REPO MEN, not by any stretch of the imagination to be confused with the similarly monikered Alex Cox masterpiece of a few decades back, is a bewilderingly awful concoction that seems to have been written by committee. A committee whose individual members were forbidden to contact one another and who seem, collectively, to be ignorant… Read More »
EARTH DAYS
Its not like the environmental crisis snuck up on us, a point made in the opening montage of Robert Stones documentary, EARTH DAYS. Starting with John F. Kennedy, ending with George W. Bush, and with every president in between, the looming consequences of living out of harmony with nature are expounded forcefully and with dire,… Read More »
CASE 39
CASE 39 takes a potent subtext about the terrors of unprepared parenthood and wastes it in a rote creepy kid flick that displays both iffy internal logic and a trifling execution. Renee Zellweger brings her best to this mess, but alas her efforts, when played out in the vacuum provided her, become at best a… Read More »
GOON
GOON is an astute and winning character study that subverts and short-circuits conventional expectations. Seann William Scott plays Doug Glatt, the eponymous goon, that member hockey team members tasked with taking out opponents with brutal directness, who goes from fan to fame by a fluke. That the incident that precipitates the fluke arises because of… Read More »
CHICAGO
Just when you thought we’d lost the knack for producing a live-action musical film here in the States, along comes CHICAGO. Set in 1920s in that toddling town, this hard-as-nails tale of sex, politics, fame, and most of all jazz, is a big, splashy, brassy confection wrapped up in a bow with enough bugle beads… Read More »
OWNING MAHOWNY
Dan Mahowny is a gray little man, meticulous, obsessive, and very careful with a dollar, even the ones in his native Canada. He is a man seemingly born to be a banker except for one little flaw, an addiction, actually. Dan is a man who likes to gamble, who has, in fact never gone more… Read More »
SLITHER
SLITHER doesn’t just embrace the cheesy goofiness of those B-grade horror films from the middle of the last century, it also gives them a big wet sloppy French kiss. Taking what is so endearing about the ineptitude, it tweaks the bad dialogue and worst plot points, turning them into an homage to bad cinema that… Read More »