Blu-ray: August 2008 Archives
August 11, 2024
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.
August 1, 2024
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