While undeniably watchable, the project is a pure puff piece. After all, it counts Lewis among its producers, so no way he’s getting treated with anything with less than kid gloves. Anything in his life that might be considered a boat rocker is absent: divorce, bankruptcy, Hardly Working, The Day the Clown Cried, etc. I […]
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Femme Fatales: The Complete First Season
For the anthology series, Tanit Phoenix (Death Race 2) serves as its comely Cryptkeeper, introducing tales of double crosses and couplings. Eye candy, aside, what makes this approach interesting is that the episodes span a wide range of genres. For example, “Behind Locked Doors,” which concerns a Lindsay Lohan-esque paparazzi magnet, pays homage to the […]
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New shift
“I really like the Oklahoma film and comedy scene,” Nghiem said. “I wanted to do a project that wasn’t too heavy and involved a lot of local people.” Clerks Too, which debuted today on YouTube, was in part inspired by an unauthorized remake of Star Wars that he and his friends saw online. “I was […]
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Marathon, man!
Comedy! Missed the first-season set of Episodes? Skip it. Instead, grab the new two-disc set collecting the first two years. Although very much a Hollywood in-joke, the Showtime series tells that in-joke with excellence, anchored by Friends vet Matt LeBlanc starring as an A-holier version of himself, reduced to starring on a hockey sitcom overseen […]
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The Thieves
So don’t complain that you have to read subtitles; literacy is good for you. Depicting the theft of a national treasure from a seemingly impenetrable art vault, a 10-minute prologue puts viewers right in the mood for its jaunty, addicting vibe — one that marries the globetrotting derring-do of the Mission: Impossible franchise with the […]
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Nature Calls
Heading it is comedian Patton Oswalt (Young Adult), here doing a variation of his ever-reliable, ever-lovable teddy-bear character as Randy. A second-generation Scoutmaster of the Boy Scouts of America, he has inherited his father’s once-vibrant Troop 5516. Today, however, in an Xbox age, enjoying the great outdoors holds no appeal to most kids. As one […]
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All Superheroes Must Die
The low-budget effort’s premise takes a page from Saw: Tired of “asshole goody-two-shoes getting in the way,” the career criminal who calls himself Rickshaw (James Remar, TV’s Dexter) wants his archenemies — this story’s superheroes — to play a game. He has kidnapped 100 innocent civilians, rigged them to explosive devices and scattered them across […]
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End of Watch / Officer Down
David Ayer has spent much of his career chronicling the life of Los Angeles law enforcement in his screenplays for Training Day, S.W.A.T. and Dark Blue, and directing Street Kings. With End of Watch, he pulls double duty. The result is an invigorating, pulse-pounding crime drama. Through a found-footage gimmick that really isn’t necessary to […]
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Why Stop Now
In the kind of one-note part that threatened to kill his career before the one-two punch of Zombieland and The Social Network saved it, Jesse Eisenberg stars as Eli, a young man with a bright future as a pianist ahead of him, if not for having to act as a surrogate father for his own […]
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Cherry Tree Lane
Likely, that film opens with an unspeakable act that calls for retribution, and ends with said retribution being achieved. And in the middle are cat-and-mouse games and close calls and rounds of table-turning to keep conflict chugging. Cherry Tree Lane, however, removes that midsection, condensing the story to assumedly real time. In between its bookends, […]