Sprouting some good acting from new actors The Son of No One becomes a showcase for their talent. Even with the fine acting however, the movie tends to ramble in the hands of director Dito Montiel. It becomes two films, one about a hopeless child, the other a man who has to come to terms with his unfortunate past.
A biopic of a very talented French singer, songwriter, actor and director Serge Gainsbourg comes to the screen in all its glory in the film Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. Set in a time where film stars and the well to do hob knobbed with upcoming artists, the movie is a cornucopia of oddball personalities, wicked interludes and imaginative cultural music.
Definitely a man flick A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas follows up on the other two outings with a lot of eye candy and sex, but the gals will get an eye full too. You do not have to have seen the other two flicks, but I bet you will go rent them after seeing this wild comedy; it’s as good at The Hangover.
A testy screenplay that turns conventional upside down becomes an enjoyable madcap adventure with Johnny Depp’s ‘intoxicating’ performance. The daring filmmaking that takes a chance with the outlandish Hunter S. Thompson book The Rum Diary comes up a winner. Not a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but a very good companion piece.
It’s very hard to repeat a performance of a character after an 8-year hiatus from the role and Rowan Atkinson, as Johnny English just isn’t as funny anymore. Maybe its because I love Atkinson as Mr. Bean and in Johnny English Reborn the lack of the amazing wordless dialogue in Bean’s facial expressions are hard to forget.
Check out the crazy little comedy About Fifty (originally called Fifty-nothing) a buddy film from writers Drew Pillsbury and Martin Grey. It’s so much a buddy film that the two writers even decided to star in it. And you know, they made their performances look easy and more natural than it probably would have been. It’s playing tomorrow night at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival Kick-off party.
We have probably had a bevy of sports true story films over the years and in most all cases even if you know who won, they are all inspirational. This is the case of The Mighty Macs, a small women’s parochial college so obscure, that I had never heard of it before seeing the film.
Sometimes you come across a film that surprises you with an interesting portrait of a person who achieved fame after his death. This is the case of Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, a biographical documentary about Sholem Rabinowitz the writer of the musical Fiddler on the Roof.
Fans of the film The Thing beware; even though the movie takes you back to the Norwegian outpost providing a beginning to John Carpenter’s 1982 film with the same title, it may as well have been a remake. Those that have never seen Carpenter’s masterpiece however, will get all the chills and thrills of the original. For fun, why not rent the 1982 horror flick AFTER you see this release for a comparison of alien shape shifting.