That it is. Too bad that this is how our female leads are oftentimes written. Sometimes, as in the case of Bridesmaids, these female leads are written by females. Which means something about the writers, how the writers view their audience or a combination of thereof. Bridesmaids is just a fantasy though the characters are meant to be identifiable. The solution is to avoid going to and/or making movies like Bridesmaids. For what it's worth, your observations on the film made me reconsider the movie and lower my opinion of it.

Haha, sorry about that.

I just remembered: they got Tim Heidecker (of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) to play the groom. I was super excited when I saw him as I love his off-brand sense of humor. He ended up just being a place holder, which was disappointing.

I'd give the film about the same rating, though I found Wiig's character likeable and funny, my main issue with the film is that it was too long for it's own good(Annie's annoying brother/sister roommaters could've been completely cut from the film as they didn't really serve much of a purpose) and it sometimes played things too over-the-top when a more subtle approach would've worked, like for example the scene at the bridal shower.

The Raid is honestly the best action movie I've watched in years. Put me right back into the feeling I got from watching Hong Kong action movies as a teenager.


But yeah, really well choreographed fights. Lots' of brutal moves with just the right amount of gore. Just really well done all round. Definitely not for everyone, but it ticked all the boxes in AJR's "awesome action movie checklist".

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers

Well, with a title like that, you should know what you're going to get. You're getting Hollywood, you're getting chainsaws, and you're getting hookers. Fred Olen Ray's schlock masterpiece about a detective who stumbles onto a chainsaw-worshipping cult is one of those films that's so bad it's awesome, and it functions as a pretty effective satire of film noir and Chandler stories to boot. Plus, it's got both Linnea Quigley and Gunnar Hansen in the cast, so what's not to love? You need to see this at least once.

The latest round-up, yo...

Animal Crackers - 5/10
Torture Garden - 6/10
Breathless (1960) - 5/10
The Man from Nowhere - 8/10
Quarantine 2: Terminal - 5/10
A Dangerous Method - 7/10
Gold Diggers of 1935 - 7/10
Corman's World - 9/10
Who Done It? (1942) - 5/10
Hold That Ghost - 6/10
Cool Hand Luke - 9/10
Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey - 8/10
21 Jump Street - 7/10

Slapshot (1977)

Following on from Goon I'd thought I'd take a look at another Ice Hockey flick and I've gotta say I greatly enjoyed Slapshot. Deeper and more political than Goon (did I just write that?), Slapshot deals with a poor, soon to be decimated, industrial town hitting out at the outside world for its own misery and failings.

The players headed by a superb Paul Newman are losers who spend their days hanging around cheap bars coming to terms with their ailing lives. The fans are aggressive, embittered, soon to be destitute factory workers who hate the team with a passion. The players' wives are either depicted as shallow, preening trophies who drink to escape their misery, or in the case of Newman's (ex) wife, someone who is only heading onwards and upwards in the world because she escaped him and his world.

The film is very human. Newman as an ageing, soon to be extinct player-coach is to some extent fighting for his soul. On the one hand he has a seemingly talented, Princeton educated idealist named Braden who deplores the violence that has become prevalent in the sport. He scores goals but these goals alone aren't enough to save the side and as a result even he is becoming slowly depressed by it all. Braden's lovely looking wife is becoming like the rest of them, drinking to escape her own misery and thoughts of what might have been.

On the other hand Newman has the Hanson Brothers. 3 Child-like, fearless thug enforcers who define in human form all that the idealists, and probably Newman himself at one time, see as wrong with the sport. Their style is uttterly destructive but brings success and hope to their wrecked town through putting it on the map by any and all means possible.

What follows is an interesting and often hilarious-yet-bleak look at the paths taken by the team on route to saving themselves from being consigned to the history books forever.

8.5/10

Nice write up. The "Hanson brothers" still occasionally strap on the skates for promotional appearances at professional hockey games. I saw them about 10 years ago at one of our local AHL games. Good stuff.

http://www.hansonbrothers.net/

Hanna (2011)

Saoirse Ronan plays 16-year old Hanna, a girl with a mysterious past living with her father (Eric Bana) in a remote arctic wilderness. She has spent her childhood continuously training for survival and studying languages and basic facts that will allow her to operate back in civilization. Hanna is a one-girl wrecking crew with mad fighting and instinctive survival abilities but limited social skills. Marissa (Cate Blanchett) is a shadowy American spymaster who is hunting for Hanna and her father.

Hanna decides that she is "ready" to leave her father (with his eventual blessing) and makes plans to leave their isolated forest cabin and strike off on her own. What follows is a 110 minute chase through northern Africa and Europe as Hanna is forced to stay one step ahead of Marissa and her henchment.

This movie tried to show a lot of style and some of the set pieces were intriguing, but overall it was a bit disjointed and the story was hard to get into. Still, I'll notch it up .5 points for having many of the fight scenes shot at a distance so the viewer could appreciate the stuntwork and timing on display. 2.5 / 4.0

Unknown (2006) 6.5/10

Six men wake up in a warehouse having lost their memory. Some of them are kidnappers, and the rest are the abducted ransom victims. They need to find out who's who before the rest of the gang shows up.

Entertaining enough, but it fell way short of the premise.

Red State. A somewhat interesting premise undone by an admirable attempt from writer/director Kevin Smith to rapidly shift through a variety of styles and, by all appearances, scripts. What results is an intriguing guide track for a film that will never be made. Maniacally overstated and wimpy with long, dull stretches of dialogue in favor of strong images that would have no doubt been difficult to sell to an audience. The humorous final scene, with John Goodman explaining how events wrapped up, is filled with such strong images. A shame we didn't get to see what he did.

Michael Parks, a Tarantino favorite for some good reasons, has gotten what I believe to be undue praise for his underwritten role. This is an understandable symptom of wanting to see an excellent actor get the attention he deserves. His fire-and-brimstone preacher was less a character than Earl McGraw, a character that appeared for about two minutes in Death Proof. Blame the writing if you want.

Ulysses (1954)
This Italian epic - originally in the 1950ies iteration of 3D and at production costs of 10 million dollars purportedly the most expensive colour movie at the time (which I find hard to believe) - is a relatively faithful adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. The filmmaking style and special effects are very dated, of course, (think ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ without Harryhausen’s stop-motion monsters), but I thought it was a charmingly old-fashioned adventure movie. ‘Ulysses’ can also pride itself on featuring a proper Hollywood star in Kirk Douglas (as Ulysses), who is a suitably heroic screen presence. If compared to the cheap, Greek mythology based Italian movies which followed, ‘Ulysses’ stands tall, although calling this a good movie would be false advertising. A watchable, diverting movie - 5/10

Police Story 3: Supercop (1992)
Jackie Chan is selected as Hong Kong's representative in a joint HK/Mainland Chinese police action against a drug lord. With the help of a red Chinese police officer (Michelle Yeoh), he goes undervover and infiltrates the drug trafficking organisation, which results in many martial arts fights, explosions, gunfights and dangerous stunts.
The plot of the movie is negligible, although better than in most Jackie Chan movies, because it actually makes good (humourous) use of the contrast between Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese (in 1992, obviously, things have changed since then). The story doesn't really matter, though, because a Jackie Chan movie is really all about the action, which is simply spectacular in 'Police Story 3'. Most modern action movies use quick cutting and handheld camera to make action seem more exciting (and disguise actors' inabilities to do martial arts or the use of stunt doubles). Not so Jackie Chan movies, which make sure that you know it's jackie himself who is really truly hanging on that train or getting his arse kicked resp. kicking someone else's arse. On top of great action, the comedic elements in 'Police Story 3' work well and aren't lost in translation unlike in many other Hong Kong/Chinese movies. In short: 'Police Story 3' is great fun with top-notch action and close to Jackie Chan's best. 8/10

The Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975 (2011)
A Swedish documentary on the Black Power movement and specifically the Black Panthers, made from recently (re-)discovered Swedish TV footage of the early 70ies.
Although interesting in parts - there is a fascinating interview with imprisoned Angela Davis - 'The Black Power Mixtape' pretty much requires that the viewer is familiar with the subject already, as the film doesn't provide any real context and doesn't chronicle events. It also suffers from the fact that the Swedish journalists, who shot the footage in the 1960ies and 70ies, are clearly sympathetic to the Black Power movement and don't keep the necessary distance from the subject, which, to be fair, is also somewhat addressed in 'The Black Power Mixtape'. This documentary contains valuable material for anybody interested and knowledgeable in the subject, but isn't wort watching otherwise. 5/10

Largely agree. Did you also find Ms. Blanchett to be a little bit annoying?

I certainly did, mostly because of that awful southern accent, I don't even get what the point of it was, why not use Blanchett's more "normal" sounding American accent that she uses in most of her other films? It just didn't make sense, not everyone from Virginia talks with a southern dialect anyways, it just sounded really stereotypical and I was taken out of the film everytime Marrisa opened her mouth, which also made it difficult to take her character seriously.

Yes. Although the character was pretty much one-note with little depth. Another thing I didn't care for was the set design of the underground lair. Oh, sure, it looked cool and all, but having hallways lit solely by slowly moving progressional stobe lights makes little to no practical sense. Someone gets out of their cell and is on the loose but has plenty of shadows and nooks and crannies to hide in?...invest in some flourescent tubes, for the love of Pete.

Hahahaha I love applying practical considerations to art

Flirt (1993)

An odd little film, this movie is basically the same story told three different times, using three different locations and sets of characters. As is stated flat out by a group of people in film, the filmmaker seeks to compare the same story as told through three different milieus. Again as state in film, it's a failure, but an interesting one. Although the director Hal Hartley makes almost no effort to write "realistic" dialogue and much of the cast is only fleshed out enough to become set pieces for direction, there's something interesting here.

Of course, in contrast to the messages within, the flaws are quite apparent.

The repetition of the story is interesting the first turn around, but the second repetition (there's only two repetitions) feels like a completely different animal from the first two and has a different, slower tone. That, combined with the fact that we've heard the lines in some for or another twice over makes the fairly short 1 hour and 20 minute film feel much, much longer at this point. Until the third arc, the film swims along, but it stops and stutters at this point. Seriously, I was cool with the film until the third arc, but after that when the credits rolled I felt like I'd sat through Magnolia all over again. In addition to the dialogue, which may come off as either interesting and thought provoking or try hard film school graduate pretentious suckup and at times, both, this movie is pretty damn uneven. It may still be worth a watch though.

6/10

I wasn't a big fan of Hanna, because I thought that it missed the real story to be found. How does a girl who has been raised as an animal adapt to the real world? That's the story. Hanna's interactions with the vacationing family were the most interesting part of the film. The rest...not so.

Elena And Her Men

A story about a princess and her relationship with a general in wartime France. Ingrid Bergman is a stunningly beautiful woman, and this film is rich in its use of color, but ultimately this is a minor effort by Jean Renoir, and not terribly memorable, especially when compared to earlier works of his such as Grand Illusion.

Battle Royale(Director's Cut)

For all the hype, all the legend, all the build-up this is kinda not great. OK...maybe that's a bit too harsh since this is fine, this is good. It's well-made, it's entertaining, the action scenes are fine and a couple of them are even great(The Lighthouse shootout) it's just that it suffer's the problem that Fame suffers from...too short to achieve the critical mass necessary to become a great movie for the ages. Probably needs an extra 90 minutes.

If you want to see this story done great, read the novel. The movie only scratches the surface of its own potential.

7/10