Celluloid Heroes

Penny Deerborn (Rachel Miner) doesn't like cars. I mean she really doesn't like cars. Through a series of flashbacks in the movies, we find that she was in a horrible wreck when she was younger that killed both of her parents (at least, they appear to be her parents). So her psychiatrist, Orianna Volkes (Mimi Rogers) is helping her through the process of conquering her fears.

Orianna has written at least one book on the subject (we see it several times as events of the night unfold), and she is helping young Penny to come full circle. To conquer her fears by confronting them. So they are taking a ride into the mountains. It appears that the mountains might be the place where the wreck happened, but that may or may not be important. What is important is that Penny simply doesn't like being in cars. She gets sick just riding along with the door shut.

Read All of "Penny Dreadful (2006) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on May 26, 2007 in Horror

We first meet Arden (Toni Collette) in the opening section, titled simply The Stranger, as she struggles to care for her abusive mother in what appears to be a rather run-down home. As Arden takes a walk, she comes across something rather unexpected in the field - the body of a young woman. For reasons known only to her, she takes the necklace the girl is wearing, and on returning home, she calls the police.

For a completely unexplained reason - perhaps because her mother wants to continue abusing her all by her lonesome - when she finds out that the police have come, Arden's mother is furious with her. I'm not sure exactly what Arden was supposed to do. Perhaps she should have just left the body in the field to rot and continue to be abused by her mother. I don't think it was really explained, and we are just left to figure out why her mother is so hateful. Maybe you can explain it if you have seen it, but I certainly didn't get it.

In any case, this sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Read All of "The Dead Girl (2006) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on May 19, 2007 in Drama

Just as Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) comes home to visit his wife, he is met by a few less-than-upstanding citizens who want to cause trouble. Unfortunately for them, Poe is an Army Ranger, which means that they probably aren't in the best position when it comes to a fight.

So when they decide to ambush him outside the bar, Poe gets the best of them. But when all is said and done, and one of them ends up dead on the ground, it is Poe who gets the short end of the stick. All he was doing was protecting his wife, but since he is trained as a deadly weapon, he ends up in prison.

Read All of "Con Air (1997) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on May 6, 2007 in Action

Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) may be the best trial lawyer you ever meet. He's never lost a case. So when he manages to win one where he just knows the guy is guilty, he attracts some unexpected attention.

He gets an invitation from a fancy New York City law firm to come up and visit, all expenses paid, to pick a jury. And what's more is that he gets to bring his wife Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) along for the ride. It's too good to be true.

Read All of "The Devil's Advocate (1997) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on May 6, 2007 in Drama

A local sheriff (Brendan Gleeson) pulls a diver out of Black Lake (they wanted to call it Lake Placid, but that name was already taken), only to find that he's been bitten in half. What they find is a tooth, and this gets sent to a museum for analysis.

The tooth ends up in the hands of Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), who doesn't usually do field research, and most certainly not in Maine. But because her boss - and boyfriend - has decided to do a little extra-curricular activity of his own with her friend, she ends up in the backwoods. This may or may not be a good choice.

Read All of "Lake Placid (1999) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on April 28, 2007 in Thriller

At the site of a lavish celebratory party, thrown by a Japanese company wanting to celebrate their purchase of a US company, the mood turns decidedly unhappy when someone turns up dead on the boardroom table. The fact that it's a young woman, who is most assuredly not Japanese, is probably not a good sign.

Detective Webster Smith (Wesley Snipes) is called in to investigate, and quickly teamed up with Captain John Connor (Sean Connery). This partner arrangement, where a younger. more inexperienced investigator, would be paired with a wiser, more seasoned man, is quite common for the Japanese. Apparently.

Unfortunately, Webb isn't too happy about either his new partner or the fact that the Japanese don't want their party to be disturbed. But life is about to get a lot more interesting for him.

Read All of "Rising Sun (1993) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on April 14, 2007 in Action

On the morning of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), an American Terrorist sets off a bomb in an SUV aboard a ferry, killing more than five hundred people aboard, as the fireball sets off another explosion in the boiler, and eventually the remains sink to the bottom of the river.

ATF Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) is assigned the grisly task of figuring out exactly what happened, and as such, he's one of the first on the scene collecting evidence. His partner, who had just taken off for vacation, is nowhere to be found, not even answering his cell phone.

Before long, Carlin is assigned to a special task force researching the event, and finds himself drawn into a special new technology that allows the investigators to look back into the past four-and-a-half days (technically, four days and six hours, but no one seems to notice this, so I'll pretend not to do so either) to see what's happening. The only catch is that this time window is open only for that exact period, and once that time window is gone, it can't be recovered.

Read All of "Deja Vu (2006) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on April 9, 2007 in Action

Edward Norton stars in this film, where he is billed only as The Narrator. We don't actually ever get to hear his name, which is interesting, but strangely, you don't find yourself missing out on that fact (or at least, I didn't).

When we meet him, he is simply a body in motion, moving through airports, living a life that most of us can associate with, finding some measure of satisfaction through filling out his apartment with items in the IKEA catalog, slowly making where he lives into a reflection of what you see on each page.

And then on one of these trips, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). That's when everything changes.

Read All of "Fight Club (1999) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on March 30, 2007 in Drama

On January 20, 1960, Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood) arrived at Alcatraz to become prisoner #AZ1441. As with many other inmates of the prison, he was sent there because he had a tendency to escape other prisons, and Alcatraz was built to keep people from escaping.

However, according to most records, Morris almost immediately began planning his exit from The Rock. While it may or may not be completely true, on the arrival of two of his former associates, John and Clarence Anglin, Morris accelerated his plans, and on the night of June 11, 1962, they were gone, never to be heard from again.

The events surrounding the event are of course lost, so the details are dramatized for the movie. But that doesn't mean that it's not a good one to sit through.

Read All of "Escape from Alcatraz (1979) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on March 18, 2007 in Drama

This movie started in interesting fashion, with a driver picking up a hitchhiker and some relatively minor chit-chat happening until the hitcher asks if the driver is interested in guys (the hitcher himself is a man as well). At that point, the driver kicks him out, and you're left wondering just what is happening here. But that doesn't last long.

Next up, the driver pulls his truck over and opens up the bed of the truck to reveal a girl, bound and tied, and we get to see her dig her own grave, before (presumably) being killed by the driver of the truck. This isn't actually shown, which would probably increase the suspense a bit, but it's really a bit early on to do much more than whet the appetite. Shift to another car load, and you're still wondering what's happening.

Read All of "The Hitchhiker (2007) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on March 10, 2007 in Thriller

In the not-so-distant future, the problems of the world's energy crisis have been solved by the New Economic Block (NEB). Or so it would seem. For once the mining begins, a massive radioactive cloud is released, and that would appear to be problematic. Do you produce a teaspoon of this wonder-fuel, at the cost of lives, or do you stop and look for something else? I suspect you already know the answer.

If you're the NEB, you continue mining, and do what you can to offset the radiation. But if you're the rest of the civilized people, you try and stop the NEB, and so war breaks out on Sirius 6B, and in 2078, this war has been going on for some 20 years between the two factions, all of which used to be a part of the NEB. But now, it's been six months since anyone has heard from the NEB, until one day a lone soldier comes in from the dessert bearing a message...

Read All of "Screamers (1995) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on February 20, 2007 in Science Fiction

Officer Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) foils the plot of a bomber, and the next day as he gets a coffee, he witnesses a city bus blown to smithereens. Then he receives a call that another city bus has a bomb on it, and when it accelerates to fifty miles per hour, the bomb is armed. If it goes below fifty, the bomb will detonate. Suddenly he has to try to help the people on this other bus. Can he make it in time?

The first task is to find the bomb, and the bomber has determined that this game has certain rules. Of course one of those rules is finding the bus, and in a city the size of Los Angeles, being able to find a lone bus is a difficult task at best, so Jack has a bus number and is told where the bus is. Now he just needs to get to it. This he does.

Since he can't get to the bus stop on time, he has to catch a lift by taking over a car and driving alongside like a maniac, and eventually jumping into the bus itself, but by then it's too late. The bus has already hit fifty miles per hour and the bomb is armed. The game is on.

Read All of "Speed (1994) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on February 18, 2007 in Action

Penny Deerborn (Rachel Miner) doesn't like cars. I mean she really doesn't like cars. Through a series of flashbacks in the movies, we find that she was in a horrible wreck when she was younger that killed both of her parents (at least, they appear to be her parents). So her psychiatrist, Orianna Volkes (Mimi Rogers) is helping her through the process of conquering her fears.

Orianna has written at least one book on the subject (we see it several times as events of the night unfold), and she is helping young Penny to come full circle. To conquer her fears by confronting them. So they are taking a ride into the mountains. It appears that the mountains might be the place where the wreck happened, but that may or may not be important. What is important is that Penny simply doesn't like being in cars. She gets sick just riding along with the door shut.

Read All of "Penny Dreadful (2006) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on May 26, 2007 in Horror

We first meet Arden (Toni Collette) in the opening section, titled simply The Stranger, as she struggles to care for her abusive mother in what appears to be a rather run-down home. As Arden takes a walk, she comes across something rather unexpected in the field - the body of a young woman. For reasons known only to her, she takes the necklace the girl is wearing, and on returning home, she calls the police.

For a completely unexplained reason - perhaps because her mother wants to continue abusing her all by her lonesome - when she finds out that the police have come, Arden's mother is furious with her. I'm not sure exactly what Arden was supposed to do. Perhaps she should have just left the body in the field to rot and continue to be abused by her mother. I don't think it was really explained, and we are just left to figure out why her mother is so hateful. Maybe you can explain it if you have seen it, but I certainly didn't get it.

In any case, this sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Read All of "The Dead Girl (2006) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on May 19, 2007 in Drama

Just as Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) comes home to visit his wife, he is met by a few less-than-upstanding citizens who want to cause trouble. Unfortunately for them, Poe is an Army Ranger, which means that they probably aren't in the best position when it comes to a fight.

So when they decide to ambush him outside the bar, Poe gets the best of them. But when all is said and done, and one of them ends up dead on the ground, it is Poe who gets the short end of the stick. All he was doing was protecting his wife, but since he is trained as a deadly weapon, he ends up in prison.

Read All of "Con Air (1997) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on May 6, 2007 in Action

Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) may be the best trial lawyer you ever meet. He's never lost a case. So when he manages to win one where he just knows the guy is guilty, he attracts some unexpected attention.

He gets an invitation from a fancy New York City law firm to come up and visit, all expenses paid, to pick a jury. And what's more is that he gets to bring his wife Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) along for the ride. It's too good to be true.

Read All of "The Devil's Advocate (1997) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on May 6, 2007 in Drama

A local sheriff (Brendan Gleeson) pulls a diver out of Black Lake (they wanted to call it Lake Placid, but that name was already taken), only to find that he's been bitten in half. What they find is a tooth, and this gets sent to a museum for analysis.

The tooth ends up in the hands of Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), who doesn't usually do field research, and most certainly not in Maine. But because her boss - and boyfriend - has decided to do a little extra-curricular activity of his own with her friend, she ends up in the backwoods. This may or may not be a good choice.

Read All of "Lake Placid (1999) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on April 28, 2007 in Thriller

At the site of a lavish celebratory party, thrown by a Japanese company wanting to celebrate their purchase of a US company, the mood turns decidedly unhappy when someone turns up dead on the boardroom table. The fact that it's a young woman, who is most assuredly not Japanese, is probably not a good sign.

Detective Webster Smith (Wesley Snipes) is called in to investigate, and quickly teamed up with Captain John Connor (Sean Connery). This partner arrangement, where a younger. more inexperienced investigator, would be paired with a wiser, more seasoned man, is quite common for the Japanese. Apparently.

Unfortunately, Webb isn't too happy about either his new partner or the fact that the Japanese don't want their party to be disturbed. But life is about to get a lot more interesting for him.

Read All of "Rising Sun (1993) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on April 14, 2007 in Action

On the morning of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), an American Terrorist sets off a bomb in an SUV aboard a ferry, killing more than five hundred people aboard, as the fireball sets off another explosion in the boiler, and eventually the remains sink to the bottom of the river.

ATF Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) is assigned the grisly task of figuring out exactly what happened, and as such, he's one of the first on the scene collecting evidence. His partner, who had just taken off for vacation, is nowhere to be found, not even answering his cell phone.

Before long, Carlin is assigned to a special task force researching the event, and finds himself drawn into a special new technology that allows the investigators to look back into the past four-and-a-half days (technically, four days and six hours, but no one seems to notice this, so I'll pretend not to do so either) to see what's happening. The only catch is that this time window is open only for that exact period, and once that time window is gone, it can't be recovered.

Read All of "Deja Vu (2006) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on April 9, 2007 in Action

Edward Norton stars in this film, where he is billed only as The Narrator. We don't actually ever get to hear his name, which is interesting, but strangely, you don't find yourself missing out on that fact (or at least, I didn't).

When we meet him, he is simply a body in motion, moving through airports, living a life that most of us can associate with, finding some measure of satisfaction through filling out his apartment with items in the IKEA catalog, slowly making where he lives into a reflection of what you see on each page.

And then on one of these trips, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). That's when everything changes.

Read All of "Fight Club (1999) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on March 30, 2007 in Drama

On January 20, 1960, Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood) arrived at Alcatraz to become prisoner #AZ1441. As with many other inmates of the prison, he was sent there because he had a tendency to escape other prisons, and Alcatraz was built to keep people from escaping.

However, according to most records, Morris almost immediately began planning his exit from The Rock. While it may or may not be completely true, on the arrival of two of his former associates, John and Clarence Anglin, Morris accelerated his plans, and on the night of June 11, 1962, they were gone, never to be heard from again.

The events surrounding the event are of course lost, so the details are dramatized for the movie. But that doesn't mean that it's not a good one to sit through.

Read All of "Escape from Alcatraz (1979) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on March 18, 2007 in Drama

This movie started in interesting fashion, with a driver picking up a hitchhiker and some relatively minor chit-chat happening until the hitcher asks if the driver is interested in guys (the hitcher himself is a man as well). At that point, the driver kicks him out, and you're left wondering just what is happening here. But that doesn't last long.

Next up, the driver pulls his truck over and opens up the bed of the truck to reveal a girl, bound and tied, and we get to see her dig her own grave, before (presumably) being killed by the driver of the truck. This isn't actually shown, which would probably increase the suspense a bit, but it's really a bit early on to do much more than whet the appetite. Shift to another car load, and you're still wondering what's happening.

Read All of "The Hitchhiker (2007) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on March 10, 2007 in Thriller

In the not-so-distant future, the problems of the world's energy crisis have been solved by the New Economic Block (NEB). Or so it would seem. For once the mining begins, a massive radioactive cloud is released, and that would appear to be problematic. Do you produce a teaspoon of this wonder-fuel, at the cost of lives, or do you stop and look for something else? I suspect you already know the answer.

If you're the NEB, you continue mining, and do what you can to offset the radiation. But if you're the rest of the civilized people, you try and stop the NEB, and so war breaks out on Sirius 6B, and in 2078, this war has been going on for some 20 years between the two factions, all of which used to be a part of the NEB. But now, it's been six months since anyone has heard from the NEB, until one day a lone soldier comes in from the dessert bearing a message...

Read All of "Screamers (1995) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on February 20, 2007 in Science Fiction

Officer Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) foils the plot of a bomber, and the next day as he gets a coffee, he witnesses a city bus blown to smithereens. Then he receives a call that another city bus has a bomb on it, and when it accelerates to fifty miles per hour, the bomb is armed. If it goes below fifty, the bomb will detonate. Suddenly he has to try to help the people on this other bus. Can he make it in time?

The first task is to find the bomb, and the bomber has determined that this game has certain rules. Of course one of those rules is finding the bus, and in a city the size of Los Angeles, being able to find a lone bus is a difficult task at best, so Jack has a bus number and is told where the bus is. Now he just needs to get to it. This he does.

Since he can't get to the bus stop on time, he has to catch a lift by taking over a car and driving alongside like a maniac, and eventually jumping into the bus itself, but by then it's too late. The bus has already hit fifty miles per hour and the bomb is armed. The game is on.

Read All of "Speed (1994) Review" »
Posted by Chad Everett on February 18, 2007 in Action