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Armageddon

December 1st, 2008 admin

1998
Starring: Bruce Willis. Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton, Steven Buscemi, Michael Clark Duncan, Owen Wilson, Will Patton
Director: Michael Bay
Runtime: 159 Minutes
Distributor: Touchstone
Rating: PG-13

When NASA has a shuttle destroyed by a meteor shower, they discover that it is only the initial phase of a much larger problem. An asteroid the size of Texas is heading straight for earth and when it hits in eighteen days nothing will survive. In a desperate attempt to save the planet NASA scrambles to recruit a team of misfit, deep-core drillers for a mission that hopes to land a shuttle on the asteroid, drill a hole to the fault line and nuke it to tiny pieces before it reaches Earth and kills us all.

You know that you have an odd one on your hands when a Michael Bay disaster film with a 41% review average at Rotten Tomatoes is chosen for a DVD release as part of The Criterion Collection – a prestigious honor where selection is based on meeting the criteria of being either an important classic or an example of innovative, contemporary cinema at its finest. Who directed this again? As it stands, Armageddon is one of the most polarizing films of recent times nominated for both the Saturn award for best science fiction film and the Raspberry award for worst picture of the year. Star Bruce Willis called it a very serious and important film; co-star Billy Bob Thornton called it the worst film he has ever been involved with citing it as nothing more than a creatively empty paycheck. Love it or loathe it though, Michael Bay’s assault on your eyes, ears and gag reflex is very hard to ignore if for no other reason than because its so damn loud and pumped-up.

Quantum of Solace

November 17th, 2008 admin

2008
Starring: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Gemma Arterton, Jeffery Wright, Giancarlo Giannini
Director: Marc Forster
Runtime: 106 Minutes
Distributor: MGM
Rating: PG-13

After the meaty origin story that was Casino Royale was greeted with almost universal acclaim for its back to basics bravado it would seem the honeymoon really is over for this latest incarnation of cinema’s longest running franchise. Looking to build on the goodwill accrued refining the bloated Bond into something efficient enough to shed the anachronistic shackles, first time Bond director Marc Foster and scripter Paul Haggis have trimmed so much off the top as to render the series virtually emaciated and delivered a film as confounding as its nonsensical title.

Picking up right where Royale left off, Quantum opens hard and fast with Daniel Craig as Bond weaving his bullet riddled Aston Martin in an out of traffic on a winding Sienna cliff road duly dispatching the customary bad guys in hot pursuit to deliver Mr. White for interrogation. It’s an interrogation that’s short-lived as an assassin is only to happy to illustrate just what White means when he says “we have people everywhere.”

Click here to read the full review at WiflyRadio.com.

Posted in Action/Adventure, Drama, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »

JCVD

November 13th, 2008 admin

Broke, depressed, and exhausted, down on his luck eighties icon Jean Claude Van Damme returns home in search of sanctuary and a little privacy. Instead he finds himself embroiled in an international media circus when the local police mistakenly believe he is the mastermind behind a botched armed robbery turned siege at a local post office.

Click here to read the full review at Suite101.com.

Posted in Action/Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »

Max Payne

October 17th, 2008 admin

2008
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Ludacris, Chris O’Donnell, Olga Kurylenko
Director: John Moore
Runtime: 100 Minutes
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Rating: PG-13

Despite delivering nothing but painful, torturous drivel from as far back as 1993 when Bob Hoskins brought us Super Mario Brothers complete with that God awful Roxette theme tune, Hollywood continues to spit out movies based on video games in hope that someday one of them might be slightly more appealing to sit through than a root canal.

We approach this offering for the first time with a sense of hope. As anyone who has played through this riveting, bullet ridden revenge saga can tell you, the blasting and the body count are offset with a tightly scripted, thoroughly absorbing neo noir story laced with copious amounts of betrayal. But sadly director John Moore has delivered something that surely rivals non-alcoholic beer as perhaps the most pointless thing ever to exist – the PG-13 shoot-em-up.

Click here to read the full review at WiFly Radio.

Posted in Action/Adventure, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest

October 15th, 2008 admin

$Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Man\'s Chest, Disney, 2008$

2006
Starring: Johnny Depp, Keira Knightly, Orlando Bloom, Jack Davenport, Bill Nighy, Stellan Skarsgard
Director: Gore Verbinski
Runtime: 150 minutes
Studio: Disney
Rating: PG-13

“Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, a pirate’s life for me.” That’s what Disney executives could be heard singing quietly to themselves in the run up to this highly anticipated sequel to the surprise smash hit of 2003. It must have seemed like an awful risk – basing a large budget film about a dead genre, starring some up and coming actors and based on a frankly crappy theme park ride in Orlando. It worked great guns though thanks mainly to the magic ingredient, Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow. A magnificent ponsing prat who ram raided the film, swiping every scene as if it were swag and sailing off into the horizon with it. With the look of Mick Jagger and the brain-fried stagger of Keith Richards, Depp carried the film almost single-handed. But would the formula repeat itself a second time around?

Spiderman 3

September 27th, 2008 admin

2007
Starring: Toby Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Rosemary Harris, Bryce Dallas Howard, J.K. Simmons
Director: Sam Raimi
Runtime: 140 Minutes
Rating: PG-13
Distributor: Universal

Far more than Memorial Day, the end of the college semester or the sweltering sticky heat, the beginning of Summer is these days heralded in by one thing – the arrival of the tent pole blockbuster movie. With one of the most impressive slates of releases for many, many years 2007 boasted the likes of Transformers, Pirates 3, The Bourne Ultimatum and Die Hard 4 to look forward to, which meant Spidey had his work cut out to be crowned king of the franchise pile.

Almost all films begin to wane and lose their magic as they move beyond the sequel into the realm of the franchise. It is the inevitable law of diminishing returns. Oddly in this case, Spiderman 3 appears to go the other direction and in excess becomes a victim of its own success. Spiderman 2 was simply so good that poor Sam Raimi seems to have no idea just how to top it and by being entrenched with the idea of making this one bigger and better than anything we’ve ever seen seems to have lost sight of what that really means and settled on the concept of “more.” More story, more special effects, more characters, more villains. There are three villains here, four if you count evil Spiderman. Pick one, Mr. Raimi, or even two. Four is just too much, we don’t know how to handle it and apparently neither does he. On top of this we have to make room for Peter and M.J. and Aunt May, as well as all the returning support cast, along with a boatload new ones. It’s an ambitious, overreaching mess and Spiderman 3 sags badly with a bloated and indigestible story.

Blood Diamond

September 25th, 2008 admin

2006
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connolly, Arnold Vosloo, Kagiso Kuypers, David Harewood, Michael Sheen
Director: Edward Zwick
Runtime: 143 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: R

Back in 2003 director Edward Zwick gave us The Last Samurai and with it his take on Western imperialism encroaching on a shrinking empire struggling to reconcile itself while dragging its people kicking and screaming towards violence laden progress. Those same underlying fingerprints that spell out ‘thank you for saving us from our own decadence, brave westerner’ can be found all over this action film masquerading as a humanitarian alarm bell. While Blood Diamond purports itself to be a serious film carrying an important social message about rampant human exploitation in the world’s forgotten continent, there is enough blood, guts and hi-octane explosions on display here to make Omaha Beach look like a Butlins camp.

Casino Royale

September 23rd, 2008 admin

2006
Starring: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench, Jeffery Wright
Director: Martin Campbell
Runtime: 144 Minutes
Distributor: MGM
Rating: PG-13

Whilst indisputably the absolute mother of all franchises, our beloved Bond films have seen their share of ups, downs, and almost as many brushes with death as the man himself. Chief offender was the aging and frankly wooden Roger Moore who in refusing to relinquish the role gracefully almost killed it off with A View To A Kill, which was made when he was a whopping fifty-seven-years-old! The series was reinvigorated with a fury thanks to Pierce Brosnan and Goldeneye, but despite staying impressively toned, come Die Another Day he still looked like a man who could quite conceivably be scampering about on the beach with his grandchildren as much as Halle Berry. In a post Jason Bourne world Bond needed to move with the times or risk becoming obsolete and thankfully, on the strength of this performance, Daniel Craig just might be the best James Bond of them all.

Going back to Ian Flemming’s very first novel, the story follows the world’s least conspicuous secret agent and shows us how exactly he became the suave, sexy, one man world saver that we have come to know and love. Casino Royale charts his promotion to double 0 status and his first assignment. Sent after an investment banker who finances terrorist organizations around the world, Bond is charged with the task of winning all of his money at the card table with Texas Hold ‘Em instead of Baccarat the game of choice for the new millennium.

MI:3

September 17th, 2008 admin

2006
Starring: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Kerri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Laurence Fishburn, Michelle Monaghan
Director: JJ Abrams
Runtime: 126 Minutes
Distributor: Paramount
Rating: PG-13

MI:3 will forever be known to history as the film that got Tom Cruise fired. After a slew of negative publicity, mostly concerning his religion and Oprah’s couch, The Cruiser was released from his fifteen-year partnership with Paramount. Looking at it in retrospect, it is not hard to see why. This film is a walking testament to the potential disasters of star power and what happens when an actor has too much creative control over his image. JJ Abrams is an accomplished director who has proved that imagination and suave trump money (see Alias), but saddled with The Cruiser and his baggage, has delivered little more than the most expensive PR campaign of all time; a $150 million attempt to convince the world that Tom Cruise is a both a great guy and a loving, doting husband. Thanks for that, but where is the dark and brooding espionage thriller you promised us? This is a post Bourne universe, boys, you have to work for your audience these days.

Superman Returns

September 13th, 2008 admin

2006
Starring: Brandon Routh, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, Parker Posey, Sam Huntington
Director: Bryan Singer
Runtime: 154 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros
Rating: PG-13

A long-awaited project stuck in development for many years and then rescued at the eleventh hour by director Bryan Singer, who left the third X-Men film to take charge, only to find his thunder somewhat stolen in the belatedly resurrected superhero department by Batman Begins. Arriving the following summer just three weeks later than X:3, the film had a lot of expectations to satisfy, but comes over like the film that it is – one that has had way too many ideas rattling around inside itself for way too long.

Superman Returns is bloated, disjointed and my God is it long. 154 minutes should make fan boys jump for joy as they wet themselves at the prospect of plenty of room available for both exhilarating action and heart stopping romance, but instead we get nothing much of either. Singer is content to take his time, way too much time as it turns out, setting the story up for, well, we’re not really sure and if there is a primary problem with Superman Returns it would be the lack of cohesion and the absence of a strong narrative spine.