Category: Movie DVDs (Page 14 of 100)

City Island

October 2, 2010 /

City Island is a beach-side neighborhood in the Bronx that’s so idyllic looking it’s hard to believe non-millionaires can afford to live there. Andy Garcia stars as hereditary homeowner Vince Rizzo, a prison guard — excuse me, “corrections officer” — who is also secretly an aspiring actor. When an inmate (Steven Strait) turns out to be his heretofore unknown son, he takes the handsome ex-con home without a word of explanation to anyone. This is a dangerous move, as his family is already seething with Italian-American emotion. Wife Joyce (Julianna Margulies) is lonely and convinced that Vince’s alleged poker games — cover for the acting classes he takes from a curmudgeonly Alan Arkin — are cover for an affair. The Rizzos’ beautiful college student daughter (Garcia’s real life daughter, Dominik García-Lorido) is secretly stripping for cash. Meanwhile, their gawky teen son (Ezra Miller, the funniest person in the movie) is nursing a fetish involving the giving of culinary pleasure to obese women. The final turns of the screw are Vince’s friendship with a very pretty fellow acting student (Emily Mortimer) and an audition for, naturally, the latest Martin Scorsese crime epic. Yes, “City Island” is terribly contrived, but the film is full of funny dialogue, good acting, and genuine feeling that nicely papers over the problems. Writer-director — and sometime classic film blogger — Raymond De Felitta is no visual stylist and may be too eager too please, but he knows how to entertain.

Click to buy “City Island”

External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movie DVD Quicktakes, Movie DVDs, Movies

Frozen

September 25, 2010 /

An audience favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Adam Green’s “Frozen” will likely elicit one of two reactions: nail-biting suspense or unintentional laughter. It all depends on how much you buy into the movie, because while it’s a pretty frightening concept, it relies too often on absurd variables and bad decisions from its characters to be effective. The story is simple: a trio of skiers (Kevin Zegers, Shawn Ashmore and Emma Bell) are stranded on a chairlift and forced to choose between a potentially fatal escape and freezing to death. And since it’s Sunday night and the ski resort doesn’t open again until Friday, they don’t have the option of waiting around for rescue.

So what would you do? That’s the big question, because whether you like the movie or not, “Frozen” will almost always lead to a conversation about what you might have done differently in order to survive. One of the biggest problems with the film, however, is that none of it feels very real. While I’m willing to give any horror thriller a certain amount of freedom to be impractical (it’s the nature of the genre), “Frozen” is too ridiculous at times. The characters constantly complain about the cold weather and the likelihood of getting frostbite, and yet they never once consider zipping up their jackets for more protection. (Because then we wouldn’t be able to see their pretty faces.) And don’t get me started on the pack of wolves that just happen to be roaming around a public ski resort. It’s stuff like this that sucks the tension right out of the movie, and it’s ultimately what keeps “Frozen” from being as terrifying as its inventive premise promises.

Click to buy “Frozen”

Horror Movies, Movie DVD Quicktakes, Movie DVDs, Movies

Killers

September 8, 2010 /

When the ads for Robert Luketic’s “Killers” started appearing in theaters, a lot of people were quick to notice the similarities to another husband-wife action comedy, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.” But while it certainly sounds like a clone of the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie film on the surface, “Killers” should be so lucky to be considered in the same company. Katherine Heigl stars as Jen Kornfeldt, a recently single woman on vacation in France with her parents when she meets the seemingly ordinary Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher) and the pair get hitched. What Spencer fails to tell her is that he used to be an assassin for the CIA, and although he’s since walked away from the job in order to lead a normal life, a bounty has been put on his head that sends a sleeper unit of contract killers posing as their neighbors and co-workers to take him out.

Unfortunately, Heigl and Kutcher just don’t have the chemistry needed to make a movie like this work, and I would have loved to have seen what other actors (like maybe real-life couple Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson) could have done in the roles. Of course, that wouldn’t change the fact that the film’s biggest flaw is the explanation as to why the bounty has been put on Spencer’s head in the first place – a twist ending so absurd that it makes the rest of the movie seem even dumber than it is. “Killers” still has a few good moments (including a cameo by a certain bestselling R&B musician that’s so out of left field it’s actually pretty funny), but they’re not enough to save it from the film’s own half-baked plot.

Click to buy “Killers”

Action Movies, External Movie DVDs, Movie Comedies, Movie DVD Quicktakes, Movie DVDs, Movies

Brewster McCloud

August 18, 2010 /

Warner Archives’ long-awaited DVD of Robert Altman’s rarely seen 1971 follow-up to his “MASH” breakthrough is an example of some of the best, but a lot more of the worst, of the great director’s filmmaking approach. Bespectacled Bud Cort (“Harold and Maude”) stars in the title role as a geeky but confident youth building a human-powered flying machine in a fallout shelter at the then new Houston Astrodome, looked over by a mysterious goddess-like earth mother/protector (Sally Kellerman). Meanwhile, assorted right-wingers in Brewster’s sphere are dying under never fully described or explained circumstances, including witchy Margaret Hamilton (“The Wizard of Oz”), complete with ruby slippers, and unrecognizable Stacey Keach under an enormous amount of age make-up as a greed-obsessed millionaire. A tough, plays-by-his-own rules San Francisco cop named Frank Shaft (Altman favorite Michael Murphy) is working the case, but the only thing connecting the deaths is the presence of bird feces on the corpses — which is, I guess, supposed to be hilarious and also meaningful. Meanwhile, the seemingly sex-negative Brewster bumps into a girl with a talent for wacky black comedy car chases (Houston-bred Shelley Duvall in her first film role). Altman discarded the original screenplay by Doran William Cannon, who wrote the infamous “Skidoo,” and so the writer can’t be blamed for the narration featuring Rene Auberjonois as a possibly half-bird ornithologist. It’s not all torture. The final few minutes find their way to a bit of actual movie poetry beneath the skylight of the Astrodome, but this bird doesn’t stay airborne for long.

Click to buy “Brewster McCloud”

Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External Movie DVDs, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movie DVD Quicktakes, Movie DVDs, Movies, Reviews

Exclusive Clip — “Cemetery Junction”

August 18, 2010 /

It’s annoying but true: in the current blockbuster-driven film climate, an increasing number of films which are clearly worthy of a look are not even getting theatrical releases. You’d think that the directorial debut of the widely acclaimed team behind the original UK version of “The Office” and HBO’s outstanding “Extras,” not to mention “The Ricky Gervais Show,” would at least get a limited arthouse release in the good old U.S.A. The fact that Ricky Gervais has become a well-known figure here as a comic in his own right should help, even if his movies as a writer-actor have so far failed to set our world on fire. If even Gervais’s equally mirth-inducing but less well known professional partner, Stephen Merchant, were to wander into, say, a random Santa Monica or Hollywood-area coffee house, he might well be mobbed.

Nevertheless, the DVD of Gervais and Merchant’s cinematic directorial debut, “Cemetery Junction,” was released yesterday and we have, I’m told, an exclusive clip from the film. As you’ll see, this appears to be a slightly jaundiced coming-of-age comedy-drama in the mold of something like “Diner,” “American Graffiti,” Fellini’s “Il Vitelone,” and innumerable other nostalgic-yet-brittle films made in Britain and all over-the-world.  It stars young Christian Cooke as the requisite dissatisfied local, dividing his time between hanging out with his more complacent mates (Tom Hughes and Jack Doolan), a theoretically dead-end job selling life insurance (hey, that’s what my dad did!), and falling for the boss’s beautiful but engaged daughter (Felicity Jones). Supporting turns are filled by Ralph Fiennes, Emily Watson, Matthew Goode and, of course, Ricky Gervais. He just happens to appear in the rather amusing clip below.

Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movie DVDs, Movies, News, TV, TV Comedies

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2023 Premium Hollywood

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑