A more politically correct trailer for Movie 43, the mother of all ensemble comedies (12 directors, 50+ A/B level actors, 8 writers), has been made available on the web by Relativity Media. Of course, when I say more politically correct, I just mean it’s just not nearly as offensive as the red-band trailer was (we…
Spooky house horror has had a fairly decent and crisply creepy cinematic run so far this year. We’ve had a “Silent House” and an old isolated one that played home to “The Woman in Black” and now we have the geographically accurate House at the End of the Street. For this latest hunk of house…
Who knew Tarsem Singh Dhandwar had a sense of humor? Well, apparently not me. So color me pleasantly surprised that the imagery-obsessed filmmaker behind such stony-faced pictures as “The Cell” and last fall’s “Immortals” has finally revealed a different side of himself with the playful fairy tale movie Mirror Mirror. A lighthearted interpretation of the…
As wrap-up films for movie franchises go, one just has to look back at the Harry Potter empire to see how to do it right. American Reunion director Jon Hurwitz (“Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay“) was obviously not very observant. Born in 1999, “American Pie” conceived by Adam Herz and starring a group…
Be careful who your neighbors are. In House at the End of the Street, the neighbor is the survivor of a brutal axe murder — a parenticide, in which his sister killed their parents. In the bizarre trailer, mother and daughter (Elisabeth Shue, Jennifer Lawrence, respectively) are the “lucky” renters next door who are plagued…
Releasing a mindless war movie under the precedent that it’s “like no other in Hollywood’s history” was not the right way to convey reverence for our troops. While Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh’s Act of Valor shows respect for the men and women in uniform overseas, it ignores the complexities of their situation. Once intended…
Daniel Espinosa’s Safe House is a lesson in “Filmmaking with Parkinson’s.” The choppily edited actions sequences — onslaughts of bright colors and enough “shaky-camera” to make Jason Bourne nauseous — are hard to endure. Moreover, they’re built on clichés: Coincidental protests (allowing the protagonists some cover), accidental assassinations, and a handful of close calls. Because…
