Ed's Review Dot Com

Films In Motion

Zoe Saldana, Jamie Chung, Rosamund Pike, Dylan McDermott, Lake Bell, Shannen Doherty, Paz Vega, Nick Stahl, Robert Hoffman, Adriana Barraza

Burning Palms is an anthology of five separate and distinct stories of characters in the LA area who are truly demented in one way or another. Each story is told in it’s own segment, started by a comic book page that shows the storyline on a comic book on the ground. At the end of the film, they burn the comic book. Perhaps they should have burned it before they made it into a movie?? This is Creepshow or the Twilight Zone Movie where the segments don’t cross and have anything to do with each other. The first story is of a father/daughter combo that is very, very close. The second is an Asian girl worried that her boyfriend likes big boobs!. The third is a gay couple who buy a child via the Black Market and have second thoughts. The fourth is a story of a very bad boy and a very bad caretaker and parents who are always out of the country. The final segment is about a lady who was raped, but finds the wallet (and drivers license) of the rapist in his wallet under her couch. Each of these stories tries to shock, and tries to come up with a shocking ending. All in all, it’s a lot like watching a Twilight Zone marathon without the clever stories.

This has to be one of the dumbest movies I have seen. I have seen people who were amused by the film, but I don’t think there is anything funny about any of it. I think they tried to really shock us, perhaps “Mondo Cane” style, but most of it doesn’t work. The payoff’s are not there, and the stories are very short. Some are downright dumb. I was truly disappointed in this film, as the write up sounds great. It just doesn’t deliver. Trying to shock us just for the sake of shock and awe rarely comes off very good. In this case it doesn’t. It’s quite to opposite. I simply did not enjoy the format or the content. It was not so gross that it makes you sick, nor was it really shocking. Stuff like this can happen anytime. It just is not a very good film, and it’s very hard to put it into a category. Nothing seems to fit it exactly. Netflix categorizes it this way: “Comedy, Spoofs and Satire, Dark Humor & Black Comedies, Indie Comedies, Blu-ray”. Comedy I don’t get, nor do I see it spoofing anything (except maybe Creepshow, but why?). Dark and Black it is, but humor, not really. Indie Comedies, there they are trying to make it sound funny which it’s not. So maybe Dark, Black Indie Blu-ray is the best you could do. Avoid it!

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Ecosse Films, Film4, UK Film Council

Aaron Johnson, Thomas Sangster, Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne-Marie Duff, David Morrissey, Ophelia Lovibond, Josh Bolt, Sam Bell, Andrew Buchan

Nowhere Boy is the story of the youth of John Lennon from 1944 through 1960. There were two strong women who played major roles in John’s upbringing, Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) who raised him from a small child, and Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) his birth mother who gave him up when he was a small child. The struggle between these two women for John’s affections was fierce and no doubt had a large impact on him. John (Aaron Johnson) inherits Julia’s love of music and is only interested in becoming a musician much to Mimi’s chagrin. The story ends here shortly after John meets a fellow musician in Liverpool named Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster) and the two form a band. The rest, as the say, is history.

I was looking forward to this film, and was excited when the DVD arrived, but I was sorely disappointed. It’s very boring! I was interested in John’s life, but there wasn’t anything really going on that made it worth watching. Mimi and Julia fighting over why Julia gave John up, and whether or not Mimi stole him. Mimi trying to convince him that music was a waste of time and would never give him a stable career and pushing him into his school work. Wow, this could just about be any family. I tried to concentrate and pay attention to what was going on, but found myself distracted and my thoughts wandering throughout. I found this to be one of the worst biographical films I have ever seen, and I’m not sure why they bothered to make this. I guess people are very interested in John’s early life, but I am not sure this is an accurate portrayal, and it’s certainly not a very interesting film. I just didn’t appreciate it very much.

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River Road Entertainment, Participant Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ

Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Bruce McGill, Michael Kelly, Ty Burrell, Noah Emmerich, David Andrews, Sam Shepard, Tim Griffin, Jessica Hecht

NOTE: WARNING. THIS FILM MADE ME VERY ANGRY AND THIS IS NOT REALLY A REVIEW BUT MORE OF A RANT. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK, AND I’M SORRY ABOUT THIS IN ADVANCE.

This is a very one sided somewhat documentary film that discusses the “outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts)” and the anger and frustration felt by her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn). I can understand why Sean Penn is in this, as this is what we would expect from him, but Naomi Watts dropped a lot in my eyes from taking on this one sided propaganda film. This is nothing less than an attempt to attack the Bush administration based upon their side of the story without really having much in the way of facts. It is a fact that someone published the information that Valerie was a CIA agent. This is not nice, and it is a crime. And whoever did it should have been punished. But these guys take A=B and C=D, therefore A=D and make a huge jump in who’s to blame. They come out and say things that have no evidence other than they “feel it must have been like that”. For example, someone at a lower level claimed that they leaked the information, and that they saw it in a memo at the white house. Now I’m sure this was a good topic to be discussing in top secret memos at the White House, “Who is this woman and why does her husband now claim that it is false information?”. Valerie goes to her management and recommends her husband is the right person to fly to Africa to investigate aluminum tubes that are used to enrich materials to make nuclear weapons which were being shipped to Iraq. Turns out that Joe later decides there is no evidence, but that information has been sent over to the White House and compiled with other evidence that Sadaam has WMD’s or is close to making them. The largest of this evidence is the fact that he will not allow UN inspectors to do their job of checking, and is constantly defiantly marching around threatening everyone, (especially other Muslim leader) that he is willing and able to take them out in an instant. (A guy walking around with his hand in his pocket and bragging to the police that he has a gun and is ready to use it cannot be surprised if a cop shoots him. You put your hands up and follow the directions and you’ll be fine. If Sadaam had let the UN inspectors see that his WMD program was kaput, he’d still be in power there. I can still remember Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine captain who has been a frequent military expert for the media and who is a frequent Hollywood consultant to make films about the military realistic and credible, saying the he was positively certain that the military WOULD find WMD in Iraq based upon Sadaam’s threats and posturing and past history. Basically everyone was certain that it was true, and it was a surprise to find out that though he was living in a golden palace, his WMD program had been destroyed in the first gulf war.

Then Valerie protests that she did NOT send her husband to Africa. Well, of course not, she didn’t have that authority, but she recommended to her superiors that he be sent. And for what that’s worth, we don’t really care whether she sent him or not. The problem that I have with this film is that it’s about as reliable as a film made by Michael Moore. His distorted view on the world ruins his message because he has proved that he will say ANYTHING whether true or not, to prove his view of things. Therefore, though he may have a valid message, it is lost because of his whacked out view on everything makes us unwilling to trust anything he says.

They tried to make a decent spy story here, but the fact this is a biased one sided view makes me doubt what is true and what is their hopes and wishes that are true. I understand that Valerie is mad as hell, and wants to fight for the rest of her life to put George W Bush in jail for being on the other side of the political spectrum and to have the evil Dick Cheney beheaded, but this movie would have been much more useful if it was not simply one side of the story. It’s possible that most of the stuff in this film may have happened the way they described it, but at the same time, it could just as easily be true that very little of it is what actually happened.

That is why I can’t recommend a propaganda film that is told from an extremist point of view. If they had tried in the least to balance the story with some of the other side it might be worth something, but at this point it’s useless. I watched this DVD a while ago, and I expected a fair dramatization of the story and wanted to know more about it. It made me very angry with it’s one sided viewpoint and I wanted to wait a while before trying to write a review. I have still failed, as I’m still angry that they are trying to pull this, and I really wished I had deleted this from my queue before I wasted my time watching it.

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Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures, Mad Chance

Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, John Gallagher, Jr., Tom Wopat, Michael Shannon, Wes Bently, Julia Jones

Jonah Hex (Brolin) is a scarred bounty hunter with warrants on his own head.  He’s on the run, when the US makes him an offer of freedom from the charges in return for stopping a terrorist who is about to attempt to wreak havoc in the nation.   Turnbull (John Malkovich) is the one who murdered Jonah’s family while Jonah was made to watch.  This is what disfigured Jonah in the first place.  Turnbull faked his own death, but joined with a bunch of Conferederate supporters to try to attack and punish the union.  Hex has to stop them before July 4th.

I really did not enjoy this movie in the least.  It is based on a comic book, and I must say that I’m not typically a comic book movie fan, but this one was particularly BAD in my opinion.  There was hardly any story and everything was really ho-hum.  Megan Fox was especially awful.  Her performance was like a high school play.  I think Josh Brolin tried hard, but his speaking due to the disfigurement of his face made him really hard to understand like someone talking with lockjaw.  The worst part is though that I could just not keep my attention on the story.  It was so dull that I found myself think of other stuff almost constantly.   I was really disappointed in this film.  Some users are talking about the worst movie of the year.  Well, it certainly, to me, was the worst with the caliber of stars that were in this film.   I just can’t figure out how it got released like this. The movie can never really decide what kind of movie it was. Disjointed at best, and just not very good. I’d say skip this one unless you’re a fan of the comic book version, although I’m not sure how well they did in capturing the comics either.

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Carnaby International, Camaby Film Productions, Hanover Films

Danny Dyer, Noel Clarke, Emil Marwa, Lee Ingleby, Keith-Lee Castle, Christina Cole, Terry Stone, Neil Maskell, Emily Booth, Stephen Graham

Oh brother!  First off,  this is a British film.  Nothing wrong with that, but the dialect is distinctly difficult to follow for us mere Americans, and I have a feeling the humor is placed directly in The Isles as well.   This is billed as horror film, but it’s really is a satirical send up of Horror films a la Scary Movie, with all the funny taken out.

Vince is handling his divorce badly, so his “blokes” suggest a wild party weekend in a small town out in the middle of nowhere.  But when they arrive, something seems unusual.  There are no men, only women.  Where did all the men go?  As time goes by, they figure out that there is a strange virus that affects only women and turns them into blood thirsty zombies.   The rest of the film these guys try to figure out how to destroy the women and escape.

Oh brother.  What a sad mess.  I’m sure somewhere out there, someone gets the humor in this.  But it is beyond me.  The guys are all asses, and they play like little kids.  They have ways to defeat the zombies, but screw it up being stupid.  In fact, I’m sure my IQ dropped at least 10 or 15 points just from watching this film.  I was really disappointed because I thought it might be fairly good (although low budget) from the description. But it passed me by completely which is what I would recommend on this one for you too.  Pass it by completely!

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