Category: Movies (Page 375 of 498)

Futurama: Bender’s Game

November 7, 2008 /

For all the collective brain power that there is on the “Futurama” writing staff, you’d think that they would come up with better reference points for their recent straight-to-DVD movies. Their first movie, “Bender’s Big Score,” revolved around the Planet Express crew falling for email scams, and the latest movie, “Bender’s Game,” dedicates its third act to a parody of…”Lord of the Rings.” Really? Didn’t that ship sail about the time “The Fellowship of the Ring” hit theaters? The subplot involves Mom (the always entertaining Tress MacNeille) cornering the market on dark matter, which means there are a fair amount of poop jokes as well. And all of this would be fine if they were smart about it, but they seem to confuse complex with clever, resulting in another Byzantine story line that’s sorely lacking in the laughs department. One of the better jokes involves the orcs, which in this universe are Morks (yep, the Robin Williams alien), and even that is a severely dated reference. And they missed a golden opportunity to make the eye of Sauron to be Hypnotoad in disguise. Sigh.

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The Small Back Room

October 28, 2008 /

Life during wartime is getting to English weapons researcher and bomb disposal expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar). He’s in constant pain from an artificial foot and his preferred method of medication, whiskey, is highly problematic. It gets worse because his struggle to avoid drinking is just one of a few thorny issues that’s giving Susan (Kathleen Byron), his very serious girlfriend, some equally serious doubts about their future. Oh, and those damned bloody Nazis have taken to leaving a new kind of tricky unexploded bomb laying around, and it’s killing local soldiers and Prof. Rice’s own colleagues.

Based on a famed wartime novel by Michael Balcon, 1951’s “The Small Back Room” is one of the less well known films from “the Archers,” the writing and directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Best known for ravishing and slightly insane Technicolor spectaculars like “A Matter of Life and Death,” “The Red Shoes,” and their masterpiece, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” the influential pair also had a flair for creating genuinely captivating black and white thrillers and love stories. “The Small Back Room” is a bit of both and possesses a degree of complexity and implied sexuality unusual in its time, and also today. Still, the film maybe bites off a bit more than it can chew resulting in a relatively distancing second act, and one semi-dream sequence involving a giant whiskey bottle shows how Pressburger/Powell’s admirable creative risk-taking could sometimes lead to unintended laughs. Still, there is humor, fine drama, suspense in the climactic bomb disposal sequence, and an amazing cast of some of Britain’s best local talent. This may not be the Archers at their absolute best but, trust me, that’s no insult.

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Hell Ride

October 25, 2008 /

There’s a rule of thumb to follow regarding movies involving Quentin Tarantino: those he writes and directs are usually good, and those he produces are usually bad. There are a few exceptions to both sides of this rule (perhaps most famously Zhang Yimou’s “Hero”) which led me to believe that “Hell Ride” could be a fun little film, but as it turns out, it’s yet another low-rent vanity project from one of QT’s less-talented friends. Larry Bishop writes, directs and stars as Pistolero, president of the Victors biker gang. When one of their own is tortured and killed by rival gang member Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones) of the Six Six Sixers, Pistolero teams up with his two most trusted members, The Gent (Michael Madsen) and Commanche (Eric Balfour), and sets out to exact revenge.

Hell Ride

Unfortunately, the film isn’t even remotely as entertaining as the red band trailer makes it out to be, and in the process, puts some really cool characters to waste. Bishop sure has the look of a badass biker, but he can’t act the part, nor can he write the kind of dialogue Tarantino is famous for. He certainly tries with these silly rhymes and play-on-word conversations that he must think sound ultra-hip, but they only make the boring mess of a plot even that much more difficult to sit through. Only Dennis Hopper and David Carradine (as veteran members of the rival gangs) truly deliver performances worth remembering, and it’ll make you wish the film spent more time developing their characters instead of focusing so much time and energy on Bishop getting his freak on with a horde of naked chicks. “Hell Ride” may sound like one hell of a time, but you’d be better off checking out FX’s “Sons of Anarchy” instead.

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