Quickie: Pineapple Express
Pineapple Express (2008)–***1/2 Quickie Review A high-flying process server witnesses a murder and goes on the run, bringing his pot dealer along for the ride. A genre melting pot, this bromance/stoner comedy/action thriller mixes buckets of laughs with gallons of blood. Seth Rogen breaks the Team Apatow team mold with his hilarious screenplay while Southern Goth director David Gordon Green channels his inner Tarantino. Oh, the film is messy–but in the best way possible. Watch for Danny McBride’s scene-stealing turn as middleman dealer Red. Also starring James...
Read MoreMovie Review: The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight (2008)–*** Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker is both The Dark Knight‘s blessing and curse. Ledger’s tour-de-force performance as the sociopathic clown takes Batman cinema into uncharted territory, but the cult leader like spell he casts over the audience has a devastating effect. We don’t really want the other characters in the film to keep up with him. And no other actor could do it if they tried. The Joker is the bringer of chaos. With no back story or profit-producing schemes, he is only there to turn everything in Gotham upside down and inside out. He robs mob banks to prove he’s crazy enough to do it and to take away the one silly thing—cash—that the petty crime families are after. With a vigilante in a bat suit taking down the ordinary criminals, it’s the...
Read MoreMovie Review: American Teen
American Teen (2008)–** In 2000, a short-lived reality program titled American High chronicled the lives of high school students in suburban Illinois. After FOX canceled the show, PBS picked it up, running the series in full. For all of its flaws, I never questioned the show’s honesty. A lot has changed for high school student since then. I don’t remember being able to spread nude pictures to everyone at school in seconds or text message attacks. Rumors, scandal and ridicule are delivered instantly with technology, making high school a different place then it was when American High hit television sets. But watching American Teen, you wouldn’t know that. American Teen is the documentary no one needed to see. Four high school seniors from a small town in Indiana must deal with the pressures of high school, whether it’s being...
Read MoreQuickie: Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)–*** Quickie Review Hellboy and his pals at the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense must face off with an evil elf prince bent on killing off mankind. Director Guillermo del Toro puts all his creative energy into this comic book sequel much like Tim Burton did with his films in the late-1980s. An all-you-can-eat buffet for your eyes and imagination, even the insipid Hellboy character can’t bring down this visual stunner. When people talk about sequels that are better than the original, they shouldn’t forget Hellboy II. Starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones and Jeffrey...
Read MoreMovie Review: For a Few Marbles More
For a Few Marbles More (2006)–***1/2 For A Few Marbles More, a nicely crafted Dutch short film, does what so many family films ought to do; it takes a good adventure and boils it down to 11 minutes of solid, perceptive entertainment. The film follows four 10-year-olds who are run off the playground by a couple of adult thugs. The playground was the perfect place to play marbles. No more playground means no more marbles. Their parents tell them to work it out for themselves. That is if the parents are willing or present to listen at all. So the kids do. They make a deal with the neighborhood’s mysterious tough kid who may or may not be some sort of maniac. (Kids, ya know.) For a payment of more than twenty marbles, he devises a crude plan to...
Read MoreFlashback – 1996 – Independence Day
Original Release: 7/3/1996 “Today is our Independence Day!” I want so hard to not like Independence Day. In fact, I remember not liking Independence Day when I first started to write about movies. As James Berardinelli put it in his 1996 review, the film had a “hackneyed plot, feeble attempts at characterization, and a predictable finale.” Yet every time I watch the Roland Emmerich disaster epic, I find like it more and more. Most of the above criticism misses the point. Independence Day makes spectacle its top priority like other pioneering effects movies of the 1990s. And unlike the lackluster disaster films that followed it, Independence Day also takes pacing the characters’ stories seriously. It has to. We still have to watch a whole lot of movie after alien spaceships level Los Angeles, New York City and D.C. And we...
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