Film

Oh, how awkward.It took five years for director Peter Sollett to follow-up his sparkling feature debut Raising Victor Vargas with his adaptation of Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's novel Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. And while the road along the way surely was littered with Hollywood-typical stories of aborted projects and collapsing funding, he should take comfort in this: He has now established himself as cinema's reigning genius of awkward young love.

Maybe a filmmaker might consider it problematic to be so pigeonholed. It becomes too easy to ignore the other facets of someone's talents, like when Quentin Tarantino became "fast-talking, pop-culture-referencing super-violence guy" and the world conveniently ignored his profoundly moral humanism. But it can also mean that a talented director gets to keep working. And when you've seen something as effortlessly charming as Raising Victor Vargas followed up with this sweet little keeper, you want Sollett to keep working.

The New Year Parade shows strong at BendFilm.BendFilm's list of movies once again can be summed up in one word:
Diverse. That seemed to be the overriding theme of almost every movie I
saw

The New Year Parade (Best Director Award, Tom Quinn) was
perhaps the most interesting, focusing on a divorce and the subsequent
fallout of family and friend alliances. The context is South
Philadelphia and its marching band orchestra. Using actors and plain
ordinary people gave it a forceful character study of good people, bad
reactions and even worse relationships.

Somewhere in the slipstream, between nostalgia and morality, resides the American western. It's proved to be a worthy packhorse for values clarification and sagas about justice for generations.

Blindness is a strange movie. It's like a diary of someone paralyzed by fear, a metaphor for socio-politico human tendencies, plus a vision of personal chaos and mass insanity.

Is that a head you got there?You gotta hand it to Spike Lee. He's willing to take risks. With
Miracle at St Anna, the risk is a larger-than-life mainstream war movie
that tries to hold onto his visionary/radical/art-house/civil rights
themes
From the first scene of an ex-Buffalo soldier watching The
Longest Day with John Wayne on TV, to a final scene of extremely
questionable merit, this is an epic saga of redemption cloaked in a war
story mystery. While working at the post office, Hector Negron (Laz
Alonso) shoots a man he recognizes from his past. Subsequently, the
head of an extremely rare statue is found in his closet. His story is
then told in flashback form, following the trials of the Buffalo
soldiers' of the 92nd Infantry Division. A big oafish soldier, Train
(Omar Benson Miller), carries around (for good luck) the aforementioned
statue head he found in some ruins. The soldiers, under the command of
Staff Sergeant Stamps (Derek Luke), travel out of radio contact to an
Italian village and hole up with an Italian family. The impending
arrival of German troops adds tension and the plot gets almost too big
to handle, but even when it meandered I liked it. The use of clips that
could've easily hit the editing floor captures the kind of idiotic
small talk that might prevail when doom waits around every corner.

Run shia, run.Even if you normally pick up a double Americano on the way to the
movies, I would advise against it if your destination is Eagle Eye. You
may find yourself on your back with electric paddles on your chest and
a medic screaming, "Clear!" This movie is one all-out-Space
Mountain-on-acid-thrill ride where you won't need any supplements to
boost your heart rate.

Even veteran high octane cinema junkies may be
surprised at Director D.J. Caruso's ability to bury your head against
the headrest and put a cinematic G force on you that may cause your
date to scream.
After US forces bomb a Middle Eastern terrorist
target - despite computer warnings there is barely 50% probability we
have the correct target - we jump to Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) - a card
shark and copy shop employee whose prospects are dim. After an earlier
collaboration with Caruso in Disturbia and a major role in the last
Indiana Jones movie, LaBeouf moves into the action hero mold alongside
actors like Matt Damon and Daniel Craig. And LaBeouf handles the role
with both believability and style.

I’ve listened to preachers, I’ve listened to fools. Opening with an intriguing and deftly shot scene, Transsiberian
promises a film that will look good, even if it goes sour. And sadly,
sour it goes. Nevertheless, there's something compelling about this
snow-driven trek

A do-gooder American couple (not without their
own problems), Roy and Jessie (Woody Harrelson/Emily Mortimer), depart
for a charity trip, traveling from China to Russia via the historic
Trans-Siberian train. They meet up with a suspicious couple, Carlos and
Abby (Eduardo Noriega/Kate Mara) whose motives immediately become
questionable. After a few misguided episodes, Russian narcotics officer
Grinko (Ben Kingsley) joins in the dreary ride.
What was really
lacking as the movie progressed was a sense of urgency. The time it
took setting up the characters could have been well spent giving us
more clues, or deception around the characters’ real agendas. The
tables get turned a couple of times, but nothing that psychologically
intimidates or fools us. On the whole, the train stops in loophole city
way too often.

Shakespeare in love. Clark Gregg did it. I wouldn't recommend trying, but he did it. This is Chuck Palahniuk we're talking about, after all.

The creator of Fight Club.

The nihilist.
The gross-out artist.
The
guy who famously or infamously or anecdotally inspired multiple people
to drop over in a dead faint at readings of a story about heinous
masturbation-inspired mishaps.
That grotesque, pathetic, twisted guy.
But
Clark Gregg did it. He took Palahniuk's Choke as screenwriter and
director and found another vein. Buried beneath the blasphemy and the
bodily fluids and the self-loathing was a story about redemption.
About recovery.
About love.
Clark
Gregg turned Chuck Palahniuk into a romantic. Or maybe he just pulled
back the covers to expose the romantic that was already there. It's
certainly not easy to see at first in the tale of Victor Mancini (Sam
Rockwell), who's messed up in so many ways that it's hard to know where
to begin. He attends 12-step meetings for sex addiction with his best
friend and compulsive masturbator Denny (Brad William Henke), but
pretty much only so he can pick up women. He visits with his ailing
mother Ida (Anjelica Huston), but her dementia has reached the point
where she doesn't even recognize him. And while he has a job at a
colonial theme park, he supplements his income by shoving food down his
throat at restaurants, finding someone to save his life, and becoming
the beneficiary of his newfound saviors' sense of connection.

There’s a place where I can go…It took Lakeview Terrace to remind me that we didn't know how good we
had it in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall had
crumbled, leaving post-Cold War America without a real international
threat; terrorism was a vague concept. Yet if you were to judge by the
movies, we were all buckets of free-floating anxiety convinced that
everyone around us would stab us in the neck with a letter opener if we
looked at them sideways.

Yes, it was the golden age of the
"fill-in-the-blank from hell" thriller-that time when your babysitter
(The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), your roommate (Single White Female),
your co-worker (The Temp), the girl next door (The Crush) or your kid's
new stepparent (Domestic Disturbance) was a psycho-in-waiting. Lakeview
Terrace appears in an age when paranoia seems just a bit more
justified, and you'd think that there would be room to re-explore the
genre in light of this. Instead, we get more or less what we would have
gotten 18 years ago: middling melodrama too concerned with providing
visceral kicks to uncover anything truly psychologically insightful.

Even the dynamic duo can’t save this disaster. Expectations abound for a movie co-starring Al Pacino and Robert De
Niro. Their only recent movie together, Heat, although considered
brilliant by most observers, had just one scene in which they were on
screen together. In their new film Righteous Kill, they are Siamese
twins, cop buddies, together in virtually every scene.

And let's be
honest, these two can carry a mediocre film on their collective backs.
They both have careers which need no buoying up, and if any two actors
working today could be called living legends, it's probably these two.
What's
not derivative these days in a cop movie? We start with the killings of
people whom the world would not miss: child rapists, Russian mobsters,
a seedy collection of low lives whose deaths probably serve to improve
the lives of others in New York.