Having suffered the indignity of being made to run around after Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie while they showcased their “talent” on TV’s The Simple Life, unit producer Jeff Fisher conceived a story telling of a pampered LA rich bitch who winds up in a backwater Dakota town and is pursued by a vicious serial killer. Amazing how ideas sometimes just come to you.
Click here to read the full review at Suite101.com.
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.
A delightfully whimsical example of the creative explosion currently going on in South Korea, Seongho Yoon’s immensely enjoyable debut follows a hugely imaginative, hopelessly inetp young filmmaker driven to distraction, and more, as he sweats out an indie script.
Click here to read the full review at Suite101.com
2008
Starring: Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Jason Mewes, Jeff Anderson, Justin Long, Katie Morgan, Craig Robinson
Director: Kevin Smith
Runtime: 102 Minutes
Distributor: The Weinstein Company
Rating: R
When last Kevin Smith tried to do something different than the familiar shtick the result, Jersey Girl, was world responded with little more than a collective shrug and a spatter of “seen worse” mutterings. It wasn’t his entire fault mind. The now defunct “Bennifer” factor hung round the film’s neck like an anchor, there was a cutsey moppet angle, and Affleck’s critical appeal was itself in the toilet. Still the awkward mishmash of some quite downbeat plotlines (mother dies in childbirth) with the typically frank Smith chitchat about masturbation and the like just didn’t gel and the entire affair was just wholly alien to what fans had come to expect.
At first glance this latest offering from everyone’s favorite fanboy turned filmmaker would seem to suggest he has been coaxed out of his comfort zone once more. Except this time he seems to have a much more solid grasp of how to extend himself safely and has calculated exactly how far he can push his limited repertoire before the breaking point.
Click here to read the full review at WiFly Radio.
2008
Starring: Robert De Niro, John Tuturro, Robin Wright Penn, Bruce Willis, Catherine Keener, Stanley Tucci, Sean Penn, Michael Wincott
Director: Barry Levinson
Runtime: 107 Minutes
Distributor: Magnolia Pictures
Rating: R
Ask anyone who works in Hollywood about the movie business and almost without exception the first thing they will tell you is that they hate it. All the glamour and the glitz and the bright lights of the big city only serve to blind us from the never-ending ballet of petty power plays and idiosyncratic egomania that make up the business. It really is the most perplexing thing, but if you gathered together in one place all the people who work in the business that hate the business, the result would stand alongside the great wall of China as one of only two man made objects that can be seen from space. Of course it begs the question if it’s so awful then why do they do it? But let’s leave that one for another day.
Based on Art Linson’s scathing expose detailing his tenure as a producer on the Fox lot during the latter half of the nineties, his tell-all airing of insider dirty laundry didn’t so much bite the hand that feeds as rip it off, piss on it and then try and try to fuck the bloody stump. This fictionalized dramatization by Barry Levinson (a filmmaker who has been in town long enough to have seen firsthand the death of the studio and the rise of the conglomerate) dilutes some of the books acidic quality and changes names to protect the guilty.
2006
Starring: Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale Christopher Walken, David Hasselhoff, Henry Winkler, Sean Astin, Julie Kavner
Director: Frank Coraci
Runtime: 107 Minutes
Distributor: Columbia
Rating: PG-13
On the surface this premise sounds like Adam Sandler gold and your standard popcorn slapstick affair. Sandler is Michael Newman, a man who is impatient with his life and neglectful of his family. One night while wandering through a home appliance store he finds Morty (Walken), a mad scientist with the requisite wild eyes and crazy hair who offers to solve all his problems. Morty offers him a universal remote control that will do to the real world exactly what it does to a television. Relishing this opportunity to skip the parts of his life that he doesn’t want to sit through and get to where he wants to be that much quicker he duly obliges.
1980
Starring: Chevy Chase, Michael O’Keefe, Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray, Ted Knight
Director: Harold Ramis
Runtime: 98 Minutes
Distributor: MGM
Rating: R
Hailed by some as a genuine classic of American cinema and the quintessential golfing comedy (well, it’s not exactly a large field to head is it), time has not been kind to this Harold Ramis directorial debut. One of first and perhaps the best (although it’s still awful) of that unfortunate smattering of goofball comedies with sporting themes that emerged during the early eighties, Caddyshack follows the anarchic goings on of Bushwood, an upscale country club. The name is a jab at exclusive single sex country clubs and that is about as funny as things get. At the center of this happy mess is Danny Noonan (O’Keefe), a young caddy who dreams of going to college only his parents can’t afford it. Lucky for him there is a scholarship offered by the club to caddies and if Danny can only bring himself to kiss the board’s ass then he might just be in with a shot.
2007
Starring: Simon Pegg, Thandie Newton, Hank Azaria, Dylan Moran, Harish Patel, India de Beaufort
Director: David Schwimmer
Runtime: 95 Minutes
Distributor: Picturehouse
Rating: PG-13
Shortly before it was sapped with a six-month delay (never a good sign), New York saw a special sneak preview of Simon Pegg’s much anticipated new film, Run Fatboy Run. Pegg himself was there to promote the film, along with fellow star Thandie Newton, writer Michael Ian Black and director David Schwimmer. Riding the escalator up to the venue we were pleasantly surprised to find that we were in fact standing behind David Schwimmer who got off and rushed to join Pegg for the official event photos with the eager group of press. Pegg was his usual friendly, jovial self, joking with event staff and cutting a figure of a man who is enjoying bringing his work to the American market. Of course British patrons have been privileged with Pegg’s tv work years before Shaun of the Dead made him a star. What strikes you about Pegg is just how effortlessly nice the man is. He was very careful to give time to everyone who waited patiently for the official event photos to finish in order to exchange a few words, take a picture or ask for an autograph. We contributed in our own small way, as Pegg was grateful to us for the loan of a Sharpie to make the signing easier. “I won’t keep it,” said Pegg, “It will probably leak and stain my suit.” Thank you Simon, some other stars are just thieving gypsies.
2006
Starring: Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Harry Shearer, Catherine O’Hara, Jennifer Coolidge, Parker Posey, Michael McKean, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, Jane Lynch, Ricky Gervais
Director: Christopher Guest
Runtime: 86 Minutes
Distributor: Warner independent Pictures
Rating: PG-13
Christopher Guest has to be the luckiest man in the world. He is married to one of the hottest and most celebrated Hollywood women of them all, Jamie Lee Curtis, and has a career that basically entails being given money to make improv comedy films with his friends. Having turned lampooning into a genuine art form over the course of his career, he has carved out a small but reliable niche for himself with his pseudo documentary style (he finds the term “mockumentary” distasteful stating that it is never his intention to mock anybody). Since taking the world by storm with the bona fide genius that was This is Spinal Tap, Guest has taken singular pleasure by exploring the eccentricities of well insulated communities that tend to operate on a plane of reality separate from the rest of us.
This latest effort notably drops the customary documentary format and plays like a straight narrative film, but it almost doesn’t matter given the setting and the subject matter. Behind the scenes at a movie studio shooting a pretentious genre picture about a dysfunctional Jewish family that suddenly captures Tinseltown’s attention with talk of Oscar buzz, it sounds like it was tailor made for Guest and his crew to poke fun at. The story still plays out like a fly-on-the-wall and all the usual suspects are present and correct. The now notorious set of players make up Guest’s troupe, all making whole colorfully quirky characters, each one more oblivious to the way they come across than the last. Everything is here.
2005
Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Katie Holmes, J.K Simmons, Robert Duvall, Sam Elliot, Maria Bello, Cameron Bright, William H. Macy
Director: Jason Reitman
Runtime: 92 Minutes
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Rating: R
If there’s one thing director Jason Reitman should know it’s his comedy. After all he is the son of one of the most successful comedy directors Hollywood has produced, Ivan Reitman. With Thank you For Smoking, Reitman Jr. working from the novel by Christopher Buckly offers up a stealthy satire on our society that they see as purportedly out of control with political correctness.
Nick Naylor (Eckhart) is vice president and chief spokesman for The Academy of Tobacco Studies, a group dedicated to lobbying in favor of big tobacco. Nick’s job is essentially to take the stink out of shit and he diligently performs his duties with a wizardry charm that affords him great success, much to the enragement of the pc anti-smoking crowd. Faced with a bill fronted by a weaselly Wisconsin senator Finistrre (Macy), Naylor is forced to go on the offensive on behalf of his company’s product. But that is not all he has to contend with; his son needs a role model, his wife can’t stand him, and a sexy young reporter (a perfectly perky Katie Holmes) looking for a story might just be the one thing he can’t talk his way past.
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