There is a sketch in the comedy InAPPropriate Comedy which features a racist guy hawking free boat rides to Africa to black passerbys. Unexpectedly — or at least I hope it wasn’t planned — one guy takes offense (and rightfully so) and proceeds to beat the living crap out of said white supremacist, continuing even…
The buddy cop genre gets a gender twist in Paul Feig’s The Heat, much as the pre-wedding shenanigans genre did in Feig’s 2011 film “Bridesmaids.” Both films are comedies full of outrageous moments that are determined to throw subtlety out of the window. Of an airplane. Into a volcano. Yet as important as it is…
John Moore’s new film A Good Day to Die Hard is the action equivalent of a chick-flick: It’s an hour and a half of highly predictable, mindless popcorn filler good only for the most ardent. The only thing it really gets right is it doesn’t take itself seriously — taking the action genre to the…
Some years ago I learned 1930s and ’40s era gangsters learned to talk “gangster” from the motion pictures. James Cagney probably had more to do with coining gangster lingo and slang than John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, and Al Capone combined. Gangster Squad gets the clothes right, does a decent job with 1949 era Los…
Yes, it is true. A fifth installment to the Die Hard franchise is coming and it is titled A Good Day to Die Hard. In it Bruce Willis reprises his iconic John McClane role to dole out an ass-whoopin’ to the Russians in their own backyard. To help him, and to presumably pass the franchise…
Vanessa Hudgens is growing up nicely. In the supposedly based on a real events movie, The Frozen Ground, she portrays a stripper who survives a murder attempt by a serial killer. Nicolas Cage is the Alaskan police detective trying like hell to stop him before he strikes again. The trailer for this psychological thriller (which…
As a heterosexual male, I am probably among the minority of those who have read Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. I’m totally cool with that. I find the books funny enough without being degrading, intelligently written, and full of excellent, memorable characters. So I was more than a little leery when I heard that the…
