Go,See,Talk resumes their Double Take Review series with the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger to headlining status in Jee-woon Kim’s small town shoot em up The Last Stand. Today Marc Ciafardini and Andrew Crump chime in on what works and what doesn’t in the latest from The Governator and American film debut of of Korean director Jee-woon Kim. Take 1 – Marc Ciafardini: When the son of a drug cartel baron breaks out of a US prison and does a Cannonball run for the Mexico border, there’s only one man who can stop him. Yes, it sounds as trite as any 80’s actioner or B-Movie from that era, but it’s a Schwarzenegger vehicle…
-
-
G-S-T Review…Mama
Seeing those four dreamy and all encompassing words “Once Upon A Time” at the start of any story is a dead give away that what you are about to see is a fairy tale. Translation: not real. But what else does it mean? Is that meant to keep kids (or adults) from being scared? Or is this the only way to make us buy what the story is selling? Not sure but this has all the familiar hallmarks of a fairy tale. This isn’t Little Red Riding Hood and this sure ain’t kids stuff. Mama calls back to the darker Grimm fairy tales and, as per all the advertising, is in the vein of Pan’s…
-
G-S-T Review…LUV
Sheldon Candis’ greatest coup in directing LUV, his debut feature, could well be securing rapper-turned-all-around-entertainer Common as his leading man. Common only started making moves in the acting world in the early 2000s before landing roles in Smokin’ Aces and American Gangster in 2007, but he’s been writing rhymes about manhood and the value of family since 1992; combining that background with his natural, easy charisma, he feels like a natural fit for a story about a young boy learning life lessons from his uncle over the course of a single day in inner city Baltimore. When Common speaks, he speaks with authority. Were we in Michael Rainey Jr.’s place,…
-
G-S-T Review…Gangster Squad
Based on a book by Paul Lieberman, Gangster Squad tells the true story of the secretive police unit that took down real life mobster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn). In the film, just as it happened in real life, this elite group of officers were assembled for their uniqueness and proved to be the one and only method of freeing up the choke-hold Cohen had on L.A. in the mid to late 40’s. Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) wastes no time immersing us in what kind of movie this will be. Like a whirlwind we are swept up in a kidnapping in progress that shows us Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) and his talent for following his hunches even if it most…
-
G-S-T Review…Zero Dark Thirty
Editor’s Note: The following review was originally written back in December by our guest contributing editor, Mark Walters of BigFanBoy.com and is topped off with some final thoughts from our own Grady May. As 2012 drew to a close, there were several films trickling out in the final months which studios hope will be fresh in everyone’s minds come Oscar voting time. One of the more talked-about contenders is director Kathryn Bigelow’s factually based Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt and eventual discovery of Osama Bin Laden. Bigelow already took home Oscar gold for her work on another military film, The Hurt Locker, and has re-teamed with screenwriter Mark Boal on…
-
G-S-T Review…Promised Land
Subtlety, when making a strong point, is never easy. In Promised Land, the heavy-handed apparition rears its ugly hand at the end and wrecks most of what proceeded. Despite this, the film works as a tool to make you question things openly and refrain from becoming emotionally attached to the people making the arguments for or against. Matt Damon’s character Steve is a confusing character first and foremost because he is real. He’s a man we aren’t often used to. He will go off on verbal tangents after working up to something, but if he is faced with someone that has the upper hand in information or personality, he becomes flustered. At one point, Steve gets…
-
G-S-T Review…The Impossible
There’s a line spoken to a young boy in the middle of Juan Antonio Bayona’s film The Impossible that brings a lot of gravity to the events he and his family are currently experiencing. It really captures the theme of the story and comes in a scene where one of Ewan McGregor’s sons talks to a woman as they discuss the stars in the nighttime sky. He’s fond of star gazing (as evidenced by the gift of a new telescope he received for Christmas at the beginning of the film) and in their conversation the woman tells him that some of the stars he’s looking at have been dead for a long…
-
G-S-T Review…Not Fade Away
I left my recollection of David Chase’s Not Fade Away in the theater shortly after walking out during the credits. Maybe that sounds like bad news, and maybe I’m putting myself in a hole by starting off my review on that note, but truthfully, memorability happens to be Not Fade Away‘s biggest Achilles’ heel. Chase hasn’t made a bad film, not by any stretch of the means, but he’s made one that suffers from diminishing returns, one which our connection to slackens and grows hazier the longer that the picture runs. He’s also made a picture about listless, directionless youth; appropriately, Not Fade Away meanders and lazes as much as its…
-
G-S-T Review…Django Unchained
If there’s one filmmaker who marches to the beat of his own drum, it’s Quentin Tarantino. Raised on a healthy cinematic diet of spaghetti westerns, gritty 60’s/70’s cult classics, not to mention pretty much everything in the Australian documentary Not Quite Hollywood and more, he has become one of the film world’s most talented and widely accepted acquired tastes. From Pulp Fiction to Jackie Brown to Kill Bill to his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, QT has learned so much about how to make film that Django Unchained might just be the pinnacle of his efforts. So how does Tarantino weave that special kind of magic? Simple, outright theft. Now that’s not…
-
G-S-T Review…Parental Guidance
As we turn the page from one year to another and one decade to the next, new and different styles of film making trends emerge. The 80’s are forever cemented in history with blockbuster hits from Steven Spielberg and a plethora of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone action flicks. In the 90’s we transitioned to Die Hard and more empathetic characters. As we rolled into the new millennium technology began growing exponentially and so did the use of CG. Another trend that has emerged over the past decade is over-the-top comedy. With every movie it seems the bar is set even higher for shock factor. Movies have gotten to the…