By: Addison Wylie The bass was booming with each explosion, the walls shook with every bullet fired, yet my ears weren’t ringing during my screening of G.I. Joe: Retaliation. On the other hand, my head was throbbing from trying to keep up with the sequel’s needlessly convoluted screenplay. Rhett Reece and Paul Wernick have joined forces to make a simple enough concept as untraceable as Roadblock’s small troupe of Joe’s. Dwayne Johnson plays Roadblock while…
By: Addison Wylie Hollywood has been trying to fill a void with a young adult audience that the Twilight films left when it wrapped up its saga last year. A number of releases this year will attempt to carry the baton including Andrew Niccol’s The Host, a sci-fi endeavour based on a novel written by Twilight’s Stephenie Meyer. Most outspoken moviegoers were glad to see Twilight pack up their sparkles and leave. These patrons dismissed…
By: Addison Wylie The Resurrection of Tony Gitone is a drama abut traditions, family, and friends – that is, if you can make it out over the yelling and excessive upstaging. Ultimately, that’s what makes Jerry Ciccoritti’s film a particularly annoying watch. Riding high off of a new gig as a leading male in a popular director’s upcoming movie and clutching an attractive big name actress, Nino (played by Fab Filippo) and his date Vanessa Luna…
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 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 Steven Soderbergh’s alleged “last movie” Side Effects is one half murder mystery and another half docudrama about the pharmaceutical industry. It only truly excels at being one of these, but the film is interesting nonetheless from start to finish. Emily Taylor, an often distraught wife played by Rooney Mara, greets her hubby (played by Channing Tatum) after he’s been incarcerated for a lengthy prison term. Life is seemingly back to normal, but…
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…