August 2008
49 posts
Evan Derrick Review: Traitor
Traitor occupies the unenviable limbo between an exciting episode of 24 and a mediocre Bourne clone. Moderately entertaining at times, sermonizingly stuffy at others, it manages to challenge one’s ability to remember it afterwards. If I were to damn with faint praise (which I am about to do), I would say it is worth a rental.
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Evan Derrick Review: Hamlet 2
Hamlet 2 begins with a series of cable-access commercials all starring Steve Coogan’s character, washed-up actor Dana Marschz, while Peter O’Toole, in a tone perfectly suited to a death-bed confession, waxes philosophical on the actor’s craft. It’s an odd mix, seeing Coogan grinning like a tortured Cheshire cat in a herpes ad while Lawrence of Arabia attempts his best James Lipton impersonation....
Jim Chastain: Dinner and a Movie?
Well, I’ve finally made it over to one of the Warren Theatre’s two grand auditoriums for a “balcony experience.” That’s the place to go, they say, if you want to get the biggest bang for your movie buck. Or, in this case, for eighteen bucks a seat.
For those of you who enjoy living a first class lifestyle, or at least dabbling in one every now and then, there’s really no cinematic comparison in...
James Vance Review: Chicago 10
With organized and highly vocal protesters — including a group called Recreate 68 — already gearing up for next week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, director Brett Morgen’s documentary “Chicago 10” seems particularly timely.
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Kim Brown Review: The House Bunny
When Hef kicks you out of the Playboy Mansion (that’s Hugh Hefner for anyone who doesn’t watch TV’s “The Girls Next Door”), it’s a cruel world out there for a bunny. That is, until a dorky sorority house lets you give them all makeovers. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, and sadly that message has far escaped the creators of “The House...
Brandy McDonnell Review: Death Race
Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson (“Resident Evil,” “Alien vs. Predator”) gets a far better cast than he deserves for the crash-and-bang spectacle “Death Race.”
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George Lang Review: Bottle Shock
“Bottle Shock,” the true story of Napa Valley vintner Chateau Montelena’s victory over French wines in the 1976 Judgment in Paris competition, could be the oenophile equivalent to sports underdog movies, but this rich story’s earthy charms result in something far more full-bodied.
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Michael Smith Review: Man on Wire
To watch Philippe Petit walk on a cable, 1,350 feet in the air and stretched between the roofs of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, is to recall a time when such wonders still existed. The derring-do of Petit’s artistic crime of the century and the towers themselves are of a different age and have almost a dream-like quality as depicted in the brilliant new documentary, “Man...
Michael Smith Review: American Teen
No matter your age, you will make an emotional connection while viewing “American Teen,” an engrossing documentary that follows several high school students through their senior year at Warsaw High School in Indiana.
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Michael Smith Review: The Rocker
Are you ready to rock? Looking for something awesome, something that’s totally cool? Look somewhere other than “The Rocker,” a mediocrity with such sleepy execution that an accurate title would be “The Recliner.”
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George Lang Review: The House Bunny
“The House Bunny” is a proudly featherweight comedy that might have been completely intolerable, but this farce from the writing team behind “Legally Blonde” could be the vehicle that finally gives Anna Faris the Hollywood career she deserves. It could do for Faris what “Legally Blonde” did for Reece Witherspoon: provide a rung in her ladder to better things.
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Brandy McDonnell Review: Hamlet 2
For a movie working so hard to be unconventional, the Sundance Film Festival favorite “Hamlet 2” is surprisingly predictable.
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Evan Derrick Review: Death Race
Director Paul W. S. Anderson (Resident Evil, Alien Vs. Predator) probably continues to work because he can either 1) bring movies in under budget, 2) on schedule, or 3) with as little fuss as possible (i.e., no arguments with studio execs over his ‘vision’). The man is a glorified Assistant Director, and the nicest thing that can be said about Death Race is that it isn’t shameful. Given Anderson’s...
Evan Derrick Review: American Teen
Watching soul-crushing films is rough – writing about them is even worse. And there are a lot of bad films out there (I know, shocking). But, as a film critic, when you have the chance to champion a wonderful, cinematic underdog – a film your readers have likely never heard of and will likely never purchase tickets for – it easily makes up for the ten Martin Lawrence vehicles that preceded it....
Brandy McDonnell DVD Review: Outsourced
Film festival favorite “Outsourced” mines the fertile grounds of fish-out-of-water tales, cross-cultural conflicts and soulless corporate America for laughs and insight.
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Phil Bacharach DVD Review: Love and a .45
By all rights, Love and a .45 should be an irresistibly greasy cheeseburger of exploitation-flick goodness. Writer-director C.M. Talkington assembles all the ostensibly necessary ingredients in his 1994 valentine to drive-in schlock: outlaw lovers on the lam, trailer-trash sexpot, blood-soaked carnage, torture, gallows humor and a heart-thumping soundtrack. And yet Love and a .45, despite such...
Gene Triplett DVD Review: The Bank Job
Truth is stranger than fiction and also supplies the dramatic dynamite for “The Bank Job,” which made off with hundreds of positive reviews when it tunneled into the vicariously larcenous hearts of heist-movie lovers everywhere in March.
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Gene Triplett Review: Henry Poole Is Here
From a director known for conspiracy and sci-fi thrillers (“Arlington Road,” “The Mothman Prophesies”) and rock videos starring U2, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Bruce Springsteen, a gentle, modern-day fable of hope lost and found comes as a mostly pleasant surprise.
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Michael Smith Review: Tropic Thunder
Ben Stiller knows all about insecurity, inflated egos and selling himself like a product on a store shelf. He works in Hollywood. So it’s no surprise that the man who has frequently skewered — while portraying — people who put themselves in front of the public (a dodgeball champion, “Zoolander’s” male model) has saved his best material for “Tropic Thunder,” a...
Kim Brown Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Just when we thought it had ended, the mighty “Star Wars” franchise continues. And it’s been resurrected to the big screen, albeit with a lighter touch in the CGI-animated “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.”
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Michael Smith Review: Henry Poole Is Here
“Henry Poole Is Here,” and he’s played by Luke Wilson, that bastion of independent cinema who takes a leap of career faith here and creates a true believer when it comes to not believing. It’s a genuine portrayal in risky subject matter that most in Hollywood would avoid at all costs.
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Michael Smith Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Woody Allen has created relationship movies that have defined the genre — films such as “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan” and “Hannah and Her Sisters” — that we still speak of glowingly 20 and 30 years later. “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” can enter that dialogue. Allen’s new film is his most fun, seductive and creative work in years, full of good humor,...
George Lang Review: The Rocker
“The Rocker” is an amiable music-business satire that rises and falls entirely on the appeal of Rainn Wilson, clocking out of “The Office” long enough to pound the skins as a past-his-prime drummer who finds an unlikely second shot at the spotlight.
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Brandy McDonnell on the summer of women's films
Heroes such as Batman, Iron Man and Indiana Jones have loomed large over the box office this summer, with “The Dark Knight,” “Iron Man” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” snatching up millions to top this year’s domestic box office.
But in a summer as crowded with superheroes as any issue of the “X-Men” or “Justice League” comics, women’s films have also thrived.
In...
Evan Derrick Review: Tell No One
An import from France, Tell No One is a taut, brain-thumping thriller based on the novel of the same name by Harlen Coben. It deals with many of the standard tropes of the genre – past tragedies, missing lovers, wrongfully accused everymen, 11th hour twists and re-twists – but manages to prevent the proceedings from going stale. However, although it doesn’t succumb to the same, dismal fate of...
Evan Derrick Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Full disclosure: my film vocabulary is conspicuously lacking in Woody Allen. I can count the number of his films I’ve seen on one hand, although he’s made nearly 1 a year since he debuted in 1966 with What’s Up, Tiger Lily? That leaves me either 1) woefully inadequate to discuss his latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or 2) perfectly suited since I’m not weighed down with Allen baggage,...
George Lang Review: Tropic Thunder
Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder” slices and dices Hollywood ambition and delivers a raucous satire of movie business egos and war movie cliches. Hardly any sacred cow survives this tipping spree as “Tropic Thunder” delivers a constant stream of barbed, nasty fun.
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Brandy McDonnell Review: Beer for My Horses
Country music star Toby Keith and down-home comedian Rodney Carrington co-wrote and co-star in “Beer for My Horses,” a comic-action romp aimed squarely at their loyal fans.
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Michael Smith Review: Beer for My Horses
Just some good ol’ boys, never meanin’ no harm, making a movie like “Smokey & the Bandit” but a lot more lukewarm. There’s an Oklahoma charm to the red-neck action-comedy “Beer For My Horses” that exhausts itself eventually, and that’s before the final credits roll and you realize that all these folks talking about Mangum and Lawton and Altus...
James Vance Review: Brick Lane
Soap operas should all be as compelling as “Brick Lane,” a beautifully mounted tale of life among Bangladeshi immigrants in London that just gets more complex and involving as it unfolds.
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Michael Smith Review: Up the Yangtze
The Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and a hotly debated symbol of modern-day Chinese progress, looms large metaphorically in the gorgeous, moving documentary “Up the Yangtze.”
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Brandy McDonnell Review: Sisterhood of the...
Talented stars America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Blake Lively and Alexis Bledel reunite for the refreshingly realistic friendship tale “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.”
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James Cooper Review: Pineapple Express
“Pineapple Express” takes the successful formula of earlier Apatow films such as “Superbad” and “The Forty Year Old Virgin” and ups the ante: He finally just allows his male characters to essentially run amok in a playground of arrested development, devising amusing and outlandish excuses for them to make crude jokes, sexual references, and to smoke a lot of...
The Movies I Love: Doug Bentin on "The Blue Angel"
A couple of words: The Blue Angel is over 75 years old so a few spoilers will probably slip by. Also, the film was released in 1930 in both the original German language and an alternate version with the same cast but spoken in English. I prefer the German version.
The Blue Angel has long been seen as a metaphor for the plight of intellectuals in Germany between the wars. Defending that reading...
Evan Derrick Review: The Dark Knight
As filmgoers we are often asked to choose between films that entertain and films that stimulate thought, but rarely are we given both in the same package. Few have accomplished this in recent memory (No Country For Old Men, The Lives Of Others, and The Mist all come to mind). The Dark Knight, however, is an epic achievement on both counts.
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Cory Cheney Column: Urban Tulsa, 8-6-08
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t need to be preached to by a damn movie. That’s what I have Bill Maher for.
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Michael Smith Review: Pineapple Express
So autobiographical were the hormones and humor of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s teen characters in “Superbad” that the men simply had to name them Seth and Evan. With the pals’ follow-up, “Pineapple Express,” one has to wonder how often the boys used to pretend they were a certain bong-powered comedy film team and fought over this question: Who gets to be...
George Lang Review: Pineapple Express
Despite their chronic condition, Cheech and Chong weren’t exactly aiming high; they were midnight movie fare for people who were halfway to a laugh before the joke. While “Pineapple Express” owes a deep debt to their movies, it earns its laughs fair and square. Clear-eyed and tack-sharp audiences with a taste for the willfully stupid should enjoy it as much as sedated ones.
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Michael Smith Review: Swing Vote
One man, one vote, one pretty amusing election-year comedy.
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Michael Smith Review: The Mummy: Tomb of the...
See whether this sounds familiar: An aging adventurer is called back into action, is joined by his son for this adventure, and he must again stop a force intent on world domination. If you’re thinking of Indiana Jones, you would be correct about his return to big screens this summer. The description is also a fit for “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” the third in the...
James Cooper Review: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon...
In a climatic battle sequence late in “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li face off, swords drawn and wits matched. We know this fight will be memorable for two very important reasons. First, early in the film during extended flashback sequence, the narrator informs us that the Dragon Emperor killed Yeoh’s lover in a violent act of revenge and...
Gene Triplett DVD Review: The Mummy: Special...
With another “Mummy” set to bust out at the box office, Universal Home Entertainment figured the timing was right to resurrect the original 1932 classic in a special two-DVD box set that’s loaded with a tomb-full of treasures in the bonus-features department.
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George Lang DVD Review: In Bruges
It’s hard to imagine the Belgian Tourist Office being thrilled with “In Bruges,” a magnificently coarse, pitch-black comedy about hit men hiding out in what is portrayed as the most boring city in Europe. Playwright Martin McDonagh, who won an Oscar for his short film “Six Shooter,” makes his feature-length debut with a film that doesn’t stop with its host city. So if...
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: Baby It's You
Writer-director John Sayles has the ability to take the most cliché-riddled formula and — voila! — skirt cliché. Such is the redemptive power of full-blooded characterization and a keen understanding that people are nothing if not especially unpredictable. The overdue DVD release of Sayles’ third (and only studio) feature, 1983’s Baby Its You, presents a modest story of...
George Lang Review: Swing Vote
Well-meaning but suffering from severe mood swings, the tone and sensibility of “Swing Vote” veers wildly from touching family drama into broad political satire. It works best when writer-director Joshua Michael Stern stays close to his salt-of-the-earth characters, but when it tries to land ham-handed jabs at political advertising, “Swing Vote” takes a hit at the polls.
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George Lang Review: The Wackness
“The Wackness” is a state of mind in which the glass is always half full of something bad. Jonathan Levine’s film about a young man grappling with the end of childhood, a love affair he doesn’t believe he deserves and a codependent relationship with his therapist, plays like a downtown take on “The Graduate,” with Notorious B.I.G. subbing for Simon and Garfunkel.
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Brandy McDonnell Review: Brideshead Revisited
A lonely, working-class British teen falls under the thrall of an odd, aristocratic family in “Brideshead Revisited,” the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s acclaimed 1946 novel, which also has been made into a respected 1981 miniseries.
Stellar performances and magnificent period details help the movie overcome some directorial miscues and a jarring score.
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Michael Smith Review: Brideshead Revisited
In terms of bringing British literary classics to the big screen, “Brideshead Revisited” was always going to be a challenge. Besides the novel itself, there’s the spectre of the 1981 miniseries hanging over any film adaptation, as that 11-hour event has been regaled as one of the best of the medium, starring no less than Oscar winners Jeremy Irons, Laurence Olivier and John...
Michael Smith Review: The Wackness
Witty and warm and weird, “The Wackness” treads some familiar ground with its coming-of-age concept, but this satirical version is so charming and perceptive that you buy into its hero being a drug dealer with a heart of gold.
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