By: Addison Wylie About six months ago, Canada’s Cineplex Entertainment held their Digital Film Festival featuring a variety of different classics restored and shown through new digital projectors. Steven Spielberg’s hit Jurassic Park was included in this special selection and being that I had some how missed watching the prehistoric epic in my early years, I decided this would be a more than appropriate choice for my first viewing. Jurassic Park is an excellent monster…
By: Addison Wylie Do you like having spare time, but find that you have TOO much of it? What do you do with it? How do you use it? Hi! It’s Addison with a brand new product for you called InAPPropriate Comedy, brought to you by director/co-writer Vince Offer. When he’s not selling ShamWOWs, Slap Chops, or Schtickies, he’s making movies. With InAPPropriate Comedy, he hopes to break down racial and sexual barriers to have…
By: Addison Wylie TV spots for the Dreamworks/20th Century Fox collaboration entitled The Croods describe the prehistoric family as “the first modern family” – I suppose, trying to connect this new animated family to a current popular commodity. It shouldn’t stoop that low because The Croods is a good film and has every right to stand on its own. Grugg (voiced by Nicolas Cage who sounds as if he’s been longing for an animated role)…
By: Addison Wylie Spring Breakers works in more ways than one. First of all, you can take Harmony Korine’s film at face value and perceive it as a lurid fever dream with a loose story integrating elements of the crime genre with a trippy punk rock attitude. The four roles played by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Korine’s wife Rachel Korine are charismatic enough in an entertaining train wreck sort of way as…
By: Addison Wylie Throughout Jack the Giant Slayer, our title character played by Nicholas Hoult has a look on his face that seems like it should be accompanied with the phrase, “are you #*@#ing kidding me?”. Surely, this is supposed to be aimed towards a giant beanstalk leading towards an army of grotesque giants that live in the sky, but it’s a more appropriate telling of what I was asking myself while watching Bryan Singer’s…
By: Addison Wylie Remaking Sam Raimi’s horror cult classic The Evil Dead comes with a price. Much like the film’s killer Book of the Dead, such a task has consequences. The Evil Dead set a bar for low-budget horror when it crept into theatres in 1981. Some claimed it was one of the scariest films ever made while others were too busy howling at the screen. It was a film that obviously left a mark…
By: Addison Wylie For a comedy about two buds who take their birthday boy pal on the night of his life filled with partying, copious amounts of booze, and flirtatious girls, I expected 21 & Over to be a somewhat obnoxious ride through unsupervised adolescence with some cheap shots that wouldn’t have the film feeling as if it was devoid of all laughs. I’m glad to report that my expectations were wrong. 21 & Over…
By: Addison Wylie It’s almost inevitable to go into The ABC’s of Death with leery reservations. The anthology’s premise involves moviegoers sitting through 24 horror short films – each one involving a letter of the alphabet tying itself to the short’s climactic gruesome activity. One immediate question pops to mind upon hearing this pitch: are audience members going to be too distracted from watching the movie by counting down each letter of the alphabet? Will we…
By: Addison Wylie Dark Skies wants its moviegoers to leave slightly chilled, but, instead we leave feeling cold. As the credit crawl began and the lights dimmed back on, you could feel the waft from everyone’s shoulders shrugging as they huffed out of the theatre. The unenthused reaction isn’t because Dark Skies is a bad movie, but because we don’t like seeing something that had so much potential settle with being “just ok”. One would…
By: Addison Wylie It’s been only a couple of hours since my screening of the latest Nicholas Sparks movie adaptation, and I’m still having difficulty figuring out how to critique it without giving away any spoilers or crucial plot points. Safe Haven may not look like the type of movie that warrants a cautious review, but it’s a twisty film that can be uncovered by the simple slip of a certain character’s name. The first…