves its purpose nicely, but it’s not an especially great movie. The film is competent on all fronts, and packed with …

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Quick Review – John Carter

Posted in movies by - Mar 29, 2012
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Quick Review – John Carter

‘John Carter’ is being called the biggest flop of all time. That’s pretty unfair. I mean, it might lose money for Disney, but it’s not ‘Waterworld’.

It’s not a great movie, but I’ve seen a lot of worse movies make insane amounts of money. ‘John Carter’ is a perfectly serviceable port of the Edgar Rice Burroughs series that spawned it, and I think the criticism it’s been receiving is misguided.

Misapprehension #1 – Opening weekend grosses have some relation to a film’s quality.

I shouldn’t have to say it, but three days is a pretty small window for judging the merits of a …

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Quick Review – Silent House

Posted in movies by - Mar 16, 2012
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Quick Review – Silent House

First of all, I’m going to pre-nominate Elizabeth Olson’s tank top for ‘Least Supporting Actor in a Low-budget Horror Film’. The Least Supporting category is usually hotly contested, what with horror films being mostly about hot teenagers making terrible choices. This performance is special, however. I’m pretty sure the tank in question was so derelict in its duties that I saw some underboob, from the neckhole. That is some next-level, NASA-type tank toppery. I’m still not sure how it happened.

There is almost no premise to this film, at least for the first 30 minutes. For that time it’s …

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Quick Review – Casa de Mi Padre

Posted in life after cable by - Mar 13, 2012
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Quick Review – Casa de Mi Padre

So, it is exactly what it says on the tin. Will Ferrell as a blundering manchild, like usual, but this time he blunders about entirely in Spanish. Shot in the style of 80s mexican television, complete with musical numbers, double exposures and some of the most endearingly faux-threadbare special effects since ‘Black Dynamite’.

It could pretty easily have been just a stunt, and 90 minutes of Ferrell stumbling through Spanish dialogue could easily have grown tiresome. I have to confess, however, to being charmed by the cast’s dogged adherence to the wacky premise.

Ferrell’s Armando is a the dimwit som of a …

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Quick Review – The Lorax

Posted in movies by - Mar 07, 2012
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Quick Review – The Lorax

Double You Tee Eff.

I get it. It’s expensive to put new ideas on screen. It’s cheaper, and more profitable besides, to recycle ideas that already have a following. Nostalgia is a reasonable replacement for inspiration, if receipts are your only metric.

Eventually, though, you’re going to do irreparable damage to our nostalgia buds. Feeding us poorly thought out, cynical versions of things we once loved is just going to teach us to hate our own memories.

I’m a Doctor Seuss fan, for realzies. I have a letter from him. I wrote a sloppy poem for him that’s included in the senior yearbook …

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Quick Review – Kill List

Posted in movies by - Mar 07, 2012
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Quick Review – Kill List

‘Kill List’ left me with a minor brain bleed.

I won’t pretend that I know what genre this thing belongs in. It’s partly a highly improvisational study of the effects of joblessness and stress on families and friends. It’s also an incredibly graphic, brutal action movie about hit men. Most distressingly, it’s a British supernatural thriller from the 70s. If you’re into the genre, you’ll quickly suss out which ones I mean.

For the most part it’s smoothly paced and carefully observed. The cast gets screenplay credit, and their largely improvised conversations feel natural and genuine, anchoring what is otherwise a very …

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