I’ve never heard of writer/producer/star Brian Petsos, but he must have friends in high places to get such a project off the ground. He plays Harry, a self-described good guy who’s done some bad things, for which his murdered pup, Jolly, has paid the ultimate price. With no job, Harry has nothing better to do […]
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Dragon
The reason? Science! As a friend put it, Dragon plays like CSI: Kung Fu. I’d add a dash of Rashomon. Set in 1917, it opens with kindly papermaker/family man (Donnie Yen, Ip Man) reluctantly thwarting the robbery of a general store, leaving the two criminals dead. But how, wonders the investigating detective (Takeshi Kaneshiro, Red […]
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Fast Company / Fast and Loose / Fast and Furious
For the record, the titles in question on this single-disc set from Warner Archive are Fast Company, Fast and Loose and Fast and Furious. Don’t let that third title make you believe they’re about racing cars; they’re not. They are about finding books. And that may be why neither you nor I have heard of […]
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The Wicked
As soon as its wonderful animated opening credits finish, however, The Wicked reveals its true nature as your below-average, everyday, unimaginative horror movie. It’s wicked, all right — just not in the word’s positive connotation. Although not to be confused with the Broadway smash Wicked, this flick also is about a witch (Cassie Keller, Hostel: Part […]
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Birdemic 2: The Resurrection
You asked for it, you got it. And you have no one to blame but yourself. Birdemic 2 is every bit as incompetent as its big bro, and then some: blurred images, sound dropouts, repeated establishing shots, public high-fives and leaden dialogue (“I don’t know about the movie business, but I know how to read”). […]
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Gangster Squad
Like that 1997 film, Gangster Squad shares a real-life character in mob king Mickey Cohen. While briefly in the former, he’s the gangster (played by Sean Penn, The Tree of Life) around whom the squad circles. (He’s also explored at length in a William Devane-hosted documentary on the Blu-ray.) That squad is fronted by war […]
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All Dolled up
Credit: Brad Gregg Made for television, the 1981 film finally made its home-video debut — no Betamax, no VHS — last month from Sony Pictures via burned-on-demand DVDs. It’s based on an actual women-only OKC football team of the late 1970s, but the similarities ended there. Some of the female footballers are played by Susan […]
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The Company You Keep
The Company You Keep, which opens Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial, is boomer meditation disguised as political drama. Directed by and starring Robert Redford, it pretends to be ambivalent about the 1960s counterculture, but the reverence of the treatment suggests otherwise. Last seen onscreen in 2007’s Lions for Lambs, Redford […]
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Upstream Color
Here’s what I think about Upstream Color nearly three weeks after seeing it: I’m unsure. I’ve not yet finished processing it. I can’t even explain the title. Screening Thursday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, the self-distributed film marks the belated sophomore effort of writer/director/producer/actor/editor/ composer/cinematographer/camera operator Shane Carruth, who became an […]
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Terminator Anthology
Cameron’s The Terminator of 1984 was and is a well-made piece of sci-fi trash that bears the ingenuity-on-a-budget scars of most Roger Corman graduates. If it proved a breakthrough for Cameron (who then earned the Aliens gig as a follow-up), it was arguably double that for its monosyllabic center, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then considered near-inconceivable as […]