Owner of the Pick 'n' Mix movie review website. Stop by after you've finished here for mostly smaller budget and harder to find movies. Thanks.
The Runaways were a peculiar phenomenon. They were less of a band than a product, and the product they sold was teen rebellion. The five-girl band was fronted by sixteen year old Cherie Currie, Joan Jett was on tousled mop and rhythm guitar, Lita Ford played lead, Sandy West was the drummer, and they had…
1984, and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ is sweeping the world, including in a small ramshackle village in New Zealand. There, living with his grandmother, a younger brother and several cousins, we meet Boy. He’s about nine or ten years old, I’d guess. His younger brother, Rocky, is six and thinks he has super-powers. Boy has no…
An eight-year old Australian girl and a mid-forties obese Jewish American man with Asperger’s Syndrome. Seems an unlikely pairing, doesn’t it? And yet Mary and Max, a stop-motion animated movie from Australia, matches the two together with no small measure of wit, and presents us with one of the most original films I’ve seen in…
Prospect: One small town in one of the southern states, population 1832, where everybody knows everybody else and the ubiquitous ‘Welcome To…’ sign on the town’s border feels more like the doors of a prison cell. Rhett Ryan knows these ties all too well but, as a wannabe country singer, he thinks he sees a…
The videotape rolls: “My name is Yusuf Mohammad, my former name is Steven Arthur Younger, and I have planted three nuclear bombs across the country. They will detonate unless my demands are met.” He then points the camera at exhibit A, looking suspiciously like a nuclear bombs with oh, I should say, about 4.5 pounds…
Creating a satire of the London art gallery scene would seem to be a rather pointless venture but director Duncan Ward, armed with his DVD collection of Robert Altman movies and aided by a lengthy cast list, brings us the lives and loves of assorted artsy types in his debut picture, Boogie Woogie. The plot,…
Boots Mason is a tough guy all right, make no mistake about it. There’s always room in the over-crowded London mob scene for a guy like him, and so it is that we find him doing a spot of debt-collecting at the start of this derivative gangster movie, The Heavy. He’s not long out of…
