(Granted, hearing future Seinfeld sidekick Alexander talk about spermicide is memorable, too. Seeing his bare behind on a high-definition Blu-ray, however, is something I’d like to forget.) In the prologue, Cropsy (Lou David, The Gumball Rally) is a caretaker at Camp Blackfoot. One night, a few kids have the bright idea to “scare the shit out […]
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Parker
Based on Parker novel No. 19, Flashfire, the film puts Expendables team member Jason Statham in a role previously played by, among others, Mel Gibson in Payback, Robert Duvall in The Outfit and even Jim Brown in The Split. Parker is a criminal, but the “good” kind: He doesn’t steal from those who can’t afford […]
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The Arrested Development Documentary Project
Well, it left this fan with an unpleasant aftertaste. At first, I was uncertain who the doc was for. While it certainly is accessible enough for the uninitiated, those people aren’t likely to run across it or even be interested if they do. And since I didn’t learn anything from it, the already converted aren’t […]
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Disconnect
The fiction-film directorial debut for Henry Alex Rubin (Murderball, one of the greatest documentaries of this millennium), the movie doesn’t feel like a preachy lesson à la David Schwimmer’s Trust; it’s more of a is-what-it-is look, however voyeuristic, at the way everyday people get tangled in the web. Disconnect opens today exclusively at AMC Quail […]
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Eastbound & Down: The Complete Third Season
In the longest season yet (eight episodes) of HBO’s raunchiest comedy, the washed-up, pot-bellied, coke-snorting blowhard Kenny Powers (Danny McBride, 30 Minutes or Less) now lives in Myrtle Beach, S.C. The change of locales, however, hasn’t changed him: The minor-league baseball pitcher remains a major-league asshole. In the season opener, an intoxicating reunion with April […]
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Nobody Gets Out Alive
Good movies, regardless of classification, are going to come from those are filmmakers vs. fans. The current wave from the latter leaves a lot to be desired, as they approach projects from a narrow-focus angle that eschews objectivity and regurgitates a mishmash of titles they’ve seen without adding anything new. Recent offenders include Mimesis and […]
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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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Zero Dark Thirty
Some, including Republican Sen. John McCain, accuse director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, who last collaborated on The Hurt Locker, of falsely suggesting that intel gleaned through torture is what led the CIA to bin Laden. The controversy is at a fever pitch. Is ZDT a nearly journalistic work? Is it morally repugnant propaganda? […]
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Lawless
Reteaming with his unlikely Proposition screenwriter, Bad Seeds rocker Nick Cave, Hillcoat again delivers a quasi-Western with this true tale of the Prohibition-era’s bootlegging Bondurant brothers in Virginia, played by Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises), Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) and Shia LaBeouf (the Transformers trilogy). When Lawless begins, the Bondurant boys rule Franklin […]
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The Expendables 2
The remainder isn’t bad, either; in fact, it’s more fun than the 2010 original, while remaining every bit as big and dumb. Barney (Sylvester Stallone), Christmas (Jason Statham, Safe) and the rest of the Expendables are hired by Church (Bruce Willis) to retrieve a case from a downed plane in Russia. After doing so, they […]