Medication and depression these days go hand-in-hand. However, it wasn’t always this way. If you were unhappy, you often put on a brave face and dealt with it. If you were over a certain age, you couldn’t sit and pout. Nowadays, medication has taken away the fear, anxiety, and depression from everyday life for a lot of people. Are we better off with being in a medically-induced euphoria? At one point a character in Stephen Soderbergh’s latest—and possible last—film, Side Effects, tells their patient that these drugs simply allow us to be our real selves. That’s a tricky idea to grapple with. What is our true selves? The one aided by a pill to be more…
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G-S-T Review…Identity Thief
Despite a decent trailer that manages to deliver a few laughs, Identity Thief in its entirety fails to live up to it’s potential. Finding comic relief in stories about stolen identities is far from an original concept, one that’s managed to work fabulously well in films like the Coen Brothers’ 90’s classic, The Big Lebowski, but left in the hands of Director Seth Gordon, whose other comedic ventures include comedies Horrible Bosses and Four Christmases, the familiar comedy of errors scenario is nothing but a chaotic mess. The film opens with accountant Sandy Patterson, played by Jason Bateman, who is duped by Melissa McCarthy’s Diana – con woman and said…
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G-S-T Review…Warm Bodies
Ah, young love. It’s a tale as old as time and no matter how far we come as a society will remain one of life’s greatest complexities. The uncertainty of affectionate advances, the confidence it takes to even talk to a member of the opposite sex, etc. etc. In Warm Bodies, the adaptation of Isaac Marion’s popular YA novel, Jonathan Levine takes us through the trials and tribulations of amorous adolescents we’ve seen countless times before but with one small detail thrown in to further complicate matters – a zombie apocalypse. Levine delivers this young adult yarn that is just bursting with originality. It’s a witty, genre-bending story, and a coming of age…
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G-S-T Double Take Review…The Last Stand
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…
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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…
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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…
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Off the Shelf…Jaume Balagueró’s ‘Sleep Tight’
From Jaume Balagueró, director of [REC] and [REC] 2, comes one of the best and most suspenseful films I’ve seen in at least a decade. It’s a taut, complex and magnificently dark thriller that doesn’t let up until the credits roll. Sleep Tight (or Mientras Duermes) follows a tortured soul named Caesar (Luis Tosar) who by some weird personal quirk is unable to be happy. Nothing will brighten his sour mood…except seeing others more upset, displeased or depressed than him. Yet before you think this sounds like some hokey story or an odd iteration of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, this really is something special. The visuals are wonderfully intricate for such simple surroundings and the…
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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…
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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…
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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…