For those who think Saw V and The Haunting of Molly Hartley are the only new horror movies available to see this Halloween season, I ask you all to dig a bit deeper. First, go to your local video store or your Netflix queue and rent a 2007 French horror film entitled Inside. It’s the best horror film I’ve seen since The Descent, and a must-watch for genre fans. If you’ve taken a look at that movie, and you still have a craving for something scary, try searching at your local theatres for the menacing indie film Splinter. Can’t find it? You’re not alone. While the annual Saw movies still manage 30+ million opening weekends, a classy and original movie like Splinter barely even gets a theatrical release. It’s a sad day for genre fans when they can’t see a movie like this on the big screen, because Splinter is actually really scary! I saw the film at Screamfest in mid-October and enjoyed it immensely, especially with such a loud and large croud for its Los Angeles premiere. I actually have a relation to the movie, as I know some people who worked on it, and I was even offered a production assistant job that I unfortunately wasn’t able to take. A year and a half later the movie is finally completed, and I must say I’m ecstatic about the results (more…)

What a strange, surreal, and somewhat irrelevant movie this is. While entertaining from beginning to end, and featuring an outstanding performance by Josh Brolin, the movie feels so… I don’t know… last millennium… now in the wake of President-Elect Barack Obama. When I saw this movie three weeks ago, we lived in a different world. Now, looking back on the movie is like looking back on the last eight years. It’s time for the past to become the past! But it’s not fair to be judgmental on the merits of Oliver Stone’s movie. It’s a sweeping biopic, filled with powerful moments, terrific performances, and sharp jabs at a President who in reality is treated more than fairly in this film. This film could’ve (easily) been a two-hour condemnation of the Bush years, but Stone wisely tries to delve into the material with more of an open mind, delegating more of the blame to those around Bush than the man himself. While Bush has to take some of the blame, there was probably more influence on him that we’ll ever realize, both before his two terms in office and during those tumultuous eight years (with two more months still to go!) (more…)

There are two halves to Eagle Eye, the new movie that teams Shia LaBouef with his Disturbia director D.J. Caruso. The first half is a genuinely exciting piece of mainstream entertainment that takes one of my favorite plots - the innocent man wrongly accused - and updates it to the new millennium with a technology-driven story that suggests we as human beings are being watched at all times. It really is a chilling idea. The thought that because of all the new technology we are constantly being supervised and that, at every moment of our lives, our whereabouts are known. The movie takes this idea and runs with it for a good hour or so, taking very few false moves along the way. Caruso has given LaBouef another solid vehicle, as Eagle Eye offers LaBouef’s best work yet. Caruso was also smart in pairing him up with one of the best younger actresses around today - Michelle Monaghan - as the two have a weirdly effective chemistry together. After a necessary slow set-up, we’re thrown into an action sequence of LaBouef’s character escaping a holding room that lasts at least twenty minutes or so and is by far the best stuff in the movie. However, as the movie leads into its second half, introducing more material with a somewhat pointless character played by (more…)

I don’t have a whole lot of heroes from the writing world of motion pictures, as often they are writer-directors (Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Craven) and just simply directors (Alfred Hitchcock and John Carpenter). But back in 1999, when I settled down in my uncomfortable chair in the third row at the Park Lane 16 cineplex in Reno, Nevada, I witnessed a new hero on screen. I had never heard of him before. I knew nothing of his background. But at the end, I wanted to get up and cheer at the sight of his name. Alan Ball.

Alan Ball? Who? Who the hell was this guy? I went home and looked him up on the Internet. All he had really done before American Beauty (his first produced screenplay) was some writing work on television shows like Cybill and Roseanne. Apparently Ball would spend his long days working on these dreadful TV shows, then go home at night and dive into his script for American Beauty. Thank God he did. During those nights he crafted one of the finest screenplays ever conceived, and the finished film turned out to be better than he or probably anyone ever could have imagined (more…)

Growing up my least favorite genre was the western. They were all the same to me. I enjoyed Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars trilogy starring Clint Eastwood, and I also liked Unforgiven… starring Clint Eastwood… but for the most part I would rather watch any other kind of movie than a western. The funny thing is that now in 2008 I still feel the same way. I mean, I’m never exactly excited to sit down for a western. Yet I find myself liking almost every western I see. In the last couple years I’ve seen The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, two pieces of superb entertainment that are nothing less than masterpieces. (One of these days I will trek through all the John Ford films.) And then in the last few years we’ve gotten (more…)

In May of 2007, I moved out of my apartment in Culver City immediately following college graduation and moved into a house in the San Fernando Valley with three roommates. The house was everything I could hope for. However, about two weeks after moving into the new house, a group of workers arrived at the empty lot next door and started working on the foundation of a new two-story house. Every weekday morning during that summer, my roommates and I would be awoken at 7 or 8am by those loud workers, banging, clanging, shouting in their foreign voices, and blasting their annoying radio music to their hearts’ content. Cut to November 2008. We’re still at the house. The lot next door has been quieter as of late, but the house is still not finished. There’s still noise. There’s still calamity. Eighteen months later. So let’s just say I understood what characters Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson) and Kerry Washington (Lisa Mattson) were going through in Neil LaBute’s new movie Lakeview Terrace, which presents a couple moving into a new home in the suburbs (more…)

Last year Joel and Ethan Coen returned after a nearly four year absence from the screen following two underwhelming films (Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers) with the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. This career-best film from the duo wasn’t flawless, but it had so much power and such commanding dramatic scenes that it made us all re-think the capabilities of these enormously talented filmmakers. And now, less than a year later, a new film of theirs has already come and gone from theatres, the frantic dark comedy Burn After Reading. Kudos to these guys for following up the somber No Country for Old Men with a very funny (if somewhat trite) piece of entertainment that gathers old friends (Frances McDormand, George Clooney) with new faces (Brad Pitt, John Malkovich). Opening with an uncomfortable and hilarious scene involving (more…)

A great travesty of the last decade or so has been the decline in quality of Steve Martin movies, and, even worse, the decline in Steve Martin movies. The man had a small role in the funny Baby Mama and has the Pink Panther 2 coming up in early 2009. Yawn… Thankfully great news was dealt last week when it was announced Martin was joining the cast of the new Nancy Meyers romantic comedy, co-starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin. Apparently Martin and Baldwin will be fighting over Streep in that typical weepy The Holiday & Something’s Gotta Give kind of way. At the very least it will be great to see him in a leading role again. Martin has apparently been working more lately on the written page, as he’s written some novella and most recently a non-fiction book about his younger years as a comic. He also came up with the idea for today’s movie entitled Traitor. Martin’s coming up with the idea of Traitor is about along the lines of Wes Craven directing a Meryl Streep drama about violins (oh, wait, that happened) (more…)

In Woody Allen’s freshest and funniest comedy in over a decade Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Scarlett Johanssen and Rebecca Hall play best friends who take a trip to Spain and meet an exotic and forward man played by Javier Bardem who entices the two to spend a weekend with him in Barcelona. One main problem: The man has an ex (Penelope Cruz) who comes back to stay with him and who doesn’t exactly approve of these younger women hanging around her man. Woody Allen has always managed to assemble terrific actors for his films (see Hannah and her Sisters or Bullets Over Broadway), and here he outdoes himself again. Who’s more impressive? Johanssen, giving her strongest performance yet in an Allen film, or Hall, a new-comer, in a compelling star-making performance. Hall’s character is the one we identify with the most in the beginning, and the arc her character goes through is unexpected and completely natural. Bardem, hot off his Oscar win (more…)

I was a little bit nervous about this one. The last movie Ben Stiller directed (which, somehow, has its fan) was Zoolander, one of the ten or so movies in my entire life I’ve given NO STARS. I hated that movie with a passion when it opened. I’d probably hate on it less all these years later, but maybe not. So I went into Tropic Thunder with some trepidation. While the cast was terrific, the premise was solid, and the trailer was fairly promising, I still had my doubts. While this is a decent comedy, definitely a step up for Stiller as a director, I rarely laughed, and found that most of the middle dragged on and on. The set-up is the best part, as we’re introduced to our three lead characters (played by Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr) with trailers promoting their new movies. A trailer with Downey Jr. and Tobey Maguire had me in tears. There was nowhere else for the movie to go but down from there, and down it went. The beginning scenes of the movie, showing the making of the production, are entertaining enough, but once the cast gets dropped down in the midst of the jungle and have to fend for themselves, we get scene after scene of people walking and talking, walking and talking, and it rarely includes material that I found funny (more…)