Tag: Review

Movie Review: Closure

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“Closure” on IMDB

Thriller,  80 Minutes, 2007

Revenge films tend to form a mixed bag.  They can be very easy to pull off (all you really need is to show somebody doing something horrible to somebody else) which means that a lot of them suffer from laziness.  Others spend so much time on the mechanics of the situation – long, intricate, graphically violent scenes – that they lose focus on the human impact.  It’s difficult to find the sweet spot.  This one starts out strong but unfortunately wanders aimlessly through its last two acts.

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Hurricane Movie Review: The Five-Year Engagement

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“The Five-Year Engagement” on IMDB

Romance/Comedy,  124 Minutes, 2012

[Hurricane Sandy is currently causing all kinds of hell for all kinds of people.  Here in Scranton, PA we’ve still got power and Internet (at least for now).  We’re going to watch movies until either Sandy puts a stop to it or we can actually leave the house.]

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Movie Review: The Babymakers

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“The Babymakers” on IMDB

Comedy,  95 Minutes, 2012

The basic idea here is that this guy has been hit in the balls so much that his “sperm are bad” but he’d still like to impregnate his wife.  He remembers that he used to donate sperm all the time and tries to get retrieve some of that but he finds out his last batch has been sold and will be used soon!  So he collects his stereotypical group friends – the fat crazy one, the dumb one and black one – and plans a sperm heist.

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Movie Review: Vile

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“Vile” on IMDB

Action,  98 Minutes, 2011

The so-called “torture porn” sub-genre of splatter films, epitomized in the modern era by the “Saw” [IMDB] franchise but predating it by decades, is difficult to execute correctly.  The point that most low-budget attempts forget is that it isn’t the actual pain being inflicted to the characters.  Focusing on purely the physical is, as films go, crude and ultimately boring.

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Movie Review: The Dilemma

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“The Dilemma” on IMDB

Drama (not a Comedy), 111 Minutes, 2011:

I think my big problem with this is that I sat down to a comedy.  But this isn’t a comedy.  It’s a drama.  The marketing machine that decided to present this in trailers and commercials as a comedy did the film a disservice because people going in expecting to laugh (like I did) are going to be confused and quite possibly pissed off.  It’s a drama.  Oh, to be sure you’ll get some chuckles out of it but it’s a drama.

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Movie Review: Dirty Little Trick

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“Dirty Little Trick” on IMDB

Action,  98 Minutes, 2011

This is a low-budget, ham-fisted thriller that thinks it’s a hell of lot more clever than it really is.  Most of the budget is blown on the marquee talent, Dean Cain [IMDB] and Michael Madsen [IMDB].  Both of their careers have taken undeniable downward turns in recent years and neither puts forth his best effort here.  Madsen, especially, sleepwalks through his scenes.  The rest of the acting is universally terrible.

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