November 18th, 2009 admin
Starring: David Duchovney, Natascha McElhone, Madeline Martin, Evan Handler, Pamela Adlon, Eva Amurri, Kathleen Turner
Created By: Tom Kapinos
Network: Showtime
Airtime: Sundays, 10:00pm EST
One of the crowning jewels in Showtime’s impressive slate of original programming, this sassy, sexy take on relationships in the new millennium started out as an deceptively layered hymm to the harmony of monogamy and the blissful intoxication of a happy marriage. Wearing the hat of a hip singles show, espousing the joy of hooking up, laced with copious amounts of gorgeous, naked flesh, those who stuck around found the balled of cynical writer Hank Moody to be one mourning the lost art of seduction, the death of romance, and pining for just a little bit of love in today’s lovemaking. A modern day libertine to be sure, Hank was a tortured soul who deep down just wanted to be with his wife, Karen.
Bidding goodbye to her at the end of season two, and with it the rock upon which the show is built, this misfiring third season has been one long, difficult search for some dramatic meat. In a real-world sense its entirely understandable for actress Natascha McElhone, whose husband suddenly and tragically passed away last year, to want to take some time, but in terms of the show it was a disaster. A rotating gallery of vague distractions, half-hearted love interests, and strange bedfellows are no substitute for a star-crossed lovers tale, and there is something oddly lazy and lowbrow about Hank’s exploits this season thus far.
Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.
Posted in American Television, Reviews | No Comments »
November 16th, 2009 admin
Starring: Susanna Blakeslee, Erin Torpey, Corey Burton, Roger Craig Smith, Gilbert Gottfried, Linda Larkin
Director: David Block
Runtime: 56 Minutes
Distributor: Disney
Rating: NR
With a price tag of $20.99 and a runtime just shy of an hour, parents may perhaps baulk at this most recent Disney parental go-between, which will happily entertain their kids so that they don’t have to, deciding that the rate is less in line with your average babysitter than a live-in, inner-city nanny who also performs light housework.
A pure piece of candy-coated bubblegum fantasy aimed firmly at the under tens the Disney Princess Enchanted Tales series blends traditional animated fantasy with songs and simplified life lessons into bite sized developmental education with the added benefit of perhaps a little piece and quiet.
Dividing itself into two separate chapters loosely knotted together by the soothing, non-threatening, warble of narrator Susanna Blakeslee (she even sounds like a Disney character), this follow your dreams edition reintroduces us to the continuing adventures of Princess Aurora, aka Sleeping Beauty, and Princess Jasmine, star of Aladdin.
Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.
Posted in Animation, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »
November 13th, 2009 admin
2009
Starring: Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Colm Meaney, Bruce McGill, Regina Hall, Emerald-Angel Young, Leslie Bibb
Director: F. Gary Grey
Runtime: 109 Minutes
Distributor: Overture Film
Rating: R
With a sprawling yet tightly wound Machiavellian conspiracy at its center, this overblown game of cat and mouse between a cocksure Philadelphia DA and the grieving husband and father-turned-vengeful psychopath wronged by him offers itself up as a thinking man’s actioner. Which is ironic really because if you actually stop to think about it for even a second the entire mess starts to unravel. The latest from director F. Gary Grey this undercooked psychological tussle wraps itself in pretensions of something deeper, offering musings on the glaring imperfections and inadequacies that riddle our justice system, but plays like a big budget Law & Order episode with Bond styling crossed with The Shawshank Redemption.
In something of an odd piece of casting Gerard Butler is Clyde Shelton, doting husband and happy father. Happy for about ninety seconds until a pair of thugs crash through the door, knife him and slaughter his family. Realizing he can preserve his conviction rate against a risky jury trial, dedicated but cold DA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) cuts a deal; one thug to death row, the other to a holiday camp for 3-5 in exchange for testimony. Despite the physique of a Greek God Butler cuts a surprisingly convincing figure as the devastated family man whose life has just been eviscerated by a seemingly senseless act of violence. But who wants to know about that guy? Not Grey, he wants to get to the cool shit!
Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.
Posted in Feature Films, Reviews, Thriller | No Comments »
November 7th, 2009 admin
2009
Starring: Max Records, James Gandolfini, Katherine Keener, Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Dano, Forest Whitaker, Lauren Ambrose
Director: Spike Jonze
Runtime: 94 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating: PG
For more than a decade offbeat auteur Spike Jonze, director of surrealist headscratchers Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, dragged his labor of love vision for Maurice Sendak’s celebrated children’s fable about a bedroom busting Odyssey through a troubled boy’s imagination all around town looking for a studio to work with. Universal threatened for a good long time before baulking and ultimately the property ended up in the hands of Warner Bros. Then disaster! Early test footage of some admittedly wonky animatronics found its way online causing uproar and the collective soiling of executive smalls. “Think of the children!” they wailed, as rumors circulated of narrative darkness traumatizing terrified tots at focus group screenings.
While certainly reactionary – the film is nowhere near as scary as some would have you believe – Warner’s concerns were not without merit. Jonze absolutely was not thinking of the children, he was thinking of us. As has been correctly summarized already in several reviews, Where the Wild things Are is not a kids movie. Nor is it an ironic hipster film, the likes of Labyrinth and Dark Crystal. Rather, it is a move aimed at adults about what it was like to be a kid.
Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.
Posted in Fantasy, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »
November 6th, 2009 admin
1939
Starring: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Margaret Hamilton
Director: Victor Fleming
Runtime: 102 Minutes
Distributor: MGM
Rating: G
The fact that seventy years on this screen adaptation of perhaps America’s most celebrated fairytale has lost none of its power to enchant and astonish adults and children alike tells you everything. First published in 1900 by author L. Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz was greeted with Harry Potter like acclaim, spawning a subsequent thirteen more books, a stage musical, twenty-six unofficial stories, a television mini-series, and a dark as midnight 1985 sequel. Yet this 1939 production remains the definitive Oz experience, rediscovered with all its magical wonder by each new generation.
Few films have seared themselves into our collective consciousness and achieved such cultural iconography with such lasting impact. That it is so universally well received and remains so un-weathered by changing trends, shifting ideals, and new media is down to it’s many subtle layers. There are as many different ways to read The Wizard of Oz as there are yellow bricks in the road; it’s a fairytale; a musical; a coming-of-age story. It’s a social commentary on depression era America; a girl’s sexual awakening; The Odyssey for kids still learning to read.
Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.
Posted in Fantasy, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »
November 3rd, 2009 admin
Though it has never managed to achieve anything beyond cult status in the US (a planned American remake never made it beyond a pilot) Red Dwarf has steadily evolved in its native Britain from a quirky sci-fi sitcom into a veritable cultural intuition as one of the most beloved comedy series of all time. Originally a short radio play titled Dave Hollins: Space Cadet, penned by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, Red Dwarf is a sci-fi slacker comedy about a lazy, drunken slob named Dave Lister (Craig Charles). Lister has no ambition, the personal hygiene of a homeless teenager, and subsists on a diet consisting entirely of curry and lager. He also happens to be the last human being in the universe.
Marooned in deep space aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf on which he served after three million years in hyper-sleep, Lister’s long, arguably fruitless journey back to Earth combined with his amiable nobility struck a chord with audiences and cemented the show’s popularity. Keeping our hero company are his companions Cat (Danny John Jules), a preening fashionista that evolved from his pet cat; Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), a neurotic sanitation mechanoid; and Rimmer (Chris Barrie), a hologram of his dead bunkmate who exhibits the ego and ambition of a Caesar but displays the ability of a particularly untalented cretin.
Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.
Posted in British Television, Reviews | No Comments »
October 30th, 2009 admin
2009
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
Director: Lars Von Trier
Runtime: 104 Minutes
Distributor: IFC Films
Rating: R
It’s a common misconception that Danish director Lars Von Trier cares what people think – he doesn’t. For evidence of that you need look no further than the press conference immediately following Antichrist’s Cannes unveiling during which one puffed-up twerp representing the reactionary British rag The Daily Mail demanded Von Trier “Justify it!” to which the diminutive Dane flatly replied: “You are all my guests. It is not the other way around.”
In fact, given his notoriously mischievous nature and his love/hate relationship with critics who exhaustively try to derive meaning from his various artistic whims, it is entirely possibly that he’s just having a right royal giggle at our collective expense. Von Trier has even been known to remark with a chuckle that he simply tells the same story about an ill-fated femme doomed to ignominy by a misguided man over and over in a variety of different genres. Antichrist, if you haven’t guessed by the title, is a horror film.
Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.
Posted in Feature Films, Horror, Reviews | No Comments »
October 26th, 2009 admin
2008
Starring:
Director(s): Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre Disciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, Richard McGuire
Runtime: 83 Minutes
Distributor: IFC Films
Rating: NR
Brought to us by the celebrated French graphic house and studio Prima Linea, Fear(s) of the Dark is an omnibus anthology of horror themed animation from some of the industry’s premier graphic designers, artist, and comic book creators. Five self-contained stories spliced up together, tied off by a recurring monologue, Fear(s) of the dark challenged six creative minds to animate the rhythm of the fears in the harsh extremities of black and white and the tonal subtleties that lay in-between.
Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.
Posted in Animation, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »
October 25th, 2009 admin
2009
Starring: Michael Jai White, Eamonn Walker, Dante Basco, Michelle Belegrin, Nona Gaye, Julian Sands, Matt Mullins
Director: Ben Ramsey
Runtime: 93 Minutes
Distributor: Remarkable Films
Rating: R
Let’s be clear – Blood and Bone is an above average MMA beat-em-up flick. But since that’s a genre that right now encompasses a whopping six, perhaps even seven films, that’s not really saying much. Blood and Bone is the kind of film where characters say lines like: You had my friend Johnny murdered in prison, after you sent him there for a crime he didn’t commit.”; where illegal bare knuckle brawls take place in inner-city parking lots close to busy intersections; where groups of heavy set gentlemen covered in ink and decked out in bling swagger around wearing sunglasses at night.
Into this neon drenched arena steps Bone (Michael Jai White of Spawn fame, also producing), a stoically badass fighter freshly released from prison and on a mission to avenge his friend’s death and rescue his loved ones from under the boot of local kingpin James (Eamonn Walker, slapping the scenery between two hunks of bread and taking a gigantic bite). The international underground street fighting business, so we’re told, is the biggest moneymaking fight game, period. Of course the idea of a black man being in charge of something that lucrative is just absurd. So enter Julian Sands (further confirming his status as quite possibly the worst actor of all time) as James’ boss, head of a cabal of gamblers who leech off of the profits from their prizefighter, Price (Matt Mullins), a $5 million a head. James wants Bone to fight him, but Bone has ideas all of his own.
Click here to read the full review at JustPressPlay.net.
Posted in Action/Adventure, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »
October 25th, 2009 admin
2009
Starring: Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Rob Lowe, Louis C.K. Jeffrey Tambor, Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, Jason Bateman, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Director: Rickey Gervais and Matthew Robinson
Runtime: 100 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rating PG-13
While this broadly drawn rom com with added gimmick is far from the most inspired concept – its little more than a reverse Liar Liar and something that ten years ago would have surely been earmarked as a throwaway vehicle for Jim Carey – it does serve to highlight just how much a comedy script can benefit from being written with a specific comedian in mind. Set in a world identical to our own where no one ever lies, The Invention of Lying is tailor-made for Ricky Gervais, literally, with Gervais having purchased the concept from debutant Matthew Robinson before retooling it to suit his comic style and delivery.
So while the actor and material are in perfect sync, the flipside is that the move has been tailor-made for Ricky Gervais. So if that particular brand of embarrassment comedy leaves you cold, or the trademark unfinished sentences punctuated by that exasperated sigh drive you crazy, then don’t even bother. It’s also a film of two halves, but we’ll get to that later.
Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.
Posted in Comedy/Romance, Feature Films, Reviews | No Comments »