Reviews

Nothing about this film feels authentic. These guys are supposed to be writers but we never learn what they write about. They easily could've been accountants or insurance salesmen. Designating them as writers seems like a shortcut to make us think these guys are "deep" when in reality they come off like characters from a bad American Gen X 1990s movie. Then there is the music: it's the music I love, the music I listened to in my 20s but I am now 44. I suspect the filmmakers are my age as well and didn't bother to research what young people have been listening to for the past 2 decades. It would be like if a movie about 20 somethings was made in 1986 and the soundtrack were filled with nothing but Black Oak Arkansas, Iron Butterfly and Disco Tex And The SeXollettes.

I really didn't care about any of these banal characters & feel the editing is a gimmick to distract the viewer from the fact that nothing interesting is happening or being said.

This movie is a real time waster. It has decent production values & a few OK performances (the lead victim & the photographer) but it is undermined by a truly awful performance by the art "patron" & a ludicrous script. The film has a "Hee Haw" attitude towards the Brooklyn art scene & seems like something a clueless old fart would've written for a skit on the "Sonny & Cher Show" back in the 1970s. The irony here is that if the writer & director were better artists they may have pulled this off. Instead it's a stale comedy that isn't funny & a horror/thriller that isn't suspenseful. Even the soundtrack is a joke--what self respecting NYC artist listens to speed metal?

I'll admit 2 things right off the bat: I was a consummate fan of the old 42nd Street grindhouses & drive ins & the fare they showed. I fondly remember skipping school to catch a triple feature. My all time perfect grindhouse experience was skipping school on a rainy lousy day with several friends of mine & kicking back with some lousy wine a few joints & a triple feature of THE WARRIORS, ENTER THE DRAGON and THE AVENGING DISCO GODFATHER.

The other thing I'll admit is that I am total Tarantino fanboy. I enjoy his work even though I really get tired of him. He does stuff that I shouldn't like—ie he makes movies about movies—but I end up loving them. I really detest his clones & after every one of his movies we are inundated with bad copycats. But I have enjoyed each feature film he has made.

So GRINDHOUSE seems to be made just for me! DEATHPROOF, Tarantino's half of GRINDHOUSE demonstrates why he is so far above his peers. He takes a hoary genre—the car chase flick--& infuses it with something new, much like Sergio Leone did with the western back in the 1960s. DEATHPROOF is the best drive in movie never made in 1975. As with RESERVIOUR DOGS he writes the scenes we never got to see in genre flicks, scenes where the characters reveal things about themselves, scenes where they set the action in motion, scenes where we see the aftermath.

DEATHPROOF also contains a car chase scene that is right up there with THE FRENCH CONNECTION & the 7 UPS. The first part of DEATHPROOF is the rapid fire dialogue between the characters & the second part is the rapid fire action of a psychopath & a car of women bent on revenge. Tarantino doesn't just send up or copy the car chase flick of the 1970s—he makes a really good one. Unlike Ridrigues' half of GRINDHOUSE, Tarantino does not degrade the film's image of scratch the print. DEATHPROOF looks like a brand new 1970s car chase flick right down to the soft focus.

Now about the rest of the film. As I'm sure most of you know, GRINDHOUSE is actually 2 full length (80 minutes) features, plus fake coming attractions. Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR is a mildly amusing send up of a zombie flick. This is the part of GRINDHOUSE where the film is scratched, it hiccups & burns. It's non stop action with no character development& is basically just a new version of a bad old movie. Whereas Tarantino injects a genre with something new Rodriguez simply takes a stroll down memory lane & is every bit as witless as most of the flicks I used to see at the real 42nd Street grindhouses.

The fake trailers are hit or miss. Eli Roth's THANKSGIVING is outrageous & hilarious as is a trailer for a bad 70s Euro horror DON'T.

So is GRINDHOUSE worth seeing? Well I had a great 3 hours & 15 minutes. The only time I got antsy was during the last 10 minutes of Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR. But if you aren't fond of this type of fare & if Tarantino generally leaves you cold then I guess there are better ways to spend 3 hours.

What wasn't so funny was a real trailer that I saw before GRINDHOUSE: apparently Rob Zombie has remade John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN. From the trailer its apparent that this is a non stop gore show & the tagline for the film is "an extreme update of the old classic". So what they've done is take a great old thriller that was heavy on scares but light on actual gore & have stripped it of it's humanity, added gore & torture & have created just another sick millennial stalk, torture & mutilate flick. I've caught both of Zombie's previous celluloid atrocities & found them to be nothing more than bad torture porn.

This could've & should've been a documentary short. Peter Berlin is just not that important nor that interesting to justify this stulifyingly dull & overlong shot on video documentary. If the directors wanted to make a feature length documentary they could've expanded their scope to other erotic artists at the time such as James Bidgood (of PINK NARCISSUS fame) or Wakefield Pool (TAKE ONE, BOYS IN THE SAND). Peter Berlin is a forgettable & mostly forgotten footnote in gay erotic history & this snoozer of a documentary will not change that.

If you want to check out a good documentary on an obscure cult figure check out Andrew Horn's THE NOMI SONG. If you want to see a fun & fluffy look at gay erotica from the 1970s check out Joseph Lovett's GAY SEX IN THE 1970s. But skip THAT MAN PETER BERLIN. If you waste your time & money on this you'll say the same thing my boyfriend did as we exited The Cinema Village: "That man, Peter Berlin owes me $10.50 plus 85 minutes of my life!".

I guess we gays have come a long way as now some of us have the time & money to waste on mediocre, dull as dishwater PG13 "mysteries" that have all of the dramatic tension of a Scooby Doo episode. Jeez, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN makes the worst episode of MURDER SHE WROTE seem like THE MALTESE FALCON!! What I just don't get is WHY this film was made & who is the audience? If there were attractive leads or hot sex maybe I could understand the effort (there IS a market for soft core gay porn) but there's just NOTHING going on here. There isn't one second of originality in this film, not one of the actors displays any enthusiasm for their roles (I've seen hostages do better line readings), the cinematography is 7-11 security cam level, the awful neo-folkie music obscures a lot of the dialog (guess that's a blessing) & the running time is padded out with numerous scenes of people driving. Were it not for the lack of sex scenes or any flesh for that matter I would swear this was an edited porn film as the sets are hilariously unconvincing but not nearly as rigid, wooden & unattractive as the actors. This wouldn't even cut it as a Troma film! The filmmakers had a budget & materials to make a gay themed mystery/romance & this is what they came up with? Man do I hope they all know how to type or wait tables because the art is just NOT in their blood! This one is up there with PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE & ROBOT MONSTER as one of the most inept films ever made.

The only way GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN can be (almost) enjoyed is "Mystery science Thatre 3000" style. My boyfriend & I were howling with laughter at this turd & heckled it mercilessly. Hey here's an idea: the new all gay cable channel Logo can hire some really bitchy drag queens to watch bad gay flicks & heckle them. THAT is the only way I can recommend it.

I am an avid Howard Stern fan & think that Artie Lange has been a positive influence on the show. I was almost going to buy this DVD but was warned by several folks I know (fellow Stern fans) that it's a waste. One of them gave me his copy which he was about to throw out. After seeing half of this I chucked it into MY trash. IT'S THE WHISKEY Talking' looks & sounds like a bad cable access show from the late 1980s. The production values wouldn't cut it on a snuff film as Artie is often out of focus & filmed from what seems like a mile away, giving it the appearance of a security cam tape. Was this shot on someone's cell phone? Artie's material is even worse than the sub amateur production values. There isn't one second of his act that you haven't heard 1,000 times before from better comedians. Artie comes across like a 4th rate Belushi clone who stumbled onto stage at a suburban strip mall comedy club sometime around 1989. His lame & dated material wouldn't make it 5 minutes on amateur/open mike night at any comedy club in New York, LA or Boston which is probably why he had to go all the way to Tempe Arizona to find people to laugh at his tired diatribes. The sad thing is that the biggest audience responses come not from his material but his references to things from the Stern show. Whenever Artie senses that he's losing his audience--which is pretty much every 5 minutes--he'll do his Jeff The Drunk or Angus Young impression. These are seeded into his act more & more as even the entertainment starved audience in Tempe begins to tire of his stale "observations". The audience seems to be made up of rabid Stern fans who at first are psyched to see someone from the show in the flesh but who soon look as though they are sitting through the most embarrassing & long drunken wedding toast in history. I'll say this for the lousy production: at least it honestly shows the enthusiasm draining from the room like air escaping from a balloon. A more professional team would've intercut positive reaction shots of the crowd from the early part of the set when the audience was happy & hopeful that a fun night was about to begin. Instead the mounting disappointment & depression of the audience is faithfully captured.

And that's all in the first 30 minutes! Holy Jeezus I can't even imagine how awful the rest of the set was. A double bill of THE BAD LIEUTENANT & SCHNINDLER'S LIST would be lighter & funnier than the funeral that is IT'S THE WHISKEY Talking'. Even though I saw this on a friends discarded DVD I still feel like I was ripped off. I'll never get that half hour of my life back!

Oh man, this braindead shlockfest looks like it just may have been made in someone's Califorina back yard! The acting is sub-porno, the sets would've made Ed Wood giggle & the dialog is some of the most unintentionally hilarious drivel ever to exude from a human head. In a weird way I recommend it, albeit only in a certain way. CLASS OF 1999 II is so relentlessly silly, cheap & badly acted that you can't help but play the home version of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATRE 3000. If you're hanging out with a few friends & have downed a few beers (or other mind altering substances) this hapless craptacular can be highly entertaining. Sasha Mitchell's wooden non acting is awe inspiring (or perhaps vomit inducing). The film also contains one of the dopiest & most unerotic sex scenes since SHOWGIRLS. If you subscribe to Showtime this deliriously inept flick pops up a lot VERY late at night or early morning (for you wake-n-bakers).

I'm a fan of all types of martial arts films, from the 1970s efforts of the Shaw Brothers to the 1960s Samurai films to Tzui Hark to Jet Li to Ringo Lam to to Donnie Yen to Jackie Chan. I don't expect Hollywood style camera work & editing. But I do expect fights that are filmed with SOME lighting & that the cinematographer knows where to point the camera. ONG BAK is a dreary, dimly lit & monotonous amateur film that should NEVER have received a US theatrical release & instead gone straight to home video. Tony Jaa is an excellent fighter & in a film with the right director, choreographer & cinematographer he will most likely be on his way to becoming a huge action star. He's got the looks, he can fight without the wires (whch have become a cliché & which hopefully will disappear) & he has the requisite acting chops.

What Jaa does not have in ONG BAK is a vehicle to fully demonstrate his talents. Everything about ONG BAK is dreary & dim, dull & hard to follow. I am looking forward to what Jaa does next--that is if he takes a job with competent film makers.

I was with this film for the first 25 minutes before the depressing reality that it was nothing but another "slacker Sundance young director" clone sank in. Zack Braff--from SCRUBS, the only sitcom that I watch--stars, writes & directs this painfully derivative flick about a bunch of aimless & quirky twentysomethings who stumble aimlessly through life while treacly awful alternative folk music is strummed & bleated from the soundtrack. Natalie Portman seems to be channeling her former costar Jar Jar Binks as the most annoying person in New Jersey (& NJ is a state that produced both Joe Piscopo & Jon Bon Jovi) while Peter Sarsgaard barely maintains his dignity in the well worn cliché of the wise, quick witted & jaded loser/stoner.

How many clinches can you jam into one movie? I stopped counting at 18 but that's only because I picked up a magazine & began reading it during the film's last 10 minutes. I just didn't care anymore what happened to these cartoon characters & only left the movie on in the vain hope that there would be another scene with Sarsgaard shirtless (there wasn't).

Jeezus, didn't they stop making movies like this back in the 1990s? Unfortunately this tepid crapola got some decent reviews, awards at Sundance & did OK box office (for an indie) so I guess we can all look forward to another slew of inoffensive, slice of life, twentysomething, slacker, disaffected, quirky, small town yarns with neo-folkie alterna "rock" cooing from the soundtrack.

Suddenly an Adam Sandler/Meg Ryan marathon doesn't seem so unendurable.

Once I realized that David O Russell's "existentialist comedy" was going absolutely nowhere & was about as deep as a p*** puddle I was able to sit back & enjoy the universally excellent performances of the cast. Jason Schwartzman & Mark Wahlberg give the best performances of their careers with Wahlberg's excellent comic timing making their scenes together a real treat...yeah I know I wrote "comic timing" & "Mark Wahlberg" in the same sentence but believe me, here he's a revelation. Jude Law is perfect as the slimy corporate lackey & Isabel Huppert is hilarious in a role that recalls a mix of Linda Fiorentino in LAST SEDUCTION & Huppert's deranged role in THE PIANO TEACHER. Naomi Watts, in a small role, once again shows another dimension. Oddly enough the weakest performances are turned in by Lily Tomlin (one of my all time fave comic actresses) & Dustin Hoffman. Both seem to be on auto pilot as if they (justifyably so) do not trust either the director or his material.

As I said the film goes absolutely nowhere as the characters are but caricatures, there's no real story & Rusell understands existentialism about as well as I do astro physics. There are a LOT of really good individual scenes in the film & some pretty ingenuous set pieces but nothing adds up. But it certainly is a unique film & probably the oddest movie made & released by a major studio since Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. What makes I (HEART) HUCKABEES ultimately so infuriating is that there is SO much good in it & the cast is so letter perfect that the concept & the actors really deserved a lot more effort & thought from Russell.

I would've felt a lot harsher towards the film had I any loftier expectations on the way in. I knew the film was problematic & it wasn't even on my list of theatrical must sees but I just happened to be walking past a theatre that had bargain matinees & its start time was only 10 minutes away so I figured what the hell. After the movie I heard a fellow patron exclaim "I paid to see a David O RUSSELL movie but what I saw was a KEN RUSSELL movie", a remark that drew mutliple murmurs or "good one" from all within earshot (including yours truly).

This is the infamous riot inducing Chicano gang flick. Two theatres in LA were nearly levelled by outraged Hispanic patrons who took offense at this minstrel show. The ultra-vanilla Robbie Benson dons brown contacts, dark makeup & seems to be channelling the Frito Bandito as a Latin gang member (?!). He then trashes his friends & heritage when he hooks up with a nice white girl. WALK PROUD has all the racial sensitivity of BIRTH OF A NATION & while it is absolutley (unintentionally) hilarious, it is still depressing to consider that as late as 1979 there were still people in Hollywood this clueless & unintentionally rascist. Luckily the impact of the box office failure of this soggy tamale was that we were spared many more awful Robbie Benson performances. Benson did have one more ethnic slur of a performance though. In 1981 he lumbered though the unwatchable THE CHOSEN where he played a Hassidic Jew in a film that advanced anti-semitism more than David Duke ever could.

John Huston is one of the all time masters of American cinema. That is why this southern fried crapola is so hard to bear. Everything about this cornpone crud fails from the murky cinematography to the slow pace & most of all to the lousy acting. Brando gives one of his all time hammiest & campiest performances...even his Dr Moreau was less hilarious than the sniveling twit he plays here. Robert Forester stumbles around with slightly less animation than the zombies in DAWN OF THE DEAD & Liz Taylor simply looks embarrassed, as if she's the only one in the cast that realizes what a catastrophe she is a part of. This was a major box office dud upon its release & has gained a cult following for that reason but skip it. It really sucks.

I'd love to remake this would-be-weepie & have Lynn Holly-Johnson skate into walls. That way at least this crap would be intentionally funny instead of being a camp classic like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, VALLEY OF THE DOLLS & MOMMIE DEAREST. This LOVE STORY clone wanted to be 1978's Disease/Affliction Movie Of The Year but it was so dopey & overwrought that even the group of high school girls sitting in front of me in the theatre (back in 1978) laughed uncontrollably at the absurd melodrama. A simpering whiner goes blind & somehow the fey voice of Robbie Benson gives her the courage to compete again. Feh! The box office failure of this yellow snowball & the jaw dropping awful WALK PROUD saved American cinema from the further torture of another Robby Benson performance. The fact that this pile of crap made it onto DVD while great films from the 1970s like PROVIDENCE still remain in limbo is a sure sign that God has a sick sense of humor (& enjoys a few unintentional laughs like the rest of us!).

Although TUBE is beautifully shot its still a weak hodge podge of every mainstream American action flick of the past 15 years. What's worse is that its derivative of the VERY derivative Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bey standard summer crapola. There are some great unintentional laughs at the expense of the lame love story but mostly this is a corny & predictable mishmash of SPEED, Armageddon, THE ROCK, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT & THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE. The writers of the last film should sue for 1) completely ripping off their plot & 2) for doing such a bad job at it. If you want mindless & fun action rent anything by Tsui Hark but avoid this time waster.

I couldn't figure out if this made for cable would be shocker was meant as a satire or not. Its not funny enough to be a comedy & not scary enough to be a thriller. It has the appearence of a movie that was rewritten by several different people. Parts of it are satirical send ups of 1950s Cold War paranoia as well as religious hyprocracy, parts of it are gory & parts are trying (unsuccessfully) to be frightening. In the hands of someone like David Lynch, Sam Raimi, Stuart Gordon or even Frank Henenlotter these parts could've gelled together & made an effective thriller & social satire. POSSESSED however is a bunch a parts that don't fit & the result is substandard cable fodder

I've been dying to see this film for the past 2 years. As a fan of HK cinema I read in horror about how Miramax planned to butcher the film & due to the continuing US theatrical release dates being pushed back I feared the film would suffer the same fate as Yimou Zhang's brilliant HERO/YING XIONG. For this reason I was joyous when I scored an all region DVD of the film...only to be seriously dissappointed. It just came across like a silly POLICE ACADEMY type comedy. The fight scenes were below average & made the scenes in BLACK MASK 2 look good by comparison. The characters behaved so randomly that there were really no characters. Since there was nobody to really care about & since all of the fights were done via CGI effects I ended up so bored that I ejected the DVD & just watched the news.

I think a lot of my dislike of the film has more to do with the fact that comedies don't often translate well. I am sure that there were things in the film that were referring to things in Chinese society that someone in North America just cannot understand. Plus the English subtitles on the DVD I saw were pretty bad--they were exact translations. BUT I have seen a lot of HK films & enjoy most of them (Tsui Hark & Corey Yuen are my faves) & quite frankly SHAOLIN SOCCER just didn;t do it for me.

Has there ever been a worse superhero movie? If this film had been in Chinese, set in Hong Kong & featured actors like Jet Li, Donnie Yen & Maggie Cheung & had some decent fight scenes & wasn't trying to be BATMAN & was directed by someone like Tsui Hark then mabey this ultra lame script could've worked. With such Wonderbread non-entities like Jennifer Garner & Ben Affleck on hand however this tiresome tale falls flat. The one thing I'll hand to the the filmmakers: they actually were able to make Joe Pantoliano & Michael Clarke Duncan boring, which is no mean feat. This cheapo sub B flick looks like a reject from the Made for The SciFi Channel universe. Blech!!

SOLARIS is the rare modern scifi film that is a meditation on ideas instead of wham bam lazer fights in space. Many pseudo-intellectuals dismissed the film as a "second chance at love". The main theme of the film is the exploration of the meaning of relationships. Chris Kelvin (Clooney) while on a space station circling the newly found planet Solaris is "visited" by a flesh & blood facsimilie of his dead wife Rheya (Natasha McElhone). She isn't a dream nor is she simply an alien disguised as her. She is a mirror of his memories of his wife--HIS memories. This is the theme of the film: what are our relationships but for our memories of what has already happened? How much can we really know a person? How much can we approximate how another person feels, how things feel to their touch, how things smell to them? The "visitor" replica of Rheya is a conglomeration of Chris' memories of her--but that is just how she begins "life". The Visitor Rheya is conscious of what is happening & knows she isn't really Rheya & makes Chris aware if this, yet he still cannot let her go as the love that he felt during his troubled marrige has come back & its a feeling he can't abandon easily. Which also begs the question what is the meaning of love?

SOLARIS is a beautifully made, well acted, moody film THAT IS NOT A REMAKE. Like the 1972 Russian film by the great Tarkovsky, it is based on the novel of the same name by the Polish writer Stanislav Lem. The dimwits who don't understand the subtlties of Soderberg's film have given themselves a pass by dismissing it as a "bad remake". If all one gets from seeing Soderberg's adaptation of Lem's novel is that it is a "second chance at love" story then there is NO WAY they ever saw Tarkovsky's 3 1/2 hour snail paced film. Chances are they never saw 2001: A SPCE ODYSSEY either but they probobly read a lot of reviews so that they can bullsh*t their way through a discussion of it.

I love almost anything that comes out of HK, but even I have my limits. If Troma ever made a cheapo Saturday morning TV series for children, this would be it. You know you're in trouble when you're watching a Jackie Chan movie & 20 minutes in there still isn't a fight. This ultra lame attempt to bring a manga to the screen fails in almost every respect & the only fun to be had with it is if you get the newly released US version & watch it with the horribly dubbed English soundtrack, where no attempt whatsoever was made to sync up the hilariously dopey English voices with the mouths of the Chinese actors. Back in the late 1970s/early 1980s the martial arts genre nearly died due to a glut of cheap & substandard films. I'm afraid of more cheap & awful substandard dreck like CITY HUNTER flooding the market & making it impossible for good HK cinema to get released here. With great martial arts/HK flicks like HERO & KUNG FU MASTER (the epic starring Donnie Yen) still without wide US distribution I am afraid this may already be happening. I know if a piece of sh*t like CITY HUNTER was the first HK flick I ever saw I would never bother to see another one.

SHANGHAI KNIGHTS is easily the worst Jackie Chan film that I've ever seen & I am a guy who sat through HALF A LOAF OF KUNG FU. The chemistry between Chan & Owen Wilson is non existant as they seem to be reading their dialogue off of billboards a mile away. The jokes are lame, the fight sequences are faked & unconvincing & its obvious that Jackie is just too old to chop the suey anymore. What is the point of a jackie Chan film when it isn't Jackie doing the fighting or stunts? If you want to have fun with a Jackie Chan flick check out any of his HK flicks from 1989 to 1998 (ie PROJECT A, SUPERCOP, DRUNKEN MASTER 1 & 2, FIRST STRIKE, MR NICE GUY), but avoid his US stinkers like the SHANGHAI & RUSH HOUR flicks & THE TUXEDO. Unfortunatley I think the jig is up for Jackie because if he had to fake his fights in this crap he probobly doesn't have it anymore period.

Before any discussion of this turgid made for TV flick there MUST be the inclusuion of the fact that the book was revealed to be a work of fiction back in the 1980s. It was written by a middle aged therarpist named Beatrice Sparks who was also involved in the satanic cult hysteria of the 1980s. So right off the bat the very origins--or what the book claims to be its origins--are a complete fraud.

This precursor to the After School Special is great for unintentional laughs if you have first imbibed in the very substances that this hysterical screed warns against. After a while though the typical lousy 1970s made for TV melodramatics become wearying. If you want a fun stoner film check out REEFER MADNESS or one of the old DRAGNET shows. Let this fraudulent bummer whither away & die like it deserves to.

Its easy to see why this early 1980s relic remains so obscure & why it did poorly here in New York City upon its initial release: it's sub-amateur CRAP!!! This is one of the most irritating movies I've ever seen & the #1 source of irritation is the AWFUL & tinny pseudo new wave synth score which repeats the same 4 notes over & over & over for the nearly 2 hour running time. In attempting to make a statement about 1980s American nihlism the Russian emigre filmmakers (perhaps the Iron Curtain was a good thing) make the fatal error of not knowing a thing about NY where their low brow & low rent scifi/comedy/sociological screed takes place. Streets & landmarks are misidentified, the New Yawk accents are straight out of a bad cartoon (someone unironically says "boids") & their depiction of the early 1980s NYC club scene is so laughably way, way WAY off the mark that it seems as if the filmmakers had never set foot in North America, let alone NYC. The acting is sub-porno, the grainy cinematography is just above 7-11 security cam video, the sound is muddly & apparently the budget was so low that they couldn't afford an editor. I say that because this tedious & grating turd not only drags itself to nearly 2 agonizing hours, it also includes actors just about to hit their marks & looking off camera to get direction. The cast is ugly & uninspired, the movie looks like a 1970s education flick & its easy to see why nobody connected with this overblown freshman film student mess has ever worked on another film.

Were it not for the presence of 2 screen legends (Rogers & Robinson) & 2 TV legends (Keith & Greene), this would've been consigned to obscurity. Its not an awful film but merely an average B film pumped up with a decent budget & name actors. Rogers effects an absurd New Yawk accent & engages in eye rolling cliche exchanges with Keith for most of the movie. Robinson is restrained & dull & looks bored with his cornball dialogue. The only bright spot is Lorne Greene who is terrific as the underworld crime boss who sets the events in motion. Otherwise the film is an OK but forgettable way to fill up 90 minutes. If there is absolutely nothing on TV & the weather outside is awful & you have run out of things to read & you are completely caught up on household chores, then perhaps TIGHT SPOT is worth a look.

Not since Rene Clements FORBIDDEN GAMES (1955) have I seen a film as devastating as GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES. It is truly a work of beauty & is not only one of the best animated films of all time but it is also one of the greatest war films ever. Only the great Miyazaki is on the same level. As another person commented here, GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES is a film that makes your eyes well up with tears just thinking about it.

This isn't even really a movie. Its a collection of uninteresting set pieces that may have worked if Brian "Plot? I Don't Need No Stinking Plot!" DePalma bothered to hire a lead actress instead of a manaquin. Kathleen Turner made CRIMES OF PASSION (another dopey sexcapade by a once great director) work because she can act. Romijn-Stamos may be OK in bit parts in action flicks but she has the emotional range of a Brillo pad--& not that it really matters but she just isn't that extrodinarily pretty. Anbtonio Banderas looks embarassed throughout this replica of a 1980s music video that passes for a film. DePalma has been on a long decline ever since RAISING CAINE. In this film he rips off almost ever movie made in the past 3 decades, most notably David Lynch's FAR superior MULHOLLAND DRIVE.