That’s especially true for Spirit, considering it was directed by the acquired-taste tag team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who gave the world such amped-up, anti-establishment thrillers as Gamer, Crank and its now-immortal Crank: High Voltage. By (thankfully) replacing non-returning director Mark Steven Johnson, Neveldine/Taylor automatically make this follow-up cooler. They get their mitts […]
torrent
Posted inArts & Culture
Accident
Masterminded by a lonely, paranoid widowed man who looks like Dwight Schrute and goes by the name of The Brain (Louis Koo, Triple Tap), a group of four carries out hired hits by making them look like accidents, and remarkably, using no weapons. In the opening hit, for instance, a Triad gang boss is felled […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Kill Speed
Flashy, yet trashy, Kill Speed is as generic as its meaningless title implies. It so wants to be another shit-goes-fast blockbuster like The Fast and the Furious, which gets name-checked in a roundabout way, but on a small budget. I believe such a thing is not impossible. One just has to do what writer/director Kim […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Project X
So much potential is built in the first 15 or 20 minutes, in which mild-manner high school loser Thomas (Thomas Mann, It’s Kind of a Funny Story) is goaded into hosting a party while his parents are away. The goal, per obnoxious buddy Costa (newcomer Oliver Cooper), is for the rest of the student body […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
It’s certainly not short on action; Holmes gets into a street brawl, disposes of a bomb and destroys a bachelor party, all before the main plot gets going. That involves what criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris, TV’s Mad Men) may have to do with anarchist activities around town, and what he wants with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Miss Minoes
Tibbe (Theo Maassen, Black Book, Interview) is a newspaper reporter so shy, he risks unemployment because he can’t bring himself to talk to people. Luck comes to his apartment window in the form of Minoes (Carice van Houten, Black Death, TV’s Game of Thrones), a young woman who gives him a scoop that turns into […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Phantom of Crestwood
Some 55 years before Dino De Laurentiis failed to lure audiences into theaters with the promise of a seven-digit payday for one lucky viewer of the wretched Million Dollar Mystery, RKO and super producers David O. Selznick and Merian C. Cooper launched a different kind of contest. Leading up to Crestwood’s premiere, the story was […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Meatballs
Things such as:• the kid-vocalized “Are You Ready for the Summer?” theme song;• the nerd, Spaz (Jack Blum, Happy Birthday to Me), getting a milkshake dumped on his head;• clown counselor Murray downing so much club soda that he burp-talks, “Oh, really? Really?”;• the fat guy, Fink, getting depantsed;• the rival camp’s entire basketball team getting depantsed (don’t accuse Meatballs […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Demoted
Luckily for Klein, as the head honcho of Treadline Industries tires, he checks out early, leaving the tire company in the hands of Ken (the too-good-for-this David Cross, TV’s The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret), a nerdy, put-upon salesman/laughingstock who’s long been the target of fellow salesmen Rodney (Michael Vartan, Colombiana) and Mike (Sean […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Monster Brawl
If the answer is “yes,” then the feature film Monster Brawl was made for you. If you let it, watching it can be a ball. Just know going in it offers neither plot nor story — it’s a series of bouts in the ring, pure and simple, with eight monstrosities summoned from around the globe […]