Hey, you know that same Jason Statham movie that comes out every 10 months? Well, this time, Jennifer Lopez is needlessly crammed into the plot. Lo, we have Parker, the newest film adaptation of the crime novel series that also brought us Point Blank and Payback. Statham, as Parker, is a thief with a code […]
Jacob Boon
Posted inLifestyle
High-speed connection
“I am not a professional escort and this has nothing to do with sex,” the Craigslist ad begins. “I just want to go to some office Christmas parties.” That sort of copy stands out amongst the usual anonymous and filthy invitations dotting online classifieds. But 34-year-old, self-employed “intelligent, educated, attractive female redhead” Amanda was disappointed […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Last Stand
Arnold is back, rising once again from obsolescence—and helping us forget his time as a duly elected political official—with the wham-bang action flick The Last Stand. Schwarzenegger, here an overqualified sheriff of a sleepy southern border town, is thrust back into action when the world’s most dangerous drug kingpin escapes from the FBI and races […]
Posted inArts + Music
Mama
Jessica Chastain also starred in this movie, featuring less Osama Bin Laden and more twisty mother ghosts. When two little feral girls are found in a remote cabin, they’re taken in by their dead father’s brother (Nikolah Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend (Chastain). Questions of how the children provided for themselves over the years they were […]
Posted inArts + Music
Quartet
Hey guys, Dustin Hoffman directed a movie! Quartet has Hoffman lending his idiosyncratic touch to a story about some lovely, aged musicians being all old together. This light, ensemble comedy finds notable thespians Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly and Tom Courtenay as former opera singers and residents of a retirement home for gifted musicians. When financial […]
Posted inArts + Music
Promised Land
Forever likely to be known as “that fracking movie,” Promised Land bubbles up a small-scale character story underneath all that rock solid cautionary environmentalism. Co-writers Matt Damon and The Office‘s John Krasinski star as a morally shady energy company frontman and mysterious environmental activist, respectively. The two battle over the potentially lucrative natural gas rights […]
Posted inArts + Music
Gangster Squad
These wiseguys are taking over Los Angeles, see? It’d take a gaggle of chiseled coppers with more balls than brains to take on that lot. Such is the tired premise of Gangster Squad. Clad in fedoras and cheap cliches, Josh Brolin “acts” as a tough-as-nails copper who’d get away from all this gunfire with his […]
Posted inArts + Music
Texas Chainsaw 3D
The saw blades match the thrills in blunt rustiness throughout the uneven, but not entirely awful, Texas Chainsaw 3D. Positioned as a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper’s gritty 1974 original (and thus ignoring several other sequels and remakes), TC:3D picks up decades after Leatherface’s first bloody rampage as yet another group of sweaty twenty-somethings wind […]
Posted inArts + Music
Jack Reacher
Tom Cruise is the best at everything except acting as Jack Reacher, in the new crime thriller Jack Reacher. Casting megastar Cruise as a brilliant ex-army super cop with skills rivalling Batman isn’t the worst idea. But the inflexible Cruise plays his titular role with a shoulder shrugging boredom that sucks the energy from his […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Guilt Trip
Entirely disposable, The Guilt Trip takes a couple of fine actors down the road of least success. Floundering salesman Seth Rogen just found out he’s named after his doting, single mother’s long lost love. So he invites mom along on his cross-country sales trip in hopes of getting her a date. Both leads are punching […]
Posted inArts + Music
Les Miserables
The labyrinthian novel turned Broadway spectacle remade into Hollywood award-bait lives up to the greatest of expectations in Les Miserables. Hugh Jackman gives it his all as upwardly mobile French convict Jean Valjean, who avoids the law and tries to make peace with god while raising an orphan child in dangerous French times. Director Tom […]
