Chick Flicks and Bro Shows

Archive for the ‘Drama’ Category

This 2 disk special edition is to be released on March 2nd. Coming soon to your DVD players. I for one loved this, with an all star cast starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Woody Harrelson and Danny Glover. Roland Emmerich the director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow took it to the next step with this one.

This is a great movie to see at the Saturday matinee when you have a couple of hours and some time to contemplate the world and watch some crazy graphics. Emmerich this time is going to destroy the world by shifting plates under the crust of the earth. The governments of all nations are involved in hiding it all of course but it has to leak out to a few to make the story interesting.

Watching this movie made me think for movies when I was a boy made by Irwin Allen , The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno to name a couple. I must have seen them on TV or something because I was too young to see them at the cinema or maybe the second time they released it. Back then they did that before video tapes and DVDs.

I digress, I loved these kind of thriller movies when I was a kid and still do now, if you haven’t seen it do, you will want this one for your DVD collection.

Get it now here and watch it this week!

The Blind Side takes the true story of a young man who went from abandonment to success as a pro-football player and treats it with respect. The movie doesn’t oversell what is, on the face of it, already compelling. It’s almost impossible to describe the plot without sounding painfully inspirational: Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron, Be Kind Rewind), a hulking but gentle African-American teen in Tennessee, gets taken in by a well-to-do white family; the mother, Leigh Anne Touhy (Sandra Bullock), pushes and mothers the boy, who eventually wins a football scholarship to the University of Mississippi. In the wrong hands, this could have been maudlin, manipulative, and condescending. To the credit of writer-director John Lee Hancock, adapting Michael Lewis’s acclaimed book, the result is intelligent, genuine, and alternately funny and moving. Leigh Anne could easily have been grandstanding and virtuous, but Bullock doesn’t shy away from her vain and domineering side. The football scenes will be gripping even to non-sports fans because they’ve been so successfully grounded in Michael’s emotional life. The all-around solid cast includes country music star Tim McGraw, pint-sized Jae Head (Hancock), and Kathy Bates as the tutor who guided Michael’s academic success. Don’t be surprised if you can’t keep yourself from watching all the real-life photos of Michael, Leigh Anne, and the rest of the family that are featured in the credits; by the end of the movie, you will care about them all. –Bret Fetzer (Amazon reviewer)

(pre order on blu-ray now.)

(pre order DVD format here)

A good cast does its best to make Armored roll, but while this heist flick certainly has its moments, it’s ultimately arrested by a predictable story, cliché-ridden dialogue, and ham-fisted direction. Matt Dillon plays Mike, the leader of a sextet of guards working for an armored truck company; other members of the team are portrayed by Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, and Amaury Nolasco, but the key is newcomer Ty (Columbus Short), an Iraq War veteran whose parents have both died, leaving Ty to support his troubled younger brother and somehow pay the mortgage on the home their folks left behind. When Mike and the others cook up a scheme to steal a cool $42 million on their next delivery and then claim they were hijacked, Ty is dead set against it–until he goes home and is greeted by a child-welfare official who threatens to put his brother into foster care unless Ty can prove himself capable of looking after the kid (this is but one of the handy plot conveniences designed to push the story forward). Predictability is one thing, but director Nimrod Antal and screenwriter James V. Simpson’s setups are so on-the-nose that Helen Keller could see what’s coming (“Promise me nobody gets hurt,” Ty says to Mike, which guarantees that the body count will start to mount almost instantly). Armored has some good action sequences, a gritty look, a couple of welcome surprises, and the occasional tense moment. But when the great heist movies are recalled, from Topkapi to Sexy Beast, this one is unlikely to be among them. –Sam Graham

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