Feast Of Love
September 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment
This movie follows a group of people with some of them falling in and out of love with each other. A guy’s wife leaves him to have a lesbian affair with a woman on her softball team. A young guy and girl meet in a coffeeshop. Various other people hook up and unhook. Morgan Freeman plays the elder statesman observing it all and offering wisdom.
This is a chick flick, but it’s not a bad one.
Also, it has quite a bit of nudity, a half-dozen scenes or so. All fairly short, but things aren’t hidden in shadow.
It’s got funny moments, but there’s a little too much pain per capita for it to be a romantic comedy.
I noticed this movie features actresses that have been in the RIDDICK movies; Radha Mitchell from PITCH BLACK, and Alexa Davalos from THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Resident Evil: Extinction
September 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Well, the third episode of Resident Evil is upon us and…its pretty much like the previous two. Yes, I said episode and not movie because this franchise plays out more like episodes in a TV show or mini series than a theatrical movie. Is it any better? Well, arguably it couldn’t be much worse than the previous two installments, but even still I would venture to answer that with a semi-solid “yes”. But even with the improvements, it’s still only a two star flick.
The special effects have been bumped up a bit for this episode and the action rolls along very smoothly. At no point did I find myself checking my watch or fidgeting in my seat so you have to give it some points for holding your attention. But that’s about where the good stuff ends.
Milla Jovovich is, of course, back again (and again..and again..and again) in the title role of Alice. As expected, she performed perfunctorily in the scenes where she wasn’t slaying zombies (and other critters that show up) and she was quite entertaining when she was in carnage mode. I honestly have no idea if she’s a good actress or not since I’ve never seen her cast in anything that would require her to actually *act* and the Resident Evil franchise is certainly not going to require anything of the sort.
Where the movie loses major points is in the structure. I used to be a major junkie for video games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Serious Sam, Half Life II, etc.. and I see a lot of parallels here to these and some other games I used to play. I felt like I was watching a computer screen where some anonymous person was controlling Alice and starting a new level. The goal of this level, by the way, is to protect a group of innocent people and travel to a big underground bunker where a nasty “boss” monster awaits. And, like any good video game, when you beat the boss, a new level starts. That’s fine and all…but do you *really* want to do the equivalent of watching someone else play a video game for 90 minutes? If so, save yourself the $10 and just go visit a friend that has one of the aforementioned games.
As well (and not unexpectedly) the ending just sucked if you are someone that likes to see something resolved. In this case, NOTHING gets resolved. NOTHING is paid off (not even a side story that would affect nothing in the inevitable sequel). Again, it felt like an episode was over and we get to wait 2+ years for the next one…which still won’t resolve anything.
Personally speaking, I resolve never to go see another one of these movies.
Popularity: 19% [?]
The Kingdom
September 25, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Peter Berg graduated from the Michael Mann school of direction so it was inevitable that he would one day make a movie in the same guise as Collateral or Heat, and The Kingdom is definitely that film. Berg’s work behind the camera has improved year in year out and in my opinion is one of the more talented visual story tellers around right now… well enough arse kissing let’s get to the film itself.
The movie starts out with a very graphic attack on a housing compound of an oil company in Saudi Arabia, by a terrorist cell. The group infiltrates the high security compound and detonate a bomb during a company softball game killing a couple of dozen people. The news wire lights up and the feds send out their field agents to investigate, along with other first responders (fire, police, emt), which spawns the second assault that kills hundreds. Among the dead is highly decorated agent of the FBI, and best friend of Lead Investigator Ronald Fleury (Foxx). The attack on what some consider sovereign American soil demands governmental intervention, and that happens to be Fleury’s teams specialty.
Certain agency figures that seem to be more concerned with insulting the Saudi’s rather than finding the killers, refuse to send an American presence this close to the attack and leave the investigation to the local Saudi police. Fleury finds a creative way to interject himself and before long he gets the green light to go in and ‘assist’ in the investigation but he’s told in very clear terms he’s not to interfere. Now we all know that’s not going to last and it’s that part of the film that makes it worth seeing.
The supporting cast of Garner, Cooper, Bateman and Jeremy Piven as the representative of the US embassy (stooge), are all really good but my favorite character was played by Ashraf Barhom. Barhom plays Colonel Al-Ghazi the police officer charged with protecting Fleury’s team, but his real orders are to protect the Prince from losing face. The two orders are the key to a social and ethical dilemma that makes him choose between his job and doing what he knows is the right thing to do, regardless of faith or politics. Overall the movie is kind of like a 2 hour episode of CSI: Baghdad with a lesson, but the acting, direction and story make it well worth the 10 bucks you’ll be shelling out to see it.
I will warn you the last 20 minutes are extremely intense, and the way Berg is able to bring the emotional rollercoaster you’re gonna feel to life is nothing short of amazing. I saw the film with a packed house and there wasn’t a person in the entire auditorium that wasn’t speechless. The movie carries a very powerful message, and the ending will drive home an opinion that some people will hate, while others will stand up and cheer.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Free Movie Monday: Helter Skelter
September 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment
This week we’re giving away Helter-Skelter. It can’t totally suck as JC gave it 3 stars, but I never saw it myself so I can’t comment on the rating.
But hey, it’s free, so if you want it just drop a note in the forum and it’s yours.
Time for some rules to this little giveaway.. you may not win if you’ve won anything previously from moviesforguys.com in the last 60 days. We’re giving this away including shipping, and as such will only ship to U.S and Canadian Addresses. Simple enough.
Popularity: 17% [?]
This Week’s Top 10
September 23, 2007 | Leave a Comment
No shock around here that Resident Evil: Extinction got the top spot even though the movie sucks. We just hope the series will go extinct after this episode… but we doubt it.
Good Luck Chick.. er.. Chuck took the #2 spot. I like Dane Cook, but this looks much more like a rental than a $10 movie ticket.
The rest of the list includes the usual suspects from last week:
1. “Resident Evil: Extinction,” $24 million.
2. “Good Luck Chuck,” $14 million.
3. “The Brave One,” $7.4 million.
4. “3:10 to Yuma,” $6.35 million.
5. “Eastern Promises,” $5.7 million.
6. “Sydney White,” $5.3 million.
7. “Mr. Woodcock,” $5 million.
8. “Superbad,” $3.1 million.
9. “The Bourne Ultimatum,” $2.8 million.
10. “Dragon Wars,” $2.5 million.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Broken
September 21, 2007 | 1 Comment
I’ve grown tired of the Saw series and all of its copycats, so when Broken crossed my desk with the quote “makes Saw looks like a children’s film” on the cover I wasn’t expecting more than a copycat with extra blood. Fortunately this turns out not to be the case, Broken is actually a smartly written psychological horror movie with a good amount of blood thrown in for the hell of it.
The film wastes no time in setting the mood, opening with a woman waking in a casket, blood everywhere, fighting to escape her entombment. Eventually she escapes only to get knocked out and when she awakes she’s tied by the neck to a tree, balancing on a stick of wood. If she slips, she’s gonna strangle herself.. so how does she escape? Seems there’s a cut on her stomach that’s been stitched up, and stashed inside her belly is a razor blade. Fetch the blade, cut yourself free and run for the hills! Yeah, not so simple. I feel like I’ve just given away a good part of the movie, but this all happens in the first 5 minutes! Like I said, the film wastes no time getting started.
The main story centers around Hope (Nadja Brand) and how she deals with being in that same situation. Don’t worry, we only have a tiny amount of back story on Hope before she ends up in a casket, just enough to let you know she’s single and has a daughter. Turns out the casket/razor blade bit is just a test to see if the victim is strong enough to be made into a slave. Yep, the guy setting this up is just a sick freak in the woods who wants someone to tend his garden. I’m not making that up.
What follows is a test of wills, Hope’s vs. the wacko in the woods. Will he break her spirit or will she prevail? With a horror movie the ending isn’t always a sure thing and obviously I’m not going to tell you much more. I will say that I appreciated the blend of psychological horror with graphic horror. Usually movies will go one way or the other, but Broken does both and does them pretty well.
So why only 3 stars? Hard to pinpoint, but two things immediately come to mind. One is technical… the movie is shot on video instead of film, and while that doesn’t always bother me this time it made itself apparent, which took me out of the scene. I think it was a lighting issue. For 90% of the time it was spot on and looked just fine, but for 10% it was off a bit and made me feel like I was watching a TV show instead of a movie. Minor, but it contributed to the overall feel. Another thing was the ending, I just didn’t like it. Obviously I can’t say why, but it didn’t work for me. There were a couple of obvious directions to go and I think they choose poorly. That’s gonna be a personal thing though as I guarantee about half of the folks watching it will think they chose the right path, I just happen to disagree.
It’s worth watching though, and very much worth a rental. Just don’t compare it to Saw, they are nothing alike other than the initial puzzle on how to escape the tree.
A note on Nadja Brand.. she’s excellent! Her performance was spot on, no complaints at all. I have to imagine that standing in woods with fake blood on your face while some guys with video cameras tell you to act terrified is a tough thing to do, and she does it perfectly. Her screams aren’t overdone, her facial expressions seem realistic, and her body language is correct. I was quite impressed and hope to see her in something else soon.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Eastern Promises
September 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
David Cronenberg used to make horror films that were ickier than other people’s horror films.
He’s moved on to thrillers, but they still have that Cronenberg touch. Within the first few minutes of this film, we see a throat cut, someone else hemorrhaging, and a baby covered in placenta.
The director teams up again with Viggo Mortensen (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE). This time it’s a tale of Russian gangsters in London.
A teenage junkie dies in childbirth, leaving a baby. A hospital’s midwife (Naomi Watts) tries to find how to get the baby to her relatives. This leads her to a Russian restaurant, whose kindly owner may be a Russian gangster. Viggo Mortensen is his chauffeur, but seems conflicted about the life of crime he’s locked into.
Unfortunately, the midwife soon knows too much about the crime family, putting her and her family at risk.
The depiction of Russian gangsters is pretty much like every other movie depicting Russian gangsters. They’re more viscious than the Corleones. And they like bathhouses. But Cronenberg makes it distinctive.
Since this comes on the heels of SHOOT ‘EM UP, another movie about dangerous men and a baby, it should be pointed out that this is not a nonstop actionfest. This is a movie of violence waiting to happen. And it’s got Cronenberg’s desire to make violence realistic. There’s a showdown in a Russian bathhouse that puts the viscera in visceral.
It’s a good taut thriller, wrapped around showing people who are aliens in another land. And the finale goes in direction I wasn’t expecting.
Popularity: 21% [?]
DOA
September 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I really wasn’t looking forward to watching this one. Why not? Because this is a movie based on a video game. As soon as I heard that, my mind conjured up images of Uwe Boll and the abominations he’s created in the past.
But wait! Once I got the DVD in my hand, I began to see signs that this one might *not* suck! First of all, Boll’s name wasn’t listed anywhere on the packaging. Then I saw that it wasn’t just a bunch of kung fu action…it was lots of HOT babes doing lots of kung fu! And, lastly, I noticed the director was Corey Yuen, martial arts supervisor/choreographer on such films as Lethal Weapons 4, X-Men, The One, The Transporter, Bulletproof Monk, and many others.
Suddenly I was actually kinda looking forward to viewing this puppy! So I popped it into the player and sat down to watch. What I saw was, as one person aptly put it, a combination of Charlie’s Angels and Enter the Dragon. Butt-kicking women (and men, too) from all over the world are introduced in bone-crunching style and, once they dispatch with their foes, they all receive invitations to fight in a very prestigious fighting tournament called Dead or Alive.
All three primary woman (and the two secondary ones) have their own back stories but they aren’t really worth mentioning here. Suffice to say that they all have a reason to want to win the tournament. Eric Roberts plays the tournament’s organizer and does a passable job. This movie is several notches down from his critically acclaimed titles (Runaway Train, Star 80, etc.) but, then again, Roberts himself is down a few notches, too, so his casting here is pretty much perfect.
The majority of the plot is very, very predictable but, in this case, it didn’t bother me since I was just simply having too much fun to care! Not nearly as much fun as I did watching Shoot ‘Em Up, but still enough fun that I could overlook some elements of the absurd.
And, as expected, Yuen delivers some top notch fighting action sequences with all the fighters, ladies included. In the featurette we learn that, like with big mega-productions, the actors spent MONTHS training several hours per day and, thanks to that, I was REALLY impressed with the women’s fighting skills. Who’d have thunk that Jaime Pressly, our favorite redneck bimbo (NBC’s “Earl”), could open so many cans of whoop-ass in one movie?
All this adds up to a very strong 3 star rating. I flirted with 4 stars, but it just misses out. Definitely rent this one soon!
Popularity: 19% [?]
Dirty Sanchez
September 13, 2007 | 1 Comment
If you like Jackass, you’re going to love Dirty Sanchez. The two crews hate comparisons between one another, but it’s impossible to resist doing it. In short, the Jackass crew is much larger and more polished especially in production values, but the Dirty Sanchez guys do stuff that would make even Steve-O go “oh dude, that’s nuts”.
Without spoiling too much, let us give you a sample of what you have to look forward to, so you can decide whether this is REALLY for you. And if so, whether you might want to have something to vomit in near the couch when you watch. If the idea of drinking beer that just came out of a guys butt is too much for you, stop now.
These Welsh guys are simply not right in the head. There’s no amount of money that would make a totally sane person do some of these stunts. This is also not a movie for a homophobe. There are shades of Brokeback Mountain in here. Hey, just because they’re messing with each other’s junk, that doesn’t make them gay, right? Again, just a little warning here, if you dont wanna see a lot of sausage, again stop now.
Now if you’re like us, and see something gross and immediately wanna share it with all of your buddies, you have to have this DVD. You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, you might puke!
Popularity: 21% [?]
The King of Kong : A Fistful of Quarters
September 13, 2007 | 1 Comment
There is a British filmmaker who has made a documentary about a group of ordinary people every seven years for the last 42 years. If you knew that every seven years somebody would be making a documentary about you, wouldn’t you tend to make dramatic choices in your life like becoming a skydiving sex therapist demolition expert?
THE KING OF KONG is a documentary about two guys vying for the World Title of Champion of 1980s arcade game Donkey Kong. Billy Mitchell first set the record in 1982 and nobody has surpassed him. But there’s a stranger riding into town, Steve Wiebe, who has a Donkey Kong machine in his garage and he has been practicing, practicing, practicing.
Even though last weekend I spent four days at a science fiction convention, I was prepared to jeer these geeks who obsess about getting the high scores in an arcade game.
But I had to keep re-evaluating the film as it went along. The movie isn’t really about arcade games; it comes down to two guys, who are each other’s Moby-Dicks. Everyone needs a nemesis; just ask Maggie Simpson about the baby with the unibrow. Both of the guys in this film are family men, with wife and kids. One is a successful hot sauce mogul who set a DONKEY KONG record back in 1982, the other is (after taking some time to find his niche with less successful careers) a high school science teacher seemingly well-liked by his students. He took up DONKEY KONG relatively recently, at least to this extent.
The movie isn’t really about obsession either; neither of these guys seems to have completely wrecked their life in pursuit of these records.
The basic idea is that these arcade games of the 1980s achieved a certain purity because of the limitations in graphics and processor speed. More modern games have fancier graphics, but just don’t take the skill that these games do. It’s like chess versus somebody’s made-up rules for three-dimensional chess; the classic wins out. And because of the difficulty of the game, it’s a hammer-and-anvil to lesser players. But those who master the game achieve a Zen-like state.
So it really comes down to the nature of competition. Having just seen an idiot blow $130 million because apparently the groupies that professional football players get don’t compare to a bunch of guys hooting over a dogfight, I’m prepared to expand my horizons as to what constitutes a suitable arena.
This is a competition without a big prize purse, presumably without hot groupies, and seemingly a relatively small fan-base; there were a few dozen onlookers at most at these competitions. The big deal seems to be a possible Guinness Book world record and the knowledge that you beat The Other Guy.
Fairly quickly the two align themselves with Jedi and Sith. The Johnny-come-lately seems to be a basically earnest, nice guy who just wants to be the best at something. The guy who holds the crown is a long-haired bearded guy who wears all black and seems to think he’s a rock star. And as the movie progresses, what constitutes legitimate psyching out on his part gets into more questionable sportsmanship as he seems to change the rules and tries to control the governing body of this sport.
And it builds to a climax as suspenseful as any underdog sports movie, because I didn’t know how it would turn out.
MoviesForGuys.com interviewed Seth Gordon, director of THE KING OF KONG. Read the interview here.
Popularity: 20% [?]
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