I've been a fanatical movie buff since I was a little girl, thanks to my parents who encouraged my brother and I to watch anything and everything we wanted, even the stuff deemed inappropriate for minors. I work, write, and reside in San Francisco the city where I was born and bred.
Tyler Perry directs and produces films that guarantee money in the bank. His distributor certainly thinks so — Lionsgate studio, heard uttering the incantation, “Tyler Perry, Tyler Perry,” recently renewed their contract with him. With his films bringing in an estimated $520 million, he may well be the studio’s favorite cash cow. However, his success…
The jury is still out for me because I can’t quite make up my mind, but it may be that The Human Centipede (First Sequence) will go down in my book as the most disturbing movie I’ve ever seen. Director Tom Six boldly goes with his bio-horror feature — deemed “100% Medically Accurate” — where…
Spring break: Sun, water, ear-splitting hip hop music, booze-swilling horny guys, brazen bikini babes — and millions of razor-sharp teeth. Welcome to Lake Victoria, the fictional locale of Piranha 3D, the remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 movie of the same name. The film’s “coed rowdy-party” setting isn’t one you usually see in the work of…
As I watched Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, a few questions came to mind. Will the children who comprise the film’s target audience understand the allusions to James Bond, Austin Powers, The Terminator, and Silence of the Lambs? Will the unfortunate adults in the audience for whom these allusions are no doubt…
A story about infidelity, prostitution, racketeering, and murder set in the swinging, “free love” decade of the 70’s is one that can make for a deliciously trashy melodrama. But that didn’t happen in Taylor Hackford’s, Love Ranch, a bio-pic about the violence that erupts from the marital breakdown of Joe and Sally Conforte, the married…
Frankenstein author Mary Shelley could not have foretold that her gothic tale of an errant scientist who creates a man/monster out of the limbs of dead bodies would become a harbinger of things to come with the emergence in the 21st century of the science of genetic engineering. Instead of stitching together body parts, today’s…
Given the recent headlines concerning the extramarital escapades of Tiger Woods and Jesse James, the premise of Atom Egoyan’s erotically-charged film Chloe reminds us of something that should come as no surprise to anybody — a cell phone is not a cheating spouse’s best friend. When the specter of possible infidelity looms over a couple…
