Entries Categorized as 'DVD'
Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
The Forbidden Kingdom (Chinese: ????) is a 2008 Hollywood martial arts-adventure film from Lionsgate and The Weinstein Company directed by Rob Minkoff. It is the first film to star together two of the best-known names in the martial arts film genre, Jackie Chan and Jet Li. The action sequences were choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping.
This time-traveling take on the Monkey King fable finds an American teen transported back to ancient China after wandering into a pawn shop and discovering the king’s fighting stick. Once there, the adventurous teen joins an army of fierce warriors who have sworn to free their imprisoned king at all costs. In addition to appearing as the mythical Monkey King, Li assumes the role of a silent monk, and Chan appears in the role of kung fu master Lu Yan.
I am always down for a movie that stars Chan that isn’t called The Tuxedo, but for a movie that stars Chan and Li both fighting together, is not something that can be missed. Although, The Forbidden Kingdom is no Hero, House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, it is still a nice piece of work that stars two of the biggest kung fu guys in the game.
I have always enjoyed Chan, when he was at his best with Rumble In The Bronx to even Rush Hour 3. With The Forbidden Kingdom he kind of returns to his roots starring in a good cheesy kung fu movie with the only difference being that he gets a little help from special effects. Everyone has to come to grips now with the fact that Chan is just too old to do his own stunts anymore and computer effects have to help him out a bit. Even Buster Keaton had to stop doing all those crazy types of stunts at some point. I also enjoyed Li as the Monkey King, who I think is not as good as Chan kung fu wise, but is better at delivering English language lines. You would think Chan would be a little bit better at his English after all these years but he is still about the same.
Neither Chan or Li are the stars of The Forbidden Kingdom however. That role goes to Michael Angarano who does a good job at basically playing the same role that the kid in The Neverending Story had, as the two movies are mostly identical, right down to the bullies and the old man in the shop. Forbidden Kingdom has some nice kung fu thanks to Woo-ping, even though some fight scenes start to look the same and some computer effects are noticeable. David Buckley supplies some great music to go with the fight scenes and director Rob Minkoff does a fine job.
The Forbidden Kingdom is not a must see film for it’s kung fu scenes. If it was ranked on a list with other movies as far as that goes it would be on the bottom. But it is a must see for fans of Chan or Li or both. The Forbidden Kingdom is a throwback to those cheesy kung fu movies of the past, updated with a few computer effects and our favorite kung fu guys not as quick as they once were, wrinkles and all.
The DVD features deleted scenes; audio commentary; a behind-the-scenes featurette; a making-of featurette; cast and crew interviews and bloopers.
Posted in DVD, Josh by Josh 
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Tags: Ch'eng-En Wu, Collin Chou, Crystal Liu Yi Fei, forbidden kingdom, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, John Fusco, Li Bing Bing, Michael Angarano, Rob Minkoff
Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
The Fall is a 2006 film by Tarsem Singh, starring Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru, and Justine Waddell. It is based on the screenplay for the 1981 film Yo Ho Ho by Valeri Petrov.
Unable to free himself from his sterile confines, the immobile patient’s deepest fears form the basis of a dark story that he shares with his young companion — a little girl who visits his room as she recovers from a nasty fall. As the eerie tale unfolds, reality and fantasy gradually merge to form a strange world in which anything is possible.
Tarsem took a lot of crap for The Cell, which I thought was a really good movie, but which I know has it’s following of haters including my mom who walked out of the theater. However, even the haters can’t dispute the fact that it is one of the best looking movies ever put to film. After 8 years, Tarsem is back with The Fall, a movie that took him most of that time to make. You can tell that he had full control over this movie and rightfully so since he put most of his own money into it. If you hated The Cell for it’s really dark and depressing visuals, then you shouldn’t have a problem with The Fall. Tarsem uses his same types of techniques for more beautiful imagery here.
The movie has a story within a story. The man and the little girl both in the same hospital is the real world. The other story is a fantasy which exists in the little girl’s head as the man tells it to her. However, this isn’t a Mother Goose story. A revenge fantasy that takes place in a world with vast deserts and palaces that float on water. This is where Tarsem uses most of his imagery that was created, although it may not seem like it, not with computer graphics but with traditional filmmaking techniques. That means the elephant swimming in the ocean is real, or seems like it is anyway. That means the scenes towards the end, with the unending labyrinths and explosions, are all real. It is a feast for the eyes and one of the best looking films ever.
However, if the two stories in the movie or even just one of the them weren’t that good, then the movie would just be good based on its visuals. Some liked the story in The Cell but didn’t like its visuals or vice versa. In The Fall, both of its stories are really well done. The best one and the most emotional is the one based in the real world. The man in the hospital wants to kill himself and the little girl with the broken arm just wants to listen to the man tell a story. No bad child acting here. Untaru, as the little girl, performs some of the best child acting I have ever seen. The fact that she is a 5 year old Romanian who speaks kind of good english in her first film role ever doesn’t seem to be a problem. Pace is very good here also and there are scenes where Tarsem seems to just let the camera keep rolling while Untaru and Pace just talk to each other in dialogue that seems unrehearsed and natural.
Part of the reason why Tarsem doesn’t seem to get a lot of respect is because he comes from a TV commercial and music video background. It is how he got his start and made his way into movies. He brings that background into the two films that he has made so far and I guess that bothers some people. Some people just don’t want their movies to look like a TV commercial. I don’t see whats so wrong with it though. After all, we have viewed many memorable commercials over the years and there are music videos that we will never forget. So why not a two hour movie with a really good story using those same elements? At the beginning of the film it says Spike Jonze and David Fincher presents. Just like it says Quentin Tarantino presents on all those cheesy straight to DVD movies at the video store. Some people seem to forget that Jonze and Fincher also got their start in commercials and music videos. Just like Tarantino got his start working at a video store.
The DVD features audio commentary; deleted scenes and a making-of featurette.
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Rating: 1.0/5 (2 votes cast)
Posted in DVD, Josh by J.C. No Comments »
Tags: Dan Gilroy, Justine Waddell, Lee Pace, Tarsem Singh, the fall
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Married Life (working title: Marriage) is a drama film directed by Ira Sachs. The film is based on the 1953 John Bingham pulp mystery novel, Five Roundabouts to Heaven. The cast includes Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson and Rachel McAdams.
Set in the 1940s, Married Life tells the tale of Harry (Cooper) — a man whose faithful but emotionally distant wife (Clarkson) has become all but impossible to love. Smitten by the beautiful Kay (McAdams) but ultra-sensitive to the shame associated with divorce, Harry opts to poison his wife as a means of allowing the marriage to end with her pride still intact.
Harry’s scheme soon goes horribly awry, however, when after revealing the plan to his best friend, Richard (Brosnan), Richard too falls in love with the ethereal young beauty and sets into motion a cunning plan all his own.
From the plot description and the trailer you would think that you’ve seen something similar to Married Life before. Devoted husband tries to kill his wife to be with his mistress. Indeed that’s how it all starts out and continues until halfway there. Then, something is revealed to Brosnan’s character and to us that turns the story on its head. It’s not so much about what we find out but what Brosnan does with this information. It turns the movie that we thought we had already seen into a suspenseful, interesting and thoughtful piece of work.
Brosnan supplies a narration throughout the movie to tell us whats going through his head and the other characters heads, although when you think about it, how could he know what they are thinking too or what they were doing when he wasn’t around to know about it. Doesn’t matter, his cool sly voice goes nicely with the film’s soundtrack.
The four main leads all do a fantastic job with these characters. They all have pretty much equal screen time, except for McAdams who gets the role of the mistress, which could have been really dull but she makes the character into a really nice person who really doesn’t want to break up a marriage. At times she seems a little too good to be true but McAdams carries it with what little screen time she has. There is no other actor as cool and calm as Cooper. Clarkson is gorgeous for her age and is believable as her character. Brosnan comes and goes throughout the film but owns every scene he is in.
When I said that the movie starts to become more suspenseful, I don’t mean it in the way that a lot of false dramatics start to happen. The suspense slowly starts to build as we know what Brosnan knows and because he won’t tell Cooper, even though he has a really good reason to. In the beginning we view three of the characters as being selfish, when actually, all they want to be is happy. I don’t want to give anything away, but I’ll just say that in the end, things might not work out for some people but everything is as it should be.
The DVD features director’s commentary and alternate endings.
Posted in DVD, Josh by Josh No Comments »
Tags: Chris Cooper, David Richmond-Peck, Ira Sachs, marriage, married life, Oren Moverman, Patricia Clarkson, pierce brosnan, Rachel McAdams
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
The Promotion is a 2008 American comedy film written and directed by Steven Conrad.
Doug (Seann William Scott) is a seemingly ordinary guy who works as the assistant manager of a supermarket near Chicago. When the owners of the market announce they’re opening a new branch near Doug’s neighborhood, he applies to become manager of the new store, and both he and his wife (Jenna Fischer) assume he’s a shoo-in to get the job. But Richard (John C. Reilly), a gregarious recent hire at the store who has relocated to Illinois from Canada, announces he’s also applying for the management position, and a keen rivalry develops between Doug and Richard even as they strive to act like friends on the surface.
As the competition grows between the two, their personality flaws become increasingly evident — Doug’s short temper, Richard’s history of drug abuse — and when Richard’s wife (Lili Taylor) leaves him, the contest starts taking an uncomfortable turn. The Promotion also stars Fred Armisen, Gil Bellows, and Bobby Cannavale.
The Promotion looked to me like it was going to be a good one. It stars Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly, both really good comic actors. The trailer had me sold but then I started to read reviews for it and they weren’t so good. I decided to watch it anyways based on the stars of the movie, as I do sometimes when I can’t decide on if I want to watch a certain movie or not. After I had watched it, I came to the conclusion that The Promotion also hadn’t decided on what it wanted to be.
It’s filled with some of the best comedic actors around and with some funny dialogue. But it’s also filled with uneasy and dramatic moments that keep the comedic elements from coming out. The movie has elements to make it funny, like Reilly’s self-help tape that he listens to that says his own name. Then it has moments that start out to be funny and while you are waiting for the final big laugh, turns around and becomes weird. Like the scenes with the Teddy Grahams guy or the black kids who hang out in the store parking lot.
The movie doesn’t know what to do with itself. There isn’t a rule saying you can’t have a comedic movie filled with bits of drama but you at least have to have some consistency with both of them and not have them all over the place. The characters in the movie change on a dime, mostly Reilly’s character who is nice one second and mean the next for no reason. The movie also doesn’t seem to know what great actors it has. Fischer just goes throughout the movie just listening to what Scott has to say and not uttering one funny line. Taylor has a horrible Scottish accent for no reason and is barely in the movie when she could have been used more. Armisen and Cannavale, both good actors, play roles that could have been played by pretty much anyone as they are not given much to do.
The movie also makes a big deal about Reilly’s character being Canadian, however it never uses that fact for anything funny other than to stress the point that he must be a nice guy. Reilly’s Canadian accent came and went so much that I wasn’t sure if I should just leave the door open and forget about it. The Promotion is filled with great things that it doesn’t know what to do with. Conrad would be the one to blame since he wrote and directed. Maybe he just had too much on his plate since this was his first time directing a film like this. He also wrote The Pursuit of Happyness and The Weather Man, so he knows how to mix light drama with comedy in the same movie.
Despite it’s many flaws, The Promotion is not a waste of your time. It has some good laughs in it with Scott and Reilly doing the best they can. I’d say it makes a good rental on a Saturday night if your local video store doesn’t have the movie you were actually there to get.
The DVD features deleted scenes; director’s commentary; audio commentary; a making-of featurette and outtakes.
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Rating: 3.0/5 (1 vote cast)
Posted in DVD, Josh by Josh No Comments »
Tags: Bobby Cannavale, Chris Conrad, Fred Armisen, Gil Bellows, Jenna Fischer, John C. Reilly, Lili Taylor, Rick Gonzalez, seann william scott, steve conrad, the promotion
Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Reprise is a Norwegian film from 2006. It is the first feature-length film directed by Joachim Trier. The script was written over a period of five years together with Eskil Vogt. The leading roles are played by Anders Danielsen Lie, Espen Klouman-Høiner and Viktoria Winge. The film was the Norwegian candidate for the Oscar as best foreign language film in 2006.
Erik (Klouman-Hoiner) and Phillip (Lie) are close friends who have known each other since they were children. Erik and Phillip grew up sharing a passion for literature, particularly the work of novelist Sten Egil Dahl (Sigmund Sæverud) and they each dreamed of becoming writers themselves someday. Both Erik and Phillip completed their first novels in their early twenties, but while Phillip’s book was accepted by a major publisher and became a best-seller, Erik’s book instead earned a sheaf of rejection slips.
The harsh glare of the celebrity lifestyle and his obsessive relationship with his girlfriend, Kari (Winge), cause Phillip to suffer a nervous breakdown, and after a stay in a treatment facility he tries to resume his relationship with Kari and his friendship with Erik. Erik, meanwhile, is still struggling to join the ranks of the published, and his romance with Lillian (Silje Hagen) begins to fray as the frustrated would-be author spends more time with Phillip and his pretentious compatriots.
Reprise is about the troubles of a couple of young guys who are all rather successful. Two of them get their first books published and the movie mostly focuses on them. Every guy in the group seems to be troubled by something or has an issue with someone else. The movie tries to tell us what these characters are going through instead of showing us and that is just one of the problems with Reprise.
Throughout the movie there is a narration, like in Y tu mama tambien, that explains what the characters are thinking, doing and once did. It worked to great effect in Y tu mama tambien but Reprise uses it throughout the film and it becomes like one of the movies annoying characters. All the characters in Reprise are extremely annoying. None of them are likable in anyway and the one who comes close has mental issues along with suicidal thoughts. How can we care about these characters if they are not interesting or likable?
It is a disappointment because you can tell a lot of effort went into Reprise. Took 5 years to write and contains some nice direction. Maybe some things got lost from the page to the screen or just added for effect. For instance, the annoying narration or the jumping in time flash cuts that are similar to Run Lola Run. The fact that everyone in the movie but us knows what these guys’ books are about.
I think it would have been a little better if we knew what the books were about. Also getting to know some of the other characters wouldn’t have hurt either as you kind of need to develop characters to get the audience to give a flip what happens to them in the end. The ending could have also used a rewrite, but depending on how you analyze the movie, it does that already. Everything seems to tidy up nicely in the end and kind of become a little comical. Is it because thats how it happened or how someone wanted it to happen? The movie never explains it to us. If only the narrator guy had been a little bit better at his job. If only the writers knew how to write before investing so much time into this and my time as well.
The DVD contains featurettes and deleted scenes.
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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)
Posted in DVD, Josh by Josh No Comments »
Tags: Anders Danielsen Lie, Christian Rubeck, Eskil Vogt, Espen Klouman-Høiner, Henrik Elvestad, Henrik Mestad, Joachim Trier, Odd Magnus Williamson, Pål Stokka, Rebekka Karijord, reprise, Sigmund Sæverud, Viktoria Winge
Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Redbelt is a martial arts film written and directed by David Mamet.
When a respected jujitsu master (Chiwetel Ejiofor) eschews a lucrative prizefighting career in favor of opening a self-defense dojo, it appears that he has chosen a peaceful path in life. The dedicated martial artist’s fate takes an unanticipated turn, however, when he is manipulated into participating in ultimate fighting championships by a group of unscrupulous actors and fight promoters.
Later, as the master is being relentlessly beaten in a dirty street fight, he connects with a high-profile action star (Tim Allen) with serious marital problems. Realizing that the only way to regain his honor is to step into the ring, the jujitsu master reluctantly prepares for the fight of his life.
Mamet, that awesome master of dialogue, usually makes movies that revolve around a con. Usually every character has a part in it and everyone is a suspect, well, except for the main character of course. In most Mamet films we get the pleasure of following around the main character as they try to figure things and then become surprised, just as they are, when they do unravel the mystery. In Redbelt however, we are just as lost as Ejiofor is and when everything is finally revealed in the end he knows what their talking about but we are still stuck in the what the hell is going on stage.
I am sad to report that Redbelt just may be Mamet’s least interesting movie ever. However, that doesn’t make it bad. Mamet has everything set up to make one of his great signature movies. We have a lot of the same actors that have been in his previous films delivering the Mamet style dialogue that he is known for. We have the con that we must try to figure out along with Ejiofor in who is a who and what is what. This is all here, except for the fact that it all happens very uneventfully and the con itself just may be one of the most ridiculous cons ever.
The movie revolves around martial arts but the fight scenes are very sloppy and the direction doesn’t help. Mamet shows nothing here of his great directing. His dialogue also doesn’t have any power to it. Usually, you can tell a Mamet film a mile away just by hearing the dialogue but Jennifer Lopez could have written Redbelt and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.
Now it seems like this review is headed for a bad rating but it is not. I have been giving Redbelt a mostly negative review so far but I guess I am just giving it a bad review based on the criteria for what a Mamet film should be. If I forget for a second that it was written and directed by Mamet, I come to realize that it is a decent movie. It features cinematography by the great Robert Elswit, has some of my very favorite actors which is pretty much every actor in the movie. It gives me a little hope that Allen will stop making retarded movies aimed for kids and turn to more dramatic fare. The first half of the movie is actually really good but its the second half that ruins it for everyone. That’s when all is revealed in its cheesy glory and the very slow moving competition scenes at the end have you looking at the running time to see when it will end.
I hope that Mamet was just having one of his bad days with Redbelt and that with his next film he will get back on track. Let’s just hope that it won’t be 4 years again until we find out if will have our awesome Mamet back or the one who came up with the equivalent of a better version of Rollerball.
The DVD features a behind-the-scenes featurette and fighter profiles.
Posted in DVD, Josh by Josh No Comments »
Tags: Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Mamet, Emily Mortimer, Joe Mantegna, redbelt, Tim Allen
Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Son of Rambow is a 2007 comedy-drama film written and directed by Garth Jennings.
Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a well-mannered schoolboy being raised in an ultra-religious community that deplores such corruptive distractions as television and seeks to maintain its purity by severely limiting contact with the outside world. In order to exorcise his creative inner demons, Will has taken to sketching imaginative drawings and complex illustrations. Lee Carter (Will Poulter) is the school terror, a rampaging hellion whose overaggressive behavior has made him an endless source of frustration to the faculty, and a source of fear to his fellow classmates.
As fate would have it, Will is in the school hallway avoiding exposure to the classroom television when a fed-up teacher ejects Lee from the classroom. Though at first it appears as if Lee is about to torment timid Will just as he does the rest of the student body, the two form a tight bond after Will convinces Lee to view a bootleg copy of Rambo: First Blood.
When Lee informs Will that he wants to shoot a homebrewed version of the violent action film for an upcoming amateur filmmaking contest, a sudden streak of rebellion prompts his sheltered classmate to readily agree. As the summer wears on the two boys set out to create the ultimate no-budget action movie, but their grand vision hits an unexpected hitch when a busload of French exchange students arrive at the school and the leader of the pack attempts to hijack the production.
I remember making movies all the time when I was a little kid. Using my dad’s giant camcorder, my little sister and her dolls as different characters, anything I could find around the house to use as props and our backyard as the wild jungle because it did look like a wild jungle for a whole year when my dad decided he didn’t want to mow it. The two kids in Son of Rambow are doing the same exact thing and having fun along the way.
The movie is very well made and light on the heavy subjects because a movie like this really doesn’t need the dramatics of a Christopher Nolan film. The two kids go to the same school but are from two very different lifestyles which are shown to great effect. Lee Carter lives in a big house connected to an old folks home. His parents are always away so it’s just him and his older brother who he loves but the feeling isn’t shared. He has almost a warehouse of fun things at his disposal which is every kids dream but no friends to share it with. Will lives with his mom, grandmother and little sister in a Shaker like household. He doesn’t get to watch TV or have any fun even though he has a great imagination that he puts down in drawings.
So when they meet up and decide to make the movie together, Lee Carter gets a friend and Will gets to have fun. The movie never crosses the line into making it more sappy, emotional or dramatic than it needs to be. I liked the other side plot of the movie with the French exchange student and his English prep school groupies. He is a fan of movies and Patrick Swayze, so he decides to help Lee Carter and Will with their movie. I liked the scene when they are all at party with a bunch of teenagers who are eating candy and getting wash off tattoos.
The second half of the movie mostly deals with the family drama and I think that’s when it looses a little bit of its fun. It kind of forgets about the whole Son of Rambow movie and just mainly wants to deal with the drama that comes up between Lee Carter and Will. It is still an enjoyable movie to the end though. The two kids are really good actors and the cinematography is great. It feels like it would have fit better as a short film than as a whole movie but the extra hour is not a waste of your time.
The DVD features trailers; audio commentary; making-of featurette and a short film.
Posted in DVD, Josh by Josh No Comments »
Tags: Bill Milner, Charlie Thrift, downlaod, download, Garth Jennings, Jessica Stevenson, Jules Sitruk, Neil Dudgeon, review, son of rambow, torrent, Will Poulter
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