Deep Focus | Movie Reviews for the Internet
"Since 1994"
My review of Zombie Strippers is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:
It’s so dreadful, in fact, that I may be underrating it in at least one respect: Zombie Strippers! actually gives the early-1980s sci-fi porn flick Café Flesh a run for its money as the most joyless, nigh despairing movie about sexual arousal in film history.
My review of Can’t Hardly Wait on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:
Can’t Hardly Wait deals in a shameless, sunny-eyed idealism that
prizes sincerity and explicitly privileges the notion of true love; the
spirit of Wim Wenders even touches the film as, in one spectacularly
sweet vignette, a bikini-clad angel (Jenna Elfman, in a terrific
uncredited cameo) touches down outside a neon-lit diner to dispense
some hard-won advice to the broken-hearted protagonist. In short, we’re
a long way yet from the crass, porn-inflected attitudes of Superbad
My review of Starship Troopers 3: Marauder on Blu-ray Disc is online at FilmFreakCentral.net
Over the course of Starship Troopers 3, the human government’s
position on religion evolves from wary tolerance (because the more
pious citizens tend to oppose the war) to outright enthusiasm, once the
military manages to conflate aggression and holiness in the public
mind. “God’s back,” declares a government mouthpiece at film’s end,
“and He’s a citizen, too!”
First, the obvious. Made of Honor is what’s generally known as a “chick flick.” I’m not totally comfortable deploying that term,
especially in its usual derogatory, casually-sexist usage–but in a purely descriptive and possibly cynical sense, that’s what we have here. It’s a love story, featuring a conventionally handsome leading man (Patrick Dempsey) playing opposite a conventionally pretty woman (Michelle Monaghan) whose character is engaged to marry the conventionally wrong guy (blond Scot Kevin McKidd). It’s directed by a man (Paul Weiland), although to its credit there is a woman prominently involved (co-writer Deborah Kaplan), and it’s designed from the bottom up to appeal to undemanding female filmgoers.
My review of The Counterfeiters [on Blu-ray Disc] is online over at Filmfreakcentral.net.
Holocaust survivor’s yarn told with a certain playfulness and no lack
of moral consideration, but it is not really a concentration-camp
movie; mostly, it feels like a prison caper yarn that happens to take
place in Sachsenhausen. The film’s weight comes from the things we know
about but cannot see within the frame: those haunting images of
emaciated Jews, the walking-dead stares of the prisoners consigned to
the gas chambers and crematoria, the tragedy of systematic genocide.
My review of Felon on Blu-ray Disc is online at filmfreakcentral.net:
If Jeffrey Lebowski had made a few wrong turns in life–if, let’s say,
he had brutally murdered some very bad men, as well as their
families–he may have turned out not entirely unlike John Smith, the
hulkingly mellow convict played by a moustachioed, goateed Val Kilmer
in Felon. Judging from the wide berth the rest of the inmates
give him, Smith is known as the silent-but-deadly type. Kilmer plays
him from behind a whole bunch of prison tattoos with a steely glare,
but also with a kind of openness that doesn’t immediately compute.
Although he’s tagged as a sociopath, he’s really just the opposite. He
believes in justice, and he longs for the death sentence he feels his
crimes deserve.
My review of Untraceable on Blu-ray Disc is online at filmfreakcentral.net:
The makers of Untraceable never acknowledge their film’s own
ranking on the torture-as-entertainment scale. Instead, they’re
hell-bent on the idea that the online masses, guilty of exercising poor
taste, are somehow complicit in the worst kinds of crimes that might be
committed somewhere on the Internet by some sicko craving an audience.
The hectoring is so relentless that Untraceable obviously means
to send that message to its own audience–the sort of sick fucks who
would pay to see this movie in the first place. (For whatever reason,
moralizing filmmakers from Michael Haneke on down the line often fail
to implicate themselves in that downward spiral they so disdain.) D
In a happy development for cult and genre-film fans, non-English-language offerings beyond the highbrow are continuing to trickle out on Blu-ray Disc. And while you can’t buy a HD copy of My Blueberry Nights in the U.S. (and with the dollar in the toilet, who can afford to import movies these days?), you can pick up this lesser-known Thai horror-fantasy from 2006. Directed by Pleo Sirisuwan, it’s a low-budget adventure about the various creatures — human, humanoid and otherwise — lurking deep inside the jungle. It’s one of those movies where the hero’s face gets more and more jacked up and bloody as it goes along.
