Every kid on the planet has either heard or said that old phrase “sticks and stones can break your bones but words will never hurt me“. Well, turns out, it’s not as true as our parents and educators led us to believe. Just like those sticks and stones, words do hurt and sometimes they cut very, very deep. Throughout the making of this powerful film and its ongoing ratings battle, The Weinstein Company has backed director Lee Hirsch’s eye-opening documentary about bullying in schools. Kids have always been self-conscious and nervous about fitting it but Bully explores stories about individuals and their families to show that bullying is a real problem…
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G-S-T Review…Detention
(Author’s note: a few weeks ago I participated in a round table interview with Detention director Joseph Kahn. That feature was published over on my site, A Constant Visual Feast; it makes for a great read in conjunction with the review itself. Go here to read the interview if you haven’t already!) There’s really no good preamble one can fashion to properly introduce Joseph Kahn’s sophomore feature length film, Detention, in a review; temptation and delusions of wit both want to nudge me into describing it as a film so utterly, enthusiastically, uniquely bonkers that it would behoove any cinephile to pay the purchase price of a ticket to watch it.…
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G-S-T Review…American Reunion
The fourth cinematic installment of the America Pie series (add to it 4 DTV films which brings the total to 8 ) American Reunion gets back to where it all started. Most of the kids from East Great Falls High have moved on and with the upcoming 10 year reunion (really it’s 13) they see how their lives come full circle. Jim, Oz, Kev and Paul have done pretty OK for themselves, though in Stifler’s case it seems all he’s done is spun in place. Containing the same level of raunchy humor that made the first movie a hit, the gang is now back for a forth helping of Pie and…
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G-S-T Review…Wrath of the Titans
I, like Jonathan Liebesman’s Wrath of the Titans, am wracked with indecision. On the one hand I want to go to bat for the film on the virtues of its better elements– excellent eye candy, including, but not limited to, some eye-popping creature design– but Wrath’s tonal incongruity holds me back. There’s a place in the Hollywood ecosphere for fantastical sword and sandal films boasting either serious or silly makes, but Wrath can’t decide which of the two models it wants to follow and ends up existing as an unsatisfying halfway point between them; it’s silly, but not silly enough. It’s epic, but it’s not epic enough. If the film needs anything, it’s direction,…
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G-S-T Review…Mirror Mirror
Forget the story you know, or think you know. Tarsem Singh (The Fall, Immortals) takes the famous Brothers Grimm fairy tale and looks at it through his insanely stylized goggles. Add to it an Oscar-winner, a dash or two of campiness, some wonderful set designs and the result is something that even the happiest fairy tales couldn’t come close to. While the trailers looked to contain off-putting levels of saccharine laced kid friendly material, there’s actually a lot of fun that won’t necessarily cause parents’ eyes to continuously roll. Simply put you don’t have to go in with low expectations to have a good time. Snow White is the fairest maiden in…
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G-S-T Review…The Hunger Games
Film fans have seen various visions of dystopia and its many hypothesized forms for decades. From Brazil to Equilibrium, from Logan’s Run to The Running Man, there’s no shortage of dismal looking futures. Yet as bleak as those titles paint their depicted worlds, The Hunger Games lets us know that hope and heart are still part of the human condition. But very much like our own society the aftermath still yields the ‘haves‘ and ‘have nots‘. In The Hunger Games the socioeconomic divides between The Capitol and The Districts are likened to the serf system of the medieval times. Yet the class split is much closer to home than some may realize. The next…
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G-S-T Review…21 Jump Street
Phil Lord’s and Chris Miller’s 21 Jump Street shouldn’t be as brilliant as it is. In fact, on paper, it’s a film that seems ripe for evisceration at the hands of critics and cineastes for whom kvetching about Hollywood’s modern culture of property recycling has become as much a pastime as actually watching movies. Maybe 21 Jump Street is an easy target; its premise is so hopelessly cheesy that it could only be a product of the late 80s, while Jonah Hill’s comedic stock has been wavering since 2010’s Get Him to the Greek. Tack Channing Tatum on and you have a project that reads like a fake film-within-a-film from Entourage. Who gave a…
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G-S-T Review…Casa de mi Padre
In his latest comedic venture, Will Ferrell plays the lead in a feature-length Spanish language telenovela…yes, you read that right. Casa De Mi Padre is the pitch perfect alchemy of Austin Powers level self-awareness and the gritty, over the top, filmed on a shoe-string budget films that inspired the Rodriguez/Tarantino Grindhouse revival. Casa de mi Padre is most definitely a film for movie lovers and a mixed bag of cheesy elements ripe with heavy doses of satire that pay homage to films of that era. Beyond that, Casa skillfully shoe-horns humor into every literally frame. From sight gags to awkward humor to pure WTF? sequences it impossible to catch all the loose-n-fast humor and in-jokes on…
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G-S-T Review…John Carter
Today’s science fiction has a debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs. The man created what is widely considered one of the first alien worlds that leaved and breathed outside of our own realm. He gave them their own language, religion, culture, and feuds. And he did all of this with the first appearance of John Carter in 1912. Before Star Wars, before Avatar, before Star Trek, there was the Barsoom (what we call Mars) adventures and it was pulpy, light, fantastic fare. They inspired hundreds, if not thousands, of writers to dream big. Now, 100 years later, a big budget film version finally exists and I think it’s a worthy showcase…
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G-S-T Review…Being Flynn
A story about family and coping with the unavoidable bonds between us, Being Flynn is, in short, about accepting who you are so you can try to fix your own problems. Adapted from Nick Flynn’s memoir “Another Bulls**t Night in Suck City” the film is about Nick and his father going a very long way to come to terms with one another. You can try to run from your family but you can’t run from DNA and being family means they butt heads…a lot. That tends to happen with movie families but these are real people with real problems. It can be morbidly funny and Nick’s writing/personal experiences yield a more bitter than…