Law Abiding Citizen (review)
It had me at *kaboom,* this thorny moral conundrum of a film, and then it lost me when it threw out all the tricksy pointedness in favor of thoughtless, counterproductive badassery.
Gerard Butler
Gamer (review)
It’s visually incomprehensible, emotionally empty, thematically nihilistic, almost entirely plotless… and it thinks those are virtues.
September 4: DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings
We know how it is: You’d like to go to the movies this weekend, but it’s the last weekend of the summer and the last chance to burn dead animals on the barbecue — yum! — before the cool weather sets in. But you can have a multiplex-like experience at home with a collection of … more…
my week at the movies: ‘Extract,’ ‘An Education,’ ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,’ ‘All About Steve,’ ‘Disgrace,’ ‘Gamer’
UPDATED: It’s turning out to be a much busier screening week than I expected. I’ve added two movies: The Boys Are Back (opens in the U.S. on September 25, and in the U.K. on January 15, 2010), starring Clive Owen as an Australian single dad, and Broken Embraces (opened in the U.K. on August 28; … more…
caption this! image from ‘Gamer’
Fun for Wednesdays! We look at an image from an upcoming movie and write snarky, witty, or otherwise entertaining captions for it. No prizes, it’s just for fun. Gamer, from the guys who gave us the Crank movies, will open on Friday without benefit of press screenings. I’ll be there, however, and will report asap … more…
trailer break: ‘Law Abiding Citizen’
Take a break from work: watch a trailer… I mentioned a couple days ago, when I featured the trailer for Gamer, that it sounded like maybe Gerard Butler’s American accent had improved dramatically over its dreadfulness in The Ugly Truth. And here we can tell that yes, he’s been working with a voice coach or … more…
trailer break: ‘Gamer’
Take a break from work: watch a trailer… So the guys who did Crank and Crank: High Voltage — Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor — are back… and it looks a lot like a lot of other shit we’ve seen before, doesn’t it? Prisoners forced to play bloodsports? A game that’s really real? Gee, why … more…
dream cast: Peter Jackson’s ‘The Hobbit’ (to give him a boot in the ass)
It’s Thursday, so it’s time for another installment in the semiregular Dream Cast, in which we take a classic movie, TV show, or — NEW! — book, perferrably something with Xer appeal that we can either trash or have fun with, and cast a production or recast a hypothetical (or sometimes not so hypothetical) remake … more…
July 24: DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings
We know how it is: You’d like to go to the movies this weekend, but have you seen the price of a ticket these days? That’s the real “ugly truth” at the multiplex. But you can have a multiplex-like experience at home with a collection of the right DVDs. And when someone asks you on … more…
The Ugly Truth (review)
I’m trying to figure out when ‘romantic comedies’ turned into ‘let’s throw two really despicable and unpleasant people together in the first act so they can hate on each other through the second act until they magically fall in love in the third act.’
