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Action on January 21st, 2007 by Chad Everett
When Randall “Memphis” Raines (Nicolas Cage) decided that he was no longer going to steal cars, the reported car theft in the area dropped. Precipitously. But he’s back. Not because he wants to be back, but because he has to be back. It seems that his little brother, Kip (Giovanni Ribisi), has decided to join the family business vacated by his brother.
This is a problem for two reasons. One, because it’s the reason that Memphis left in the first place. Two because Kip isn’t nearly as good as his older brother, and now he’s in big to bloodthirsty Raymond Vincent Calitri (Christopher Eccleston). If Calitri doesn’t get the fifty cars that Kip owes him, he plans on killing Kip. So Memphis decides to come out of retirement for one last boost.
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Posted to
Drama on January 21st, 2007 by Chad Everett
Seth Warner (Aidan Quinn) is having a bad year. At the beach, his wife kisses him, then goes in for a dip. When he wakes some indeterminate amount of time later, she’s gone. There was no apparent struggle, she didn’t seem to leave him, she is just gone. Not long after (it seems to be shortly thereafter, but it isn’t stated), he is told that he’s being fired, for no apparent reason.
One thing after another simply goes wrong. It’s like he’s Job, and he is being tested. He decides that it isn’t fair, and he wants an audience with the almighty, so he decides to end it all one night on a building. Neighbors call his in-laws, Rachel (Courteney Cox) and Harry (Anthony LaPaglia) to talk him down, which they do. They also take him in. But he still wants to talk to God. Face-to-face.
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Joe Dirt (David Spade) is perhaps your average janitor, if you consider your average janitor to have a mullet wig that was put on him as a boy to cover a hole in his head, and now it’s been fused into the skull when the bones finally grew together, and a life so bad that he can do little about it but look at the bright side of life. If he didn’t, he would probably have given up long ago.
So one day when his employer, Zander Kelly (Dennis Miller) comes across him cleaning the lobby and decides to put him on the show, the whole world gets to hear about the adventures of Joe Dirt and just how he got to where he is today. Perhaps the strangest thing of all is that by the end of the story, what started as poking some fun at the guy who didn’t fit turns into a story of triumph.
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This movie starts what is perhaps the classic time-travel trilogy. While it is definitely not the most serious of films, that may be what is most charming about it. The fact that Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a high-school kid from California, can jump in a car in order to save himself from Libyan terrorists may seem dated now, but in 1985 when the movie came out? This was classic cinema. Okay, that might be a bit over-the-top, even then. But what makes the movie is that it’s fun to watch.
Marty is friends with Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and Marty receives an invitation to meet Doc at the mall one night to help film a science experiment. When he gets there, he finds that Doc has turned a DeLorean into a time machine, and a somewhat surprised Marty watches as Doc sends Einstein (Doc’s dog) through time in the car. It all goes awry when the Libyans show up to demand their uranium back. I mean this is good stuff!
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In the not-so-distant future, it seems that one of the last frontiers of travel has been broken. An enterprising (greedy) soul has discovered a scientist who has uncovered the secret to time travel, and he has developed a plan for marketing it to ultra-wealthy clients, bored with their mundane existence. There are two problems with this plan.
The first is that government, as they are likely to do, gets involved in regulating what he does. The second is that the potential for catastrophe is great. But being a greedy capitalist, Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) proceeds anyway, and disaster seems the likely outcome. Unless, of course, the loner scientist who has his own noble goals for working for Hatton can save the world. What do you think will happen?
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Posted to
Action on January 7th, 2007 by Chad Everett
Jack Hammond (Charlie Sheen) isn’t having a good year. First he had to take those gigs as a clown, just to make ends meet, then when the lady next door turned him in as the red-nosed robber, the blood evidence from the other guy was thrown out because it was collected improperly, so he’s facing 25 years in prison.
When he catches a break and manages to escape before getting stuck in jail, he steals a car, but wouldn’t you know it, it doesn’t have any gas. He stops in at the convenience store, and as he’s trying to get the guy to give him his change, a couple of police officers show up and sure enough, they get a notice over the radio about a stolen car, and they notice the very same vehicle just happens to be parked out front at the pumps. Uh-oh.
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Posted to
Horror on January 6th, 2007 by Chad Everett
The follow-up to the 2005 Saw II (itself a sequel to 2004’s Saw) returns to a format that is a bit more like the original than the initial sequel.
In the first go-round, we were left a bit baffled, trying to figure out just what was going on. In the end, we were still left wondering, but in a good way. In the first sequel, it was mostly a horror-fest. This time, Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) and his apprentice Amanda (Shawnee Smith) return to their testing ways, which is a whole lot more fun to watch.
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Posted to
Action on January 5th, 2007 by Chad Everett
It’s been 2 years since the original Beverly Hills Cop (2 years movie time, 3 years real time), and Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is moving up in the world.
Instead of a streetwise punk selling cigarettes from the back of a semi trailer, he’s now a streetwise punk buying credit cards from a Ferrari. But when he hears that his buddy Andrew Bogomil has been shot in Beverly Hills, he has to make a quick exit from Detroit, and head to California once again. There, he teams up with Taggart (John Ashton) and Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), who are in danger of being demoted to traffic duty, to catch the Alphabet Criminal.
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Drama on January 2nd, 2007 by Chad Everett
This movie tells the twenty-year tale of two cowboys, who meet as they prepare to head up Brokeback Mountain one year to watch sheep. Yes, they are headed up the mountain to keep an eye on the sheep. The two will stay there and one will keep the camp while the other keeps an eye on the sheep.
It’s not a glamorous job, but apparently the pay is good (they don’t actually mention it – I’m assuming that it must be, or they wouldn’t do it for months on end). Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) go up the mountain as strangers, but they come down as a whole lot more than friends, which is a tough thing in the sixties. It’s not an easy thing now. Then they go their separate ways.
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Posted to
Action on January 2nd, 2007 by Chad Everett
Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) isn’t exactly the pride of the Detroit Police Department. When he has another bust go bad and a bunch of private property is destroyed in the process, his boss isn’t happy. But when his old buddy Mikey comes to town and ends up dead at Axel’s apartment building later that night, he’s even less happy.
In fact, he’s so irate that he won’t even let Axel in on the investigation, so Axel does what just about anyone would do. He asks for some time off. But instead of sticking around Detroit, he heads to California. That makes sense, too, because it seems that Mikey had just taken a new job as a security guard at a warehouse there, and maybe it had something to do with his death.
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