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Film Review – Priest
In 2010, director Scott Stewart brought a dopey apocalyptic action film titled “Legion” to the big screen, which starred Paul Bettany as an agent of God caught in the middle of an unearthly war. For 2011, Stewart throws a curveball with “Priest,” a dopey apocalyptic action film that stars Paul Bettany as an agent of God caught in the middle of an unearthly war. And people say there’s no originality in Hollywood anymore. Well, instead of combative angels in a desert setting, the new feature offers a plague of vampires in a desert setting. Additionally, “Priest” offers its rusty delights in magical 3D, leaving its dreary lifelessness to linger right in front of your eyes!
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Blu-ray Review – The Big Bang
Red-hot noir meets a college lecture in “The Big Bang,” a distinctive spin on detective dealings that bravely assumes audiences might be more interested in the nuances of physics than any sort of narrative momentum. Energetically acted and scripted with faint pizzazz, the feature simply runs too hot and cold to convince. The movie’s originality is stimulating, but it often cuts into the basic necessities of the mystery genre, pausing the action to tend to monologues concerning time and space. Dames, diamonds, and science — they don’t exactly form an exhilarating motion picture.
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Film Review – Hesher
Though it has the early designs to be a head-spinning mystery, “Hesher” is no puzzle. What a disappointment. An abrasive dark comedy that invests more in mood than substance, the picture feeds off an anarchic ambiance of metalhead insight, showing a fist when all it really wants to do is offer a hug. Blowing a glorious opportunity to create substantial psychological mischief, “Hesher” would rather play it safe, though this is hardly a traditional domestic drama.
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Film Review – Bridesmaids
“Bridesmaids” has more than its share of wonderful moments exploring the ease and crisis support command of female friendships, a sensitive tenor not seen nearly enough on the big screen. In fact, the film is best slipping inside this intimacy, which goes a heck of a lot further than any of the gross-out jokes co-writer/star Kristen Wiig serves up to play to the back row. “Bridesmaids” is a hoot, but it’s also ridiculously overlong and surprisingly unadventurous, almost afraid to pursue its most compelling qualities.
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Film Review – Everything Must Go
I like Will Ferrell when he slips into serious dramatic actor mode. The creative tidal change suits his abilities, permitting the perennial clown an opportunity to show off his unexpected range. “Everything Must Go” is perhaps Ferrell’s most consistent work as an actor, stepping inside a dubious character enduring the worst week of his life. Though streaks of comedy are present, this is Ferrell crouching in a dark corner, playing a complicated role in an unsteady, though rewarding psychological drama.
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Blu-ray Review – The Dilemma
Stepping away from serious business (and the lucrative world of Robert Langdon) for a spell, Ron Howard mounts his first comedy in over a decade with “The Dilemma.” True to form, it’s really not much of a comedy at all. Though crudely marketed as a slapstick bonanza to sell some discs, the picture is a far more peculiar machine of anxiety, flavored with only a light dusting of the funny stuff. Howard’s not drilling to the root of infidelity here, but he touches on delicate relationship issues, providing a fascinating, unexpected personality to the picture.
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Blu-ray Review – Cougars, Inc.
The nauseatingly titled “Cougars, Inc.” comes across like an unfinished movie, with viewers often dropped into scenes already in progress. It’s a mess of characterizations and romantic connections that also wants to register as a raunchy sex comedy, spinning itself dizzy for 79 minutes. I’m not exactly sure what type of film writer/director K. Asher Levin was looking to make, but he’s made all of them, uncomfortably stuffed into a doomed comedy where every character is either suffering from an undiagnosed mental impairment or registers as flat-out repulsive.
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Blu-ray Review – Daydream Nation
It appears writer/director Michael Goldbach really enjoyed Richard Kelly’s 2001 mind-bender, “Donnie Darko.” In fact, he liked it so much, he went out and made a copy for himself, dialing down the sci-fi complexity, but retaining the apocalyptic teen angst routine, performed by a cast of frantic actors who always look bewildered. I can’t blame them, for “Daydream Nation” is an impenetrable, seemingly unfinished saga of love, rage, drugs, and sinister activities, thrown up on the screen all at once. “Donnie Darko” it’s most certainly not, though it finds a few appealing moments underneath the deflating sense of chaos Goldbach is incapable of aiming.
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Film Review – Last Night
“Last Night” is an account of marital trust put to the test, though it’s not a habitual situation of primitive carnal delights. The picture dares to approach the sensitivity of emotional need, asking difficult questions about infidelity, submitting a disconcerting query: When it comes to wandering eyes and escalating flirtations, what’s the worst offense, sex or love?
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Film Review – Jumping the Broom
With Tyler Perry spending his precious time driving his most popular character into the ground to sustain a hold on African-American entertainment dollars, burgeoning movie mogul T.D. Jakes (“Not Easily Broken”) has selected a softer approach for multiplex dominance, taking on the trials of family and marriage with the charming feature, “Jumping the Broom.”
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Film Review – Something Borrowed
“Something Borrowed” is a romantic comedy, thus immediately placing its contents outside the border of reality. That whimsy established, this movie is still a total crock. Even by the low standards set by the occasionally nauseating genre, the feature doesn’t play fair, electing to strip a complex situation of romance and friendship free of any human qualities. With all the crude good vs. evil scenarios passed around in this unbearable motion picture, it might as well be a western.
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Film Review – Thor
Now here’s a superhero that’s difficult to translate to the big screen. Born of mythology and armed with a magical hammer, Thor isn’t exactly Batman or Iron Man, lacking the brood and the gadgets required to keep viewers in a shadowy mood of fractured valor. To successfully bring the character to cinemas, director Kenneth Branagh has conjured an epic visual experience, infusing “Thor” with the expansive sweep of a comic book and some snappy personality, creating a wildly entertaining yarn that effectively launches the adventures of a new caped crusader (and his trusty hammer).
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Film Review – Poetry
It’s easy to misjudge the South Korean drama, “Poetry.” From the outside, it might appear as another mawkish tale of self-discovery, with an older woman finally seizing the finer triumphs of the world in the twilight of her life, tasting her surrounding at the very moment it’s all about to be taken away from her. Instead, “Poetry” is a far more pained, unsentimental picture, investigating the commotion raging inside a perplexed grandmother, generating over two hours of spellbinding introspection.
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Film Review – The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
Marketing is everywhere, surrounding us daily with a sensorial assault that’s slowly become white noise. The public’s ability to tune it all out has stymied advertisers, requiring more subtle means to push their brands to consumers. It’s an elaborate game of buying and selling, with the average human powerless to stop the madness. Documentarian Morgan Spurlock? Well, he wants to contribute to the invasion in the name of satire. Or whatever Spurlock calls his toothless brand of filmmaking these days.
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Blu-ray Review – Jolene
“Jolene” is chunk of old-fashioned American storytelling, adapted from a short story by E.L. Doctorow. Crossing the country detailing the swelling woe of a redhead and her failure to find uncontaminated love in the world, the film attempts to spread the feeling of a life lived across a widescreen environment, working out the complex mechanics of a tragedy in two hours, deploying a supporting cast of familiar faces to help make the violations stick. Cruelly, the display of sorrow never takes command, with most of the film an unsatisfactory soap opera that never seizes an illuminating essence.
BRIAN ORNDORF 