Joaquin Phoenix‘s much-publicized retirement from acting in order to pursue his burgeoning career as a rapper had cries of “Hoax!” surrounding it from the very beginning, and its subsequent critical and audience response was mostly negative. However, despite the apparent trend of people upset at being duped, Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here is a fascinating and frequently hilarious send-up of celebrity culture anchored by an amazingly committed performance from Phoenix. In the film, as in reality, this is the kind of thing that could potentially end a career and forever ruin a reputation, and the courage he displays in sticking to it is very impressive.
Page 64 of 1232
If you’ve never heard of Troma Entertainment, there is no better place to start than their 1984 masterpiece, The Toxic Avenger. Though at first glance, this may seem like a terrible movie, it is actually that rarest of all “so bad it’s good” movies: the kind that is simultaneously self-aware and very sincere. Sure, it’s filled with cheesy puns and one-liners, and the performances are uniformly over-the-top and cartoonish, but that’s all part of director Lloyd Kaufman‘s unique, immediately recognizable style. Kaufman may be a trash filmmaker, but he has embraced sleaze so fully that he almost transcends it. He is truly the greatest trash auteur since Roger Corman; in fact, he’s greater, because his films are even trashier than Corman’s ever were.
The Toxic Avenger takes place, as all canon Troma films do, in the fictional town of Tromaville, New Jersey, “the toxic waste dumping capital of the world.” Melvin Ferd (Mark Torgl) is a scrawny, awkward nerd who works as a janitor at a local health club, where he is perpetually tormented by a quartet of bullies. Bozo (Gary Schneider) and Slug (Robert Prichard) are a couple of meat-head juvenile delinquents who spend their free time either working out or going on vehicular homicide sprees with their equally unredeemable girlfriends, Wanda (Jennifer Babtist) and Julie (Cindy Manion). Early on in the film, we see them run over an innocent boy on a bicycle (D.J. Calvitto) in an obscenely graphic shot gloriously preserved on Netflix in the original unrated version. When Wanda later pleasures herself to a photo of the messy murder, it’s almost as if the film is commenting on the exact kind of repugnant titillation it so gleefully provides.
From Friday nights in to boredom at airports, laptops now serve a purpose of more than just writing Word documents and surfing the Internet. Users are upgrading their drives to view Blue-Ray DVDs and access high-quality movies online from popular content websites. Here are a few tips to ensure you get the most out of watching movies from your laptop.
Change Your Power
Typically laptops default to a low performance. This conserves power and is beneficial when working on programs such as Word or writing an email. When running a video, however, the laptop must utilize more energy—especially HD videos that require a higher output of power. You can combat this setting by simply changing the power management to a high performance setting within your laptop’s settings function. This can be done in Windows by going to the Control Panel and finding the Power Options menu. You can also click on the battery icon on the taskbar and access Power Options.
Upgrade Your Notebook
If your laptop is older even by a few years, it is not current with the technological needs of HD videos. Laptops are now faster and more capable of the performance necessary to sustain the power required to view a movie. Lightweight laptops are not only easier to carry, but also optimized for performance. If you are going to be spending hours watching movies, an investment like this will yield much more positive results.
Check Your Programs
Watching HD movies causes your laptop to work harder. It has to decode the content. Stopping any anti-virus software running in the background, closing out of any open programs, removing any malware, and keeping a clean system will ensure your laptop doesn’t have to work harder than it already will. It is also possible that you experience reduced power when transferring files between laptops or onto other devices, so be sure to finish all of these tasks before inserting the movie or downloading one off of a website.
Use Graphics Chips
Modern laptops come with a graphics chip to assist processors with any high-definition movies you want to play, which is known as GPU-acceleration. They are designed to display video and graphics while taking away the load from the processors. If your laptop is an older model, using a graphics chip will ensure that the video plays effortlessly and does not skip while running at just a small percentage of its maximum load.
Following these techniques will help ensure you have a pleasant, uninterrupted experience when watching movies on your laptop. It is not tedious to perform a few simple tasks so that your laptop doesn’t have to work harder and cause you frustration in the movie-viewing process.
Source:
http://www.thinkdigit.com/forum/graphic-cards/156701-how-play-hd-content-movies-netbook-laptop.html
The term “dark comedy” often seems overused, as relatively few films really strike the balance between truly dark and truly funny, tending instead to fall more on one side or the other. One film that really deserves the title, however, is Mark Waters‘ 1997 adaptation of Wendy MacLeod‘s play, The House of Yes. Blending sharp, clever dialogue and a wonderfully unhinged lead performance by Parker Posey with exceptionally disturbing subject matter and boldly unlikable characters, The House of Yes has to be one of the darkest comedies ever made. At the same time, though, it is strikingly funny.
Posey is “Jackie-O” Pascal, a disturbed young woman with a lifelong obsession over Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and, especially, the JFK assassination. As a child, she once dressed as her namesake for Halloween, complete with fake blood and “brains” made from macaroni. She also has an unhealthy fixation on her twin brother, Marty (Josh Hamilton), with whom she shares a far too close relationship, even for twins. Their mother (Genevieve Bujold), upon meeting Marty’s fiancée, Lesly (Tori Spelling), tells her, “Jackie and Marty belong to each other. Jackie’s hand was holding Marty’s penis when they came out of the womb.” This casual admission of such an unsettling fact to a relative stranger gives the viewer a pretty strong idea of how this unbalanced family came to be the way they are.
Most films classified within the horror genre are not so much truly scary as they are fun in a sort of morbid way, at least to true horror fans. A real horror fan is too jaded to actually jump when the killer jumps out of the shadows, and certainly most monster movies are more eye candy to the true fan than they are actually frightening. The one thing most of the scariest films ever made have in common is a strong atmosphere of claustrophobia, a sense of no escape from a terrifying situation. Whether it’s in outer space (Alien), a remote arctic wilderness (The Thing), or an isolated building haunted by the past (The Shining), the feeling of being either physically or psychologically trapped is essential to real terror.
Brad Anderson‘s Session 9 has this atmosphere in spades, which is one reason it is probably the scariest film of the past decade. Though its characters can and do leave the location of the horror, a defunct mental hospital from which they have been contracted to remove asbestos, once they have set foot in it the horror never really leaves them. Gordon Fleming (Peter Mullan) is the owner of the company, a man troubled by a failing marriage and seemingly a lack of proper sleep. The rest of his team has their problems as well, all integral to the horror that befalls them. Mike (Stephen Gevedon, the film’s co-writer) is a law school dropout who has some prior knowledge of the asylum, which gradually begins to seem like an unhealthy obsession. Phil (David Caruso) and Hank (Josh Lucas) have an uncomfortable shared history, in that Phil’s former girlfriend is now with Hank, and Gordon’s nephew, Jeff (Brendan Sexton III), has a severe case of nyctophobia, or fear of the dark.
FOLLOW US!
CATEGORIES
© 2026 Premium Hollywood
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑