tjpierce-45675

Jesus this is wonderful stuff! Every actor wannabe will find valuable insights here. Mr. Douglas summons the kind of grungy magic that made Wonder Boys one of the best movies ever. And Mr. Arkin (we once came out of the same show at the Los Feliz Theatre circa 1980 {The Old Gun?} !) is terrific as usual. Solid gold through and through. Watch it, you'll love the damn thing.

It has an improved story over the French original, with a more detailed and moving story arc for Kevin Hart's character. This screenplay not only has funny situations, it has laugh-out-loud funny lines--and the matinee audience with whom I saw it was bellowing with laughter. Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart nail it, with admirable support from Nicole Kidman and Julianna Margulies.

The bad reviews are mostly the reviewers revealing their insecurity about all things American when compared with the French. This reverse snobbery is unbecoming and even embarrassing.

By the way, do you think any of the people who voted 1-star on the first day of its release actually saw the film? I don't. They're haters going after Kevin. Hey, he apologized. What do you want him to do, tap dance barefoot on broken glass?

No, the writing's not Aaron Sorkin, and the cast has echoes of 1950s Warner Brothers pretty-boy casting (e.g., 77 Sunset Strip), but the plot's sharp and Kiefer Sutherland is the bomb. What's not to love!?

I mean, when you see the political right ruthlessly gerrymandering to increase their officeholdings by half again what the actual votes would give them, when you see them wiping voter rolls to suppress votes, and passing last-ditch legislation to gut the power of offices they have just lost, you can't be shocked to see a show that posits a violent effort by right-wing extremists to overthrow the national government.

And that's why I give this show--Seven Days in May meets West Wing--a perfect 10: it p!sses off all the right people. You only have to look at the angry, thinly-rationalized 1 ratings here to see that. They want what their greedy hearts desire and democratic processes and the public good be damned.

Also, fighting with pistols, machine guns, swords, daggers, paring knives, meat cleavers, circular saws, pig's trotters, meat hooks, garrots, power drills, baseball bats, whips, chains, pool cues, corkscrews, tasers, broken window panes, machetes, box cutters, cars, bombs, grenades, and the pointy end of broken bones, among other things, that result in stabs, bullet hits, slices, impalings, grindings, crackings, gurgles, limb severings, crashes, and explosions. All to save a little girl from an evil hippy-cum-Triad-boss. Now that's entertainment.

Watchable noir. American Lit grad-school dropouts go on a bender and hang out around an abandoned high school sitting on the asphalt and spouting Chandleresque dialog. Oh wait--are we supposed to think they ARE high school students!? Hmmm.

Great big gobs of gritty, gory violence set against the fog of black ops--and a nice twist at the end--make this actioner a lot of fun. Can't wait for the sequel.

The main takeaway from this diverting, cautionary yarn is that, as preparation for an invasion--and simply as a practical matter--you should have duct tape on hand to seal your childrens' mouths so that their more-or-less constant bawling and shrieking doesn't give away your location. Also, you should have sufficient lengths of lightweight chain or climbing rope to tether them to you, so that their sudden and irrational dashes into the open do not draw you into the range of enemy fire.

Other than that, the story has a great twist and Michael Peña is, as always, superb. PS, most of the ridiculously low ratings here are from Trump Monkeys® who think the film is targeting their so-called values. Ignore them--it's worth seeing, despite the annoying kids.

Superstitious whackos spread hysteria amongst other superstitious whackos. Complications ensue.

How does it happen? I mean, I just watched a super-exciting thriller that achieves absolutely everything it set out to do--mostly just provide a rollicking good time--and I see the grumpy ensemble at Rotten Tomatoes has given it decidedly mixed reviews. Do they just decide one of the big summer blockbusters needs to be panned? Do they flip a coin? Does the message that killing a couple dozen bad guys offend their snowflake sensibilities? Not sure, but I am certain of one thing: it's everything you would expect after viewing the trailer.

I didn't see the religious allegory, though it makes perfect sense and obviously was intended by the writer/director. I saw another, more concrete allegory, related to the fact that the woman was married to a self-involved poet.

An acting teacher--I forget who--once passed along a theory that artists draw from a bottomless well of narcissistic poison and, through talent and craft, transform it magically into art. I think this film starts with that position and further suggests that the artist uses the love of his spouse or lovers as creative nourishment, even as he lives for the love of his audience.

One thing it brought to mind is that the spouses of artists who stay with them a long time tend to be pretty tough cookies.

Anyway, I found it tough sledding, even as an absurdist allegory. You can decide for yourself if it was sufficiently entertaining. I gather that, for many, it was not, but I'm giving it a 10 because the religious whackos have piled in to trash it.

Let's face it--if you're a nobody typist at, say, Rottentomatoes, looking to make your bones by trashing an easy target, Charlie Sheen is about as good as it gets. And if Charlie's little drama is framed by the momentous events of 9-11, you have the irresistible opportunity to climb way up on your high horse and damn it as cheesy, awful, and exploitative.

9-11, the tense drama of five people trapped in a north tower elevator of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is none of those things. It is suspenseful, well-written, moving, and the acting is solid. I mean, why wouldn't you tell the story of people trapped in those elevators, or a hundred other stories that happened in those towers on that day? People DIED in those elevators, and they have stories to tell.

There have been at least 182 films of every conceivable genre with World War 2 as the background--drama, suspense, thriller, action, comedy, super-hero, mystery, supernatural, ZOMBIE--yet, I cannot recall a single review that accused any of them of exploiting those 80 million deaths to lend their movie some gravitas.

The cast rocks. Charlie Sheen, Gina Gershon (who should have an Oscar nomination coming--she really brings it), Wood Harris, Luis Guzman, Whoopie Goldberg, Olga Fonda, they're all terrific. This was shot on a shoestring budget, so these performances were shot quickly, perhaps after a period of rehearsal, and yet they don't miss a moment. If I have a beef, it's with the sound. The hard surfaces inside an elevator set create a lot of reverb, and sound could use some additional filtering before the digital media release.

All the positives aside, douche nozzles such as the bunch at Rottentomatoes have reputations to make; moreover, judging from the paltry number of reviews, the producers probably couldn't afford a nice cruise junket. So here we are with a solid little film that scores only 14 percent at RT, whilst 86 percent of Google viewers liked it. That ought to tell you something.

Whatever. It'll be gone from the big screens faster than you can sneeze, but they're going to love it on Netflix.

A good faux documentary about a zombie attack that wipes out a small town in Arizona, after which a Mexican immigrant who photographs and survives the nightmare is scapegoated for the massacre by racist officials, who dismiss the photos as a hoax. The film's depiction of Arizona's racist rubes as, well, racist rubes, is spot on.

Hollywood knows a cash market when they see one. They have learned that evangelicals will throw lots of money at anything that supports their beliefs and helps indoctrinate others, and so we're seeing these proselytizing flicks regularly.

What makes this one particularly loathsome is that the filmmakers hawk it as being based on the "hard-hitting" journalism of Lee Strobel. Well, they have a funny notion of "hard-hitting," since Strobel's book basically packages the essays of thirteen Christian academics, mostly from theological institutions. That's the sum of his "hard-hitting" research--letting readers be evangelized by believers.

It's not surprising, then, that the product of his work is unconvincing as anything approaching journalism, and that applies equally to the film. If you want an actual investigation into the historical Jesus, read the scholarly, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt by Richard Carrier. The Kindle version costs about the same as a movie ticket and your intelligence won't be insulted for your trouble.

You realize, I hope, that this inspired and inspirational film is even better than the cumulative rating here suggests. That is because the homophobes and racists have swarmed here on a self-righteous, self- assigned mission to trash this celebrated film by voting '1' in the ratings. If you are not sure, see it and you will know the praise and awards are fully deserved. I guess I can do no better than the person who said, "I didn't realize how much I needed this film until I had seen it."