Films of James Bond creates the false impression indeed work in a Secret Service applicants, the head of the Personnel Division of the British Foreign Intelligence MI6. According to him, in the department treated many fans of acute sensations, in which special services are not interested, transmits agency Reuters.
Chief HR MI6, named only by the name "Mark", said in the radio broadcast BBC Radio One, that the lives of modern intelligence agent has little to do with sport utility vehicles, available women and cocktails "with a vodka Martini", which should be thoroughly, but not confused. "Mark" also stressed that the Secret Service agents do not have a license to kill and were not pistols Beretta. "
Statement by the Chief of Staff for the MI6 and the two agents, one woman is part of a program to recruit new staff, writes Guardian newspaper. It will go all week on the transfer of exploration at the radio station BBC Radio One. To avoid exposure, employees take special precautions: for example, their voices on the air specifically distorted.
An estimated newspapers, currently in MI6 employed about two thousand employees, a finished budget service is about 200 million pounds. Secret Service requires people who are well owning foreign languages, particularly Arabic, Farsi (the language of Iran), Urdu (the most common language in Pakistan), Spanish and Chinese.
As Daily Telegraph newspaper reports, "Mark" stressed that foreign exploration need people of different nationalities can enter there, which would not be able to get white men.
HR MI6 disappointed fans of James Bond
3000 Miles to Graceland (Action,Comedy,Crime,Drama,Thriller)
Crime Is King.
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It was an ingenious enough plan: rob the Riviera Casino's count room during an Elvis impersonator convention. But Thomas Murphy decided to keep all the money for himself and shot all his partners, including recently-freed ex-con Michael Zane. With $3.2 million at stake, the Marshals Service closing in, and single mom Cybil Waingrow and her son Jesse constantly confounding things, Michael must track down Murphy.
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Here's a movie without an ounce of human kindness, a sour and mean-spirited enterprise so desperate to please, it tries to be a yukky comedy and a hard-boiled action picture at the same time. It's about a gang that robs a casino while masquerading as Elvis impersonators. I was nostalgic for the recent "Sugar and Spice," in which cheerleaders rob a bank while masquerading as five pregnant Betty dolls (plus one Richard Nixon).The movie has a heavy-duty cast, with top billing shared by Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner. Russell once played Elvis, very well, on TV, and hits some of the right verbal notes here. Costner, the leader of the gang, chain-smokes and looks mean. His fellow criminals include Christian Slater, David Arquette and Bokeem Woodbine, who is the black guy and therefore the first to die, adhering to an ancient cliche this movie lacks the wit to rewrite.The casino robbery involves a gory bloodbath, all gratuitous, all intercut with an Elvis revue on one of the show stages. Not intercut a little, but a lot, complete with dancing girls, until we see so much of the revue we prefer it to the shooting. (Looks like dozens of patrons are killed, but the movie of course forgets this carnage the minute it's over.) The gang makes off with the loot, there is the inevitable squabble over how to divvy it up, and then the movie's most intriguing and inexplicable relationship develops.This is between Kurt Russell and Courteney Cox, who plays the mom of a bright young kid (David Kaye), and is stranded in the Last Chance Motel, one of those movie sets from a Road Runner cartoon.Cox's character is intriguing because we never understand her motivation, and inexplicable because she doesn't, either. She really does like Russell, I guess, and that explains why they're in the sack so quickly, but then the kid, who is about 8, creeps into the bedroom and steals Russell's wallet. The movie never questions the wisdom of showing the kid in the room while his mother is in bed with a stranger. One imagines that the filmmakers were so tickled by the plot point that the moral questions just didn't occur to them.At a point later in the movie, the Cox character drives off in a car containing most of Russell's loot, while leaving her son behind with him. Would a mother do this? Some would, but most movies wouldn't consider them heroines. There is an "explanation" for her behavior, based on the fact that Russell, a criminal she has known for about 10 minutes, is obviously a good guy and likes the guy--but, come on.The plot is standard double-reverse, post-"Reservoir Dogs" irony, done with a lot of style and a minimum of thought. It's about behavior patterns, not personalities. Everybody is defined by what they do. Or what they drive: As the film opens, Russell is in a 1957 red Cadillac, and Costner drives a Continental convertible of similar vintage, perhaps because they want to look like Elvis impersonators, more likely because all characters in movies like this drive 1950s cars because modern ones are too small and wimpy.The cast stays top drawer right down to the supporting roles. Kevin Pollak turns up as a federal marshal, Jon Lovitz is a money launderer, Ice T is hired muscle. You guess they all liked the script. But the Russell and Costner characters are so burdened by the baggage of their roles that sometimes they just seem weary, and the energy mostly comes from Cox--and from the kid, who seems to be smarter than anyone else in the film, and about as experienced.I will give "3000 Miles to Graceland" credit for one thing, a terrific trailer. When a bad movie produces a great trailer, it's usually evidence that the raw materials were there for a good movie. I can imagine a blood-soaked caper movie involving Elvis disguises, a lonely tramp and her bright-eyed son, but it isn't this one.Download here
Trapped (Crime,Drama,Thriller)
Fear strikes back
It was the perfect plan until she refused to be the perfect victim!
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Joe Hickley thinks he's got a great scheme: kidnap the child of rich parents, hold it for 24 hours, keeping the mother under his control while an accomplice gets the ransom from the father, who is on a trip. But things go very wrong when he tries this scheme on the Jennings family, in part because their daughter Abby is asthmatic, and in part because the Jennings' find out more than Hickley wants them to know.
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I suspect that the more you know about Japan and movies, the less you will enjoy "Memoirs of a Geisha." Much of what I know about Japan I have learned from Japanese movies, and on that basis I know this is not a movie about actual geishas, but depends on the romanticism of female subjection. The heroines here look so very beautiful and their world is so visually enchanting as they live trapped in sexual slavery.
I know, a geisha is not technically a prostitute. Here is a useful rule: Anyone who is "not technically a prostitute" is a prostitute. As dear old Henry Togna, proprietor of the Eyrie Mansion in London, used to cackle while describing to me his friend the Duchess of Duke Street, "Sex for cash, m'dear. That's my definition."
Is the transaction elevated if there is very little sex, a lot of cash, and the prostitute gets hardly any of either? Hard to say. Certainly the traditions of the geisha house are culturally fascinating in their own right. But if this movie had been set in the West, it would be perceived as about children sold into prostitution, and that is not nearly as wonderful as "being raised as a geisha."
Still, I object to the movie not on sociological grounds but because I suspect a real geisha house floated on currents deeper and more subtle than the broad melodrama on display here. I could list some Japanese films illustrating this, but the last thing the audience for "Memoirs of a Geisha" wants to see is a more truthful film with less gorgeous women and shabbier production values.
This is one of the best-looking movies in some time, deserving comparison with "Raise the Red Lantern" (in more ways than one). On the level of voluptuous visual beauty, it works if you simply regard it. The women are beauties, their world swims in silks and tapestries, smoke and mirrors, and the mysteries of hair when it is up vs. hair when it is down.
I am not disturbed in the least that the three leading Japanese characters in the film are played by women of Chinese descent. This casting been attacked as ethnically incorrect, but consider that the film was made by a Japanese-owned company; the intent was not to discriminate against Japanese, but in favor of the box office. The movie was cast partly on the basis of star power: Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh are not only great beauties and gifted actresses, but box office dynamite. Even in Japan, Zhang and Li outgross any Japanese actress.
They do wonders with their characters, who are trapped in a formula fiction but suggest possibilities they cannot explore. There isn't the faintest suggestion of free will, but then free will has never played much of a role in the world of a geisha. That's made clear at the outset, circa 1929, when a widowed fisherman sells his daughters on the human market in Kyoto. The older girl, although hardly old enough for sex, is sold directly into prostitution, while the 9-year-old Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) is sold to a geisha house where she will be an unpaid servant until it is determined if she is elegant enough for the house's clientele.
The house is run by Mother (Kaori Momoi), and its ruling geisha is Hatsumomo (Gong Li). Chiyo quickly becomes best friends with Pumpkin (Youki Kudoh), a girl about her age, and they are raised by the house under a strict discipline that trains them for a lifetime of flattering wealthy men. They learn that love has no role in this world (although Hatsumomo sets a bad example). Geisha lore hints that they do fall in love with clients, but the operative word is "client" and the love is not free. Nobody wants it to be -- not the geisha, who is earning her living, or the client, who is using money to control a woman while maintaining his independence and, for that matter, to observe a distinction between his geisha and his wife.
The key male in the story is the Chairman (Ken Watanabe), who first encounters Chiyo when she is a child, and suggests her to Mother. As Chiyo and her beauty grows, it becomes clear she may represent a threat to the dominance of Hatsumomo. The story resumes when she is in her mid-teens and is purchased from Mother by Mameha (Yeoh), Hatsumomo's rival, whose master plan is to use her control of the younger girl to win control of Mother's house away from Hatsumomo, who expects to inherit the reins. Hatsumomo in response acquires Pumpkin as her own proxy in the battle. It is amazing that a client stepping through their doors is not killed in the crossfire.
Chiyo is renamed Sayuri, and is now played by Ziyi Zhang. The movie, almost like a tourist, prowls the geisha quarter of Kyoto, visits a sumo wrestling match and attends a dance performance where Sayuri stars. Then World War II intervenes (that is the best word for its role in the film), and in peacetime the Chairman now desperately needs Sayuri, who has always and still does love him, perhaps because he steered her as a child into the best geisha house. It suits him for Sayuri to become the friend of his colleague Nobu (Koji Yakusho), and there is great intrigue surrounding the auctioning of Sayuri's virginity. This takes place, if my math is sound, at her fairly advanced age of about 26, which reminds me that Oscar Levant claimed: "I've been in Hollywood so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."
I realize that my doubts and footnotes are completely irrelevant to the primary audience for this movie, which wants to see beauty, sex, tradition and exoticism all choreographed into a dance of strategy and desire. "Memoirs of a Geisha" (directed by Rob Marshall of "Chicago") supplies what is required, elegantly and with skill. The actresses create geishas as they imagine them to have been, which is probably wiser than showing them as they were. There is a sense in which I enjoyed every frame of this movie, and another sense in which my enjoyment made me uneasy. I felt some of the same feelings during "Pretty Baby," the 1978 film in which Brooke Shields, playing a girl of 12, has her virginity auctioned away in New Orleans. The difference is that "Pretty Baby" doesn't evoke nostalgia, or regret the passing of the world it depicts.Download here
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Fantasy,Horror,Thriller)
It will tear your soul apart... again.
Time to play.
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After having her father and perverse stepmother killed by the cenobites, Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Lawrence) is sent to a psychiatric hospital. Even after trying to convince the authorities of what really happened with her family, nobody believes in her version of the history and they decide to place her in the institute, so that she rests and relaxes a little bit. The hospital is commanded by a brilliant and strange psychiatrist, Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham), who has been looking for the key for another dimension for a long time. The only person who believes in Kirsty is a young and kind assistant of Dr. Channard, called Kyle MacRae (William Hope). Following Kirsty's version of the story, Channard put his hands on the bloodstained mattress where her stepmother Júlia (Clare Higgins, from the first Hellraiser) died, Channard decides to resurrect her, killing his patients and offering them as food for Júlia. She returns without skin, and she decides to help Channard to bring the forces of the evil, but the plans of the two will be disturbed by Kirsty, who wants to end at once with the cenobites, and for Kyle, who doesn't want to see Kirsty being hurt...
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Generally speaking, there are two kinds of nightmares: the kind that you actually have, and the kind they make into movies. Real nightmares usually involve frustration or public embarrassment. In the frustrating ones, a loved one is trying to tell you something and you can't understand them, or they're in danger and you can't help them. In the embarrassing ones, it's the day of the final exam and you forgot to attend the classes, or you're in front of a crowd and can't think of anything to say, or you wandered into the hotel lobby without any clothes on and nobody has noticed you yet - but they're about to.Those are scary nightmares, all right, and sometimes they turn up in the movies. But "Hellbound: Hellraiser II" contains the kinds of nightmares that occur only in movies, because our real dreams have low budgets and we can't afford expensive special effects. The movie begins a few hours after the original "Hellbound" ended. A young girl named Kirsty has been placed in a hospital after a night in which she was tortured by the flayed corpses of her parents, who were under the supervision of the demons of hell. What this girl needs is a lot of rest and a set of those positive-thinking cassettes they advertise late at night on cable TV.But no such luck. The hospital is simply another manifestation of the underworld, hell is all around us, we are powerless in its grip, and before long Kristy and a newfound friend named Tiffany are hurtling down the corridors of the damned. Give or take a detail or two, that's the story. "Hellbound: Hellraiser II" is like some kind of avant-garde film strip in which there is no beginning, no middle, no end, but simply a series of gruesome images that can be watched in any order.The images have been constructed with a certain amount of care and craftsmanship; the technical credits on this movie run to four single-spaced pages. We see lots of bodies that have been skinned alive, so that the blood still glistens on the exposed muscles. We see creatures who have been burned and mutilated and twisted into grotesque shapes and condemned for eternity to unspeakable and hopeless tortures.We hear deep, rasping laughter as the denizens of hell chortle over the plight of the terrified girls. And we hear their desperate voices calling to each other."Kirsty!" we hear. And "Tiffany!" And "Kirsty!!!" and "Tiffany!!!" And "Kirstiyyyyyyy!!!!!" And "Tiffanyyyyyyy!!!!!" I'm afraid this is another one of those movies that violates the First Rule of Repetition of Names, which states that when the same names are repeated in a movie more than four times a minute for more than three minutes in a row, the audience breaks out into sarcastic laughter, and some of the ruder members are likely to start shouting "Kirsty!" and "Tiffany!" at the screen.But this movie violates more rules than the First Rule of Repetition. It also violates a basic convention of story construction, which suggests that we should get at least a vague idea of where the story began and where it might be headed. This movie has no plot in a conventional sense. It is simply a series of ugly and bloody episodes strung together one after another like a demo tape by a perverted special-effects man. There is nothing the heroines can do to understand or change their plight and no way we can get involved in their story.That makes "Hellbound: Hellraiser II" an ideal movie for audiences with little taste and atrophied attention spans who want to glance at the screen occasionally and ascertain that something is still happening up there. If you fit that description, you have probably not read this far, but what the heck, we believe in full-service reviews around here.You're welcome.Download here
Reindeer Games (Action,Crime,Drama,Thriller)
The trap is set. The game is on.
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After being imprisoned for six years on a grand theft auto charge, Rudy Duncan (Ben Affleck) and his cellmate Nick (James Frain) are finally going to be paroled. After hearing endless stories during his incarceration of Nick's romantic correspondence to a woman named Ashley he has never met (Charlize Theron), Rudy is looking forward to returning to his family and having a fresh cup of hot chocolate. When Nick is killed during a prison riot, Rudy decides to assume Nick's identity upon release from prison and meet up with the unknown woman. Burdened with a base knowledge of Nick's Indian casino employment past, Rudy finds himself in too deep with Ashley's brother Gabriel (Gary Sinise) and is violently forced to cooperate with a casino robbery that Gabriel and his gang have been planning with Nick in mind.
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"Reindeer Games" is the first All Talking Killer picture. After the setup, it consists mostly of characters explaining their actions to one another. I wish I'd had a stopwatch, to clock how many minutes are spent while one character holds a gun to another character's head and gabs. Charlize Theron and Gary Sinise between them explain so much they reminded me of Gertrude Stein's line about Ezra Pound: "He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not." Just a nudge, and the movie would fall over into self-parody, and maybe work better. But I fear it is essentially serious, or as serious as such goofiness can be. It opens in prison, with cell mates Rudy (Ben Affleck) and Nick (James Frain). Both are about to be set free. Nick has engaged in a steamy correspondence with Ashley (Theron), one of those women who have long-distance romances with convicts. His cell wall is plastered with photos that make her look like a model for cosmetics ads.But then (I am not giving away as much as it seems, or perhaps even what it seems), Nick is knifed in a prison brawl, and when Rudy walks out of prison and lays eyes on Ashley--well, what would you do? That's what he does. "I'm Nick," Rudy tells her. Soon they make wild and passionate love, which inevitably involves knocking things over and falling out of bed and continuing on the floor. You'd think if people were that much into sex, they'd pay more attention to what they were doing.Then there's a major reality shift, and perhaps you'd better stop reading if you don't want to know that . . . Ashley's brother Gabriel (Sinise) heads a gang of scummy gunrunners who think Rudy used to work in an Indian casino in upstate Michigan--because, of course, they think Rudy is Nick, and that's what Nick told Ashley about himself. Gabriel and his gang try to squeeze info about the casino's security setup out of Rudy, who says he isn't Nick, and then says he is Nick after all, and then says he isn't, and has so many reasons for each of his answers that Gabriel gets very confused, and keeps deciding to kill him, and deciding not to kill him, and deciding to kill him after all, until both characters seem stuck in a time loop.There are other surprises, too, a lot of them, each with its explanation, usually accompanied by an explanation of the previous explanation, which now has to be re-explained in light of the new explanation. They all got a lot of 'splainin' to do.The movie's weakness is mostly in its ludicrous screenplay by Ehren Kruger. The director, John Frankenheimer, is expert at moving the action along and doing what can be done with scenes with which hardly anything can be done. Affleck and Theron soldier through changes of pace so absurd it takes superb control to keep straight faces. Theron's character looks soft and sweet sometimes, then hard and cruel other times, switching back and forth so often I commend her for not just passing a hand up and down in front of her face: smile, frown, smile, frown.Perhaps the movie was originally intended to open at Christmas. That would explain the title, and the sequence where the casino, which looks like a former Target store, is stuck up by five Santas. But nothing can explain the upbeat final scene, in which, after blood seeps into the Michigan snow, we get a fit of Robin Hood sentimentality. The moment to improve "Reindeer Games" was at the screenplay stage, by choosing another one.Download here
Freedomland (Crime,Drama,Mystery,Thriller)
His Streets. His Rules.
The Truth Is Hiding Where No One Dares To Look.
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When her son disappears and is believed to be dead, a single mother blames an African-American man from the projects for the kidnapping, creating a racial controversy. An African-American detective (Jackson) and a white missing child researcher team up to investigate the case, which they discover may be more complicated than they expected.
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"Freedomland" assembles the elements for a superior thriller, but were the instructions lost when the box was opened? It begins with a compelling story about a woman whose car is hijacked with her 4-year-old son inside. It adds racial tension, and the bulldog detective work of a veteran police detective. And then it flies to pieces with unmotivated scenes, inexplicable dialogue, and sudden conclusions which may be correct but arrive from nowhere. The film seems edited none too wisely from a longer version that made more sense.
Julianne Moore appears in the opening scene, sobbing, her hands bleeding, staggering into a hospital with a story of her car being hijacked in a wooded area near a low-income housing development. Samuel L. Jackson plays Lorenzo, the detective assigned to the case. He can't understand why her character, named Brenda, was driving through the isolated area at the time. She explains: She's a volunteer at a community children's center, and took the wrong shortcut home. Lorenzo thinks she's hiding something, and she is: Her son was in the back seat of the car when it was taken.
When this story becomes public, it creates a furor. Cops from a nearby white district blanket the area, a black preacher complains that blacks are killed all the time in the district without this kind of police attention, and the woman's brother Danny (Ron Eldard) is a white cop who seems angry all the time -- at his sister, at the black community, at Lorenzo.
Racial demonstrations are on the simmer, but the movie turns them on and off at will. Brenda, after all, is well known and beloved in the area because of her volunteer work. Yet at one point a black woman tells her, "You stay away from my child!" Why would she say that? And why, for that matter, does Lorenzo announce a sudden about-face on the case when we haven't seen the evidence to support his conclusion? Why are untold resources used to search for the missing boy on the grounds and buildings of Freedomland, an abandoned orphanage, when there is every reason to believe he is not there?
And why, oh why, is Brenda apparently left in the personal custody of Lorenzo, who removes her from the hospital without formalities, drives her around, leaves her alone, has heart-to-heart talks with her, and ignores all police procedures for dealing with victims and/or witnesses? And what about that passionate discussion between Lorenzo and Brenda in which their body language and the close framing of the shots lead us to anticipate a development that never comes? The scene ends weirdly with the two of them staring fiercely at each other, as if they were told to freeze while the writers came up with more dialogue.
This movie is filled with behavior that seems to exist only to provide things for the actors to do. There's an asthma attack early in the film that should pay off somehow, but doesn't. Danny, the brother who is a cop, seems constantly poised to do something radical, but never quite does. And why does his concern for his sister express himself in his decision to essentially ignore her and operate elsewhere in the plot? And does the angry preacher in the black neighborhood have a legitimate grievance, or is he just venting on command, to provide filler for the plot?
One scene works. It's a conversation between Brenda and Karen (Edie Falco), who is the leader of a group of mothers whose children have been kidnapped, molested or killed. She gets Brenda alone for a fraught and crucial conversation (which is against all standard procedures, but never mind), and for the length of that conversation the movie is about something, and it works.
"Freedomland" is based on a novel by Richard Price, whose Clockers made a better film. He adapts his story for director Joe Roth as if they know a lot of places in the neighborhood but don't remember how to get from one place to another. Individual scenes feel authentic, but the story tries to build bridges between loose ends.Download here
Venom (Horror,Thriller)
He Never Hurt A Soul Until The Day He Died.
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After the town freak Ray Sawyer is killed in a freak accident involving voodoo related material, local teens' bodies soon start piling up. A few of the teens decide to visit a friends house in the swamps of Louisiana to find out if she knows what's going on, but they soon realize that Ray is possessed by evil spirits of murderers and evil souls and worser...Ray has found the teens and is armed with a crowbar. With only voodoo protecting them, the teens must survive his clutches or become his next victims...
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The new version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is a contemptible film: Vile, ugly and brutal. There is not a shred of a reason to see it. Those who defend it will have to dance through mental hoops of their own devising, defining its meanness and despair as "style" or "vision" or "a commentary on our world." It is not a commentary on anything, except the marriage of slick technology with the materials of a geek show.The movie is a remake of, or was inspired by, the 1974 horror film by Tobe Hooper. That film at least had the raw power of its originality. It proceeded from Hooper's fascination with the story and his need to tell it. This new version, made by a man who has previously directed music videos, proceeds from nothing more than a desire to feed on the corpse of a once-living film. There is no worthy or defensible purpose in sight here: The filmmakers want to cause disgust and hopelessness in the audience. Ugly emotions are easier to evoke and often more commercial than those that contribute to the ongoing lives of the beholders.The movie begins with grainy "newsreel" footage of a 1974 massacre (the same one as in the original film; there are some changes but this is not a sequel). Then we plunge directly into the formula of a Dead Teenager Movie, which begins with living teenagers and kills them one by one. The formula can produce movies that are good, bad, funny, depressing, whatever. This movie, strewn with blood, bones, rats, fetishes and severed limbs, photographed in murky darkness, scored with screams, wants to be a test: Can you sit through it? There were times when I intensely wanted to walk out of the theater and into the fresh air and look at the sky and buy an apple and sigh for our civilization, but I stuck it out. The ending, which is cynical and truncated, confirmed my suspicion that the movie was made by and for those with no attention span.The movie doesn't tell a story in any useful sense, but is simply a series of gruesome events which finally are over. It probably helps to have seen the original film in order to understand what's going on, since there's so little exposition. Only from the earlier film do we have a vague idea of who the people are in this godforsaken house, and what their relationship is to one another. The movie is eager to start the gore and unwilling to pause for exposition.I like good horror movies. They can exorcise our demons. "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" doesn't want to exorcise anything. It wants to tramp crap through our imaginations and wipe its feet on our dreams. I think of filmgoers on a date, seeing this movie and then -- what? I guess they'll have to laugh at it, irony being a fashionable response to the experience of being had.Certainly they will not be frightened by it. It recycles the same old tired thriller tools that have been worn out in countless better movies. There is the scary noise that is only a cat. The device of loud sudden noises to underline the movements of half-seen shadows. The van that won't start. The truck that won't start. The car that won't start. The character who turns around and sees the slasher standing right behind her. One critic writes, "Best of all, there was not a single case of 'She's only doing that (falling, going into a scary space, not picking up the gun) because she's in a thriller.' " Huh? Nobody does anything in this movie for any other reason. There is no reality here. It's all a thriller.There is a controversy involving Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Volume 1," which some people feel is "too violent." I gave it four stars, found it kind of brilliant, felt it was an exhilarating exercise in nonstop action direction. The material was redeemed, justified, illustrated and explained by the style. It was a meditation on the martial arts genre, done with intelligence and wit. "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is a meditation on the geek-show movie. Tarantino's film is made with grace and joy. This movie is made with venom and cynicism. I doubt that anybody involved in it will be surprised or disappointed if audience members vomit or flee.Do yourself a favor. There are a lot of good movies playing right now that can make you feel a little happier, smarter, sexier, funnier, more excited -- or more scared, if that's what you want. This is not one of them. Don't let it kill 98 minutes of your life.Download here
Threat of Exposure (Thriller)
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Dr. Daryl Sheleigh (Sean Young), is smart, beautiful, sophisticated, and in trouble... she's a psychotherapist / hypnotherapist whose clients have begun to mysteriously disappear. Badger (Will Schaub) Welldon is working undercover with the police, he poses as her patient looking for clues about four missing men(which also includes his younger brother). He's confident when he first enters her office, with no intention of revealing anything about himself... as the therapy progresses, boundaries are broken. Disturbing secrets from Badger's past emerge, and a compelling bond develops between Daryl and Badger. As Badger's feelings deepen, so does the chilling evidence against her... will she be the one to remove his loneliness or will she be his executioner?
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Tears of the Sun (Action,Drama,Thriller)
He was trained to follow orders. He became a hero by defying them.
The lives of many rest in the courage of a few.
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Navy SEAL Lieutenant A.K. Waters and his elite squadron of tactical specialists are forced to choose between their duty and their humanity, between following orders by ignoring the conflict that surrounds them, or finding the courage to follow their conscience and protect a group of innocent refugees. When the democratic government of Nigeria collapses and the country is taken over by a ruthless military dictator, Waters, a fiercely loyal and hardened veteran is dispatched on a routine mission to retrieve a Doctors Without Borders physician, Dr. Lena Kendricks. Dr. Kendricks, an American citizen by marriage, is tending to the victims of the ongoing civil war at a Catholic mission in a remote village. When Waters arrives, however, Dr. Kendricks refuses to leave unless he promises to help deliver the villagers to political asylum at the nearby border. If they are left behind, they will be at the mercy of the enormous rebel army. Waters is under strict orders from his commanding officer Captain Bill Rhodes to remain disengaged from the conflict. But as he and his men witness the brutality of the rebels first-hand, they are won over to Dr. Kendricks' cause and place their lives at risk by agreeing to escort the villagers on a perilous trek through the dense jungle. As they move through the countryside on foot, Waters' team, experts at evasion and concealment, are inexplicably and ferociously pursued by an army of rebels. They are confounded until they discover that, among the refugees, is the sole survivor of the country's previous ruling family, whom the rebels have been ordered to eliminate at all costs. Waters and his small band of soldiers must weigh the life of one man against their own and the refugees they feel obliged to protect.
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"Tears of the Sun" is a film constructed out of rain, cinematography and the face of bruce willis. These materials are sufficient to build a film almost as good as if there had been a better screenplay. In a case like this, the editor often deserves the credit, for concealing what is not there with the power of what remains.The movie tells the story of a Navy Seals unit that is dropped into a Nigerian civil war zone to airlift four U.S. nationals to safety. They all work at the same mission hospital. The priest and two nuns refuse to leave. The doctor, widow of an American, is also hostile at first ("Get those guns out of my operating room!"), but then she agrees to be saved if she can also bring her patients. She cannot. There is no room on the helicopters for them and finally Lieut. Waters (Bruce Willis) wrestles her aboard.But then he surprises himself. As the chopper circles back over the scene, they see areas already set afire by arriving rebel troops. He cannot quite meet the eyes of the woman, Dr. Lena Hendricks (Monica Bellucci). "Let's turn it around," Willis says. They land, gather about 20 patients who are well enough to walk, and call for the helicopters to return.But he has disobeyed direct orders, his superior will not risk the choppers, and they will all have to walk through the jungle to Cameroon to be rescued. Later, when it is clear Willis' decision has placed his men and mission in jeopardy, one of his men asks, "Why'd you turn it around?" He replies: "When I figure that out, I'll let you know." And later: "It's been so long since I've done a good thing--the right thing." There are some actors who couldn't say that dialogue without risking laughter from the audience. Willis is not one of them. His face smeared with camouflage and glistening with rain, his features as shadowed as Marlon Brando's in "Apocalypse Now," he seems like a dark violent spirit sent to rescue them from one hell, only to lead them into another. If we could fully understand how he does what he does, we would know a great deal about why some actors can carry a role that would destroy others. Casting directors must spend a lot of time thinking about this.The story is very simple, really. Willis and his men must lead the doctor and her patients through the jungle to safety. Rebel troops pursue them. It's a question of who can walk faster or hide better; that's why it's annoying that Dr. Hendricks is constantly telling Waters, "My people have to rest!" Presumably (a) her African patients from this district have some experience at walking long distances through the jungle, and (b) she knows they are being chased by certain death, and can do the math.Until it descends into mindless routine action in the climactic scenes, "Tears of the Sun" is essentially an impressionistic nightmare, directed by Antoine Fuqua, the director who emerged with the Denzel Washington cop picture "Training Day." His cinematographers, Mauro Fiore and Keith Solomon, create a visual world of black-green saturated wetness, often at night, in which characters swim in and out of view as the face of Willis remains their implacable focus point. There are few words; Willis scarcely has 100 in the first hour. It's all about the conflict between a trained professional soldier and his feelings. There is a subtext of attraction between the soldier and the woman doctor (who goes through the entire film without thinking to button the top of her blouse), but it is wisely left as a subtext.This film, in this way, from beginning to end, might have really amounted to something. I intuit "input" from producers, studio executives, story consultants and the like, who found it their duty to dumb it down by cobbling together a conventional action climax. The last half hour of "Tears of the Sun," with its routine gun battles, explosions, machine-gun bursts, is made from off-the-shelf elements. If we can see this sort of close combat done well in a film that is really about it, like Mel Gibson's "We Were Soldiers," why do we have to see it done merely competently, in a movie that is not really about it? Where the screenplay originally intended to go, I cannot say, but it's my guess that at an earlier stage it was more thoughtful and sad, more accepting of the hopelessness of the situation in Africa, where "civil war" has become the polite term for genocide. The movie knows a lot about Africa, lets us see that, then has to pretend it doesn't.Willis, for example, has a scene in the movie where, as a woman approaches a river, he emerges suddenly from beneath the water to grab her, silence her, and tell her he will not hurt her. This scene is laughable, but effective, Laughable, because (a) hiding under the water and breathing through a reed, how can the character know the woman will approach the river at precisely that point? and (b) since he will have to spend the entire mission in the same clothes, is it wise to soak all of his gear when staying dry is an alternative? Yet his face, so fearsome in camouflage, provides him with a sensational entrance and the movie with a sharp shudder of surprise. There is a way in which movies like "Tears of the Sun" can be enjoyed for their very texture. For the few words Willis uses, and the way he uses them. For the intelligence of the woman doctor, whose agenda is not the same as his. For the camaraderie of the Navy Seal unit, which follows its leader even when he follows his conscience instead of orders. For the way the editor, Conrad Buff, creates a minimalist mood in setup scenes of terse understatement; he doesn't hurry, he doesn't linger. If only the filmmakers had been allowed to follow the movie where it wanted to go--into some existential heart of darkness, I suspect--instead of detouring into the suburbs of safe Hollywood convention.Download here
Se7en (Crime,Drama,Mystery,Thriller)
Earnest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I believe the second part.
Gluttony * Greed * Sloth * Envy * Wrath * Pride * Lust
Let he who is without sin try to survive
Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.
Seven deadly sins. Seven ways to die.
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A film about two homicide detectives' desperate hunt for a serial killer who justifies his crimes as absolution for the world's ignorance of the Seven Deadly Sins. The movie takes us from the tortured remains of one victim to the next as the sociopathic "John Doe" sermonizes to Detectives Sommerset and Mills -- one sin at a time. The sin of Gluttony comes first and the murderer's terrible capacity is graphically demonstrated in the dark and subdued tones characteristic of film noir. The seasoned and cultured Sommerset researches the Seven Deadly Sins in an effort to understand the killer's modus operandi while green Detective Mills scoffs at his efforts to get inside the mind of a killer...
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`Seven," a dark, grisly, horrifying and intelligent thriller, may be too disturbing for many people, I imagine, although if you can bear to watch, it you will see filmmaking of a high order. It tells the story of two detectives - one ready to retire, the other at the start of his career - and their attempts to capture a perverted serial killer who is using the Seven Deadly Sins as his scenario.As the movie opens, we meet Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a meticulous veteran cop who lives a lonely bachelor's life in what looks like a furnished room. Then he meets Mills (Brad Pitt), an impulsive young cop who actually asked to be transferred into Somerset's district. The two men investigate a particularly gruesome murder, in which a fat man was tied hand and feet and forced to eat himself to death.His crime was the crime of Gluttony. Soon Somerset and Mills are investigating equally inventive murders involving Greed, Sloth, Lust and the other deadly sins. In each case, the murder method is appropriate, and disgusting (one victim is forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh; another is tied to a bed for a year; a third, too proud of her beauty, is disfigured and then offered the choice of a call for help or sleeping pills). Somerset concludes that the killer, "John Doe," is using his crimes to preach a sermon.The look of "Seven" is crucial to its effect. This is a very dark film, the gloom often penetrated only by the flashlights of the detectives. Even when all the lights are turned on in the apartments of the victims, they cast only wan, hopeless pools of light.Although the time of the story is the present, the set design suggests the 1940s; Gary Wissner, the art director, goes for dark blacks and browns, deep shadows, lights of deep yellow, and a lot of dark wood furniture. It rains almost all the time.In this jungle of gloom, Somerset and Mills tread with growing alarm. Somerset intuits that the killer is using books as the inspiration for his crimes, and studies Dante, Milton and Chaucer for hints. Mills settles for the Cliff Notes versions. A break in the case comes with Somerset's sudden hunch that the killer might have a library card. But the corpses pile up, in cold fleshy detail, as disturbingly graphic as I've seen in a commercial film. The only glimmers of life and hope come from Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), Mills' wife.A movie like this is all style. The material by itself could have been handled in many ways, but the director, David Fincher ("Alien 3"), goes for evocative atmosphere, and the writer, Andrew Kevin Walker, writes dialogue that for Morgan Freeman, in particular, is wise, informed and poetic. ("Anyone who spends a significant amount of time with me," he says, "finds me disagreeable.") Eventually, it becomes clear that the killer's sermon is being preached directly to the two policemen, and that in order to understand it, they may have to risk their lives and souls."Seven" is unique in one detail of its construction; it brings the killer onscreen with half an hour to go, and gives him a speaking role. Instead of being simply the quarry in a chase, he is revealed as a twisted but articulate antagonist, who has devised a horrible plan for concluding his sermon. (The actor playing the killer is not identified by name in the ads or opening credits, and so I will leave his identity as another of his surprises.) "Seven" is well-made in its details, and uncompromising in the way it presents the disturbing details of the crimes. It is certainly not for the young or the sensitive. Good as it is, it misses greatness by not quite finding the right way to end. All of the pieces are in place, all of the characters are in position, and then - I think the way the story ends is too easy. Satisfying, perhaps. But not worthy of what has gone before.Download here
Edge, The (Action,Adventure,Drama,Thriller)
They were fighting over a woman when the plane went down. Now, their only chance for survival is each other.
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Billionaire Charles Morse accompanies his supermodel wife Mickey to photo shoot at Alaska. The shoot is to be made by fashion photographer Robert Green. To find specific Indian for the shoot, they fly to even more distant location, where their small plane crashes into a lake. To survive in the woods full of man-killing bears they need each other, but the smarter of the men - Charles is suspicious that Robert is having an affair with his wife.
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Wild Things (Crime,Drama,Thriller)
Be wild. Be wicked. Beware.
They can turn you on or turn on you.
They're dying to play with you.
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When High School Guidance counselor Sam Lombardo is accused of raping the popular student Kelly Van Ryan, his carefully structured life is ruined. But as the case heads to trial, an outcast school girl Suzie, may have information to free Sam. But the investigating Detective Ray, thinks that a more devious plan is at work that involves Sam, Kelly, and Suzie. As Ray digs deeper into the case, he uncovers a scheme that has very high stakes and where nothing is as it seems.
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``Wild Things'' is lurid trash, with a plot so twisted they're still explaining it during the closing titles. It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it. This being the latest example of Florida Noir (hot on the high heels of ``Palmetto''), it has a little of everything, including ominous shots of alligators looking as if they know more than they're telling.The movie solidifies Neve Campbell's position as the queen of slick exploitation, gives Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon lots of chances to squint ominously, and has a sex scene with Denise Richards (of ``Starship Troopers'') that is either gratuitous or indispensable, depending on your point of view.Plus, it has Bill Murray as a storefront lawyer who delivers 20 minutes of hilarity, which at the time is the last thing we're expecting.Movies such as this either entertain or offend audiences; there's no neutral ground. Either you're a connoisseur of melodramatic comic vulgarity, or you're not. You know who you are. I don't want to get any postcards telling me this movie is in bad taste. I'm warning you: It is in bad taste. Bad taste elevated to the level of demented sleaze.The plot: Matt Dillon plays Lombardo, a high school teacher who was ``educator of the year'' and has an engraved crystal goblet to prove it. As the movie opens, he writes ``SEX CRIMES'' on the board at a school assembly, and introduces speakers on the subject, including police officers Duquette (Bacon) and Perez (Daphne Rubin-Vega). In the back of the room, a student named Suzie (Neve Campbell) stalks out, suggesting which part of her anatomy one of the speakers can kiss. I wasn't sure if she was referring to Bacon or Dillon, but this is the kind of plot where it works either way.Then we meet Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards), the richest kid in the upscale Florida enclave of Blue Bay. She's got the hots for Mr. Lombardo. She follows him home, asks for rides, washes his Jeep and turns up in his living room so thoroughly wetted-down, she reminds us of the classic Hollywood line about Esther Williams: ``Dry, she ain't much. Wet, she's a star!'' Later, we see her leaving the teacher's humble bungalow, looking mad.Why is she mad? I will tread carefully; a publicist was stationed at the door of the screening, handing out letters begging the press not to give away the ending. The problem is, the ending of this film begins at the 45-minute mark, and is so complicated, I doubt if it can be given away. What sets up everything, in any event, is Kelly's testimony that she was raped by Mr. Lombardo--and the surprise testimony of Suzie that she was, too.Suzie lives in a trashy trailer out behind an alligator farm run by Carrie Snodgress. But Kelly lives on the right side of town, in manorial splendor, with her bikini-wearing, martini-drinking mom (Theresa Russell), who has had an affair with Lombardo. Hearing her daughter has been raped by him, Mom is enraged, and snarls, ``That SOB must be insane to think he can do this to me!'' That's the kind of dialogue that elevates ordinary trash into the kind that glows in the dark. Here's another line, after a murder: ``My mother would kill me if she knew I took the Rover!'' Bill Murray lands in the middle of this pie like a plum from heaven. Wearing a neck brace as part of an insurance scam, Murray runs his shabby storefront law office like a big downtown spread; when he asks his secretary to ``show Mr. Duquette his way out,'' all she needs to do is look up and say, ``goodbye,'' since the door is in arm's reach of everything else in the office.Without giving away the ending, that's about all I can tell you. See the movie, and you'll understand how very much I must leave unsaid.The director is John McNaughton, whose work includes two inspired films, ``Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer'' and ``Normal Life.'' He likes to show audiences how wrong their expectations are, by upsetting them. That worked in ``Henry'' as grim tragedy, and it works here as satire.Don't leave when the end titles start to roll. Credit cookies (those little bonus scenes they stick in between ``Key Grip'' and ``Location Catering'') are usually used for outtakes showing Matthau and Lemmon blowing their lines, or Jackie Chan breaking his legs. In ``Wild Things,'' McNaughton does something new: flashbacks, showing us stuff that was offscreen the first time around. The movie is still explaining itself as the curtains close, and then the audience explains it some more, on their way out of the theater.Download here
One Point O (Mystery,Sci-Fi,Thriller)
Are you infected?
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After receiving mysterious empty packages inside his apartment, a young computer-programmer (named Simon) begins a personal investigation into their origins. This leads him to discover his odd and eccentric neighbors; an artificially intelligent robot-head, named Adam; a virtual-reality sex game; and a possible corporate conspiracy. As the story progresses, Simon's grip on reality becomes more and more tenuous, while his craving for Nature Fresh milk becomes almost unbearable. Is it all just in his mind, or is something more sinister happening here?
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Godsend (Drama,Horror,Thriller)
Adam Duncan. Born: December 11, 1987. Died: December 12, 1995. Born September 23, 1996.
Evil is here.
If someone you love was taken from you, how far would you go to bring him back from the dead?
On April 30th, evil is born.
Scare as Hell!
Their dreams came true...their nightmares will too.
When a miracle becomes a nightmare, evil is born.
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After their young son, Adam (Bright), is killed in an accident, a couple (Kinnear, Romijn-Stamos) approach an expert (De Niro) in stem cell research about bringing him back to life through an experimental and illegal cloning and regeneration process. When Adam comes back to them, however, he's.. different...
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In the middle of the night on a back road of the Czech Republic, two truck drivers unload a group of illegal immigrants from India. Then they drive away, unaware that they still have a passenger -- a baby, left behind in the confusion. Should they try to return the infant to its mother? No, because they don't know how to find her without risking arrest. Should they dump the baby by the roadside? One thinks that would be a good idea, but the other doesn't, and they end up selling the baby to the owners of a shady pawnshop.
This opening sets up one of the story lines in "Up and Down," a Czech film about working-class and middle-class characters, former and present wives, infant and grown children, current and retired soccer fans, professors and hooligans, criminals and the police. Director Jan Hrebejk and his co-writer, Petr Jarchovsky, are interested not so much in making a statement about their society as seeing it reflected in specific lives; in this, their film resembles the early work of the Czech director Milos Forman ("The Fireman's Ball"), whose son Petr plays one of the film's leads.
The first couple we meet after the pawnshop are the Fikes, Mila and Franta (Natasa Burger and Jiri Machacek). They're not very bright, but not bad people. He's a night watchman, sensitive about his cleft palate, grateful to his wife for having dinner with him, even though "I eat ugly." He's a member of a soccer team's fanatic group of supporters, who meet to watch the games on TV, get drunk, sing, chant slogans and go through the emotional yo-yo of victory and defeat.
Mila desperately wants a baby. She can't conceive. They can't adopt, because Franta has a police record (he blames the soccer club for leading him into hooliganism). After almost stealing a baby in its carriage, she's afraid: "I'll do something and they'll arrest me." The baby at the pawn shop is a godsend. They buy it, bring it home and love it. When Franta's booster club buddy makes racist remarks about the baby's dark skin, Franta boots him out, resigns from the club and joins his wife in loving the baby.
Then we meet another family, the Horeckas. Martin (Petr Forman) has spent the last 20 years in Australia -- a useful explanation for his English-accented Czech, no doubt. He returns home to visit his father Otto (Jan Triska) and mother Vera (Emilia Vasaryova), who have divorced. He is also confronted with the fact that his former girlfriend, Hana (Ingrid Timkova) is now living with his father, and they have an 18-year-old daughter, Lenka (Kristyna Liska-Bokova). No doubt the romance between Otto and Hana was one of the reasons Martin left for Australia.
Czech movies seem to have some of their finest moments around the dining table, and a Horecka family dinner is a funny, sad and harrowing all at once. So is the uncertain relationship between Martin and half-sister Lenka. We learn that Vera is an alcoholic with the kinds of resentments, including racist ones, that drunks often use to deflect anger and attention away from themselves.
These two stories do not so much interact as reflect on each other with notions about families, parents, children and class. For me, the most affecting character was Frantz, the watchman, who is tattooed, muscular and ferocious, yet so gentle with his wife and baby. He has been under the thumb of the "Colonel" (Jaroslav Dusek), a leader of the booster club, but for a brief moment breaks free into happiness and a content family life. The story of his history with the club is the story of the ups and downs of his life, and his final scene in the movie is heartbreaking in the way it shows the club becoming a substitute family.
There is, of course, the question of the baby's real parents. Can they go to the police without revealing their status as illegal immigrants? Another of the movie's ups and downs is about the way we're simultaneously required to sympathize with the baby's birth mother while witnessing how the baby transforms the marriage of Mila and Franta.
Jan Hrebejk was also the director of "Divided We Fall" (2000), a film about a couple in Prague whose Jewish employers are victims of the Nazis. When the son of the employers appears at their door, they give him shelter in a hidden space within their house. Meanwhile, a local Nazi, makes it clear he is attracted to the wife of the couple providing the shelter. He also begins to suspect their secret.
What should happen next? Should the wife have sex with the Nazi to protect the man they are hiding? Such moral puzzles are at the heart of Hrebejk's work, and he has no easy answers. "Up and Down" also lacks any formulas or solutions, and is content to show us its complicated characters, their tangled lives, and the way that our need to love and be loved can lead us in opposite directions.Download here
Se7en (Crime,Drama,Mystery,Thriller)
Earnest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I believe the second part.
Gluttony * Greed * Sloth * Envy * Wrath * Pride * Lust
Let he who is without sin try to survive
Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.
Seven deadly sins. Seven ways to die.
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A film about two homicide detectives' desperate hunt for a serial killer who justifies his crimes as absolution for the world's ignorance of the Seven Deadly Sins. The movie takes us from the tortured remains of one victim to the next as the sociopathic "John Doe" sermonizes to Detectives Sommerset and Mills -- one sin at a time. The sin of Gluttony comes first and the murderer's terrible capacity is graphically demonstrated in the dark and subdued tones characteristic of film noir. The seasoned and cultured Sommerset researches the Seven Deadly Sins in an effort to understand the killer's modus operandi while green Detective Mills scoffs at his efforts to get inside the mind of a killer...
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`Seven," a dark, grisly, horrifying and intelligent thriller, may be too disturbing for many people, I imagine, although if you can bear to watch, it you will see filmmaking of a high order. It tells the story of two detectives - one ready to retire, the other at the start of his career - and their attempts to capture a perverted serial killer who is using the Seven Deadly Sins as his scenario.As the movie opens, we meet Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a meticulous veteran cop who lives a lonely bachelor's life in what looks like a furnished room. Then he meets Mills (Brad Pitt), an impulsive young cop who actually asked to be transferred into Somerset's district. The two men investigate a particularly gruesome murder, in which a fat man was tied hand and feet and forced to eat himself to death.His crime was the crime of Gluttony. Soon Somerset and Mills are investigating equally inventive murders involving Greed, Sloth, Lust and the other deadly sins. In each case, the murder method is appropriate, and disgusting (one victim is forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh; another is tied to a bed for a year; a third, too proud of her beauty, is disfigured and then offered the choice of a call for help or sleeping pills). Somerset concludes that the killer, "John Doe," is using his crimes to preach a sermon.The look of "Seven" is crucial to its effect. This is a very dark film, the gloom often penetrated only by the flashlights of the detectives. Even when all the lights are turned on in the apartments of the victims, they cast only wan, hopeless pools of light.Although the time of the story is the present, the set design suggests the 1940s; Gary Wissner, the art director, goes for dark blacks and browns, deep shadows, lights of deep yellow, and a lot of dark wood furniture. It rains almost all the time.In this jungle of gloom, Somerset and Mills tread with growing alarm. Somerset intuits that the killer is using books as the inspiration for his crimes, and studies Dante, Milton and Chaucer for hints. Mills settles for the Cliff Notes versions. A break in the case comes with Somerset's sudden hunch that the killer might have a library card. But the corpses pile up, in cold fleshy detail, as disturbingly graphic as I've seen in a commercial film. The only glimmers of life and hope come from Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), Mills' wife.A movie like this is all style. The material by itself could have been handled in many ways, but the director, David Fincher ("Alien 3"), goes for evocative atmosphere, and the writer, Andrew Kevin Walker, writes dialogue that for Morgan Freeman, in particular, is wise, informed and poetic. ("Anyone who spends a significant amount of time with me," he says, "finds me disagreeable.") Eventually, it becomes clear that the killer's sermon is being preached directly to the two policemen, and that in order to understand it, they may have to risk their lives and souls."Seven" is unique in one detail of its construction; it brings the killer onscreen with half an hour to go, and gives him a speaking role. Instead of being simply the quarry in a chase, he is revealed as a twisted but articulate antagonist, who has devised a horrible plan for concluding his sermon. (The actor playing the killer is not identified by name in the ads or opening credits, and so I will leave his identity as another of his surprises.) "Seven" is well-made in its details, and uncompromising in the way it presents the disturbing details of the crimes. It is certainly not for the young or the sensitive. Good as it is, it misses greatness by not quite finding the right way to end. All of the pieces are in place, all of the characters are in position, and then - I think the way the story ends is too easy. Satisfying, perhaps. But not worthy of what has gone before.Download here
Smokin' Aces (Action,Crime,Thriller)
He just met ten hitmen after his own heart.
Let There Be Blood
May the best hitman win.
Nobody gets away clean.
The hit goes down 2007.
The hit goes down January 26.
The Only Way To Even The Score... Is To Take Buddy Israel Out Of The Game
When you're worth $1 million dead, you don't have long to live.
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An FBI agent (Reynolds) hunts for a Las Vegas stand up comedian (Piven) who has decided to squeal on the mob but, before he heads off for protective custody, decides to go to the casinos at Lake Tahoe for one last good time, drawing a crowd of assassins (including Affleck and Keys).
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Spartan (Action,Crime,Drama,Thriller)
She's missing
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A "lone wolf" U.S. government secret agent, Scott( Kilmer), is assigned the task of rescuing the kidnapped daughter (Bell) of a high ranking government figure, only to discover along the way a larger, more sinister plot.
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"Spartan" opens without any credits except its title, but I quickly knew it was written by David Mamet because nobody else hears and writes dialogue the way he does. That the film tells a labyrinthine story of betrayal and deception, a con within a con, also stakes out Mamet territory. But the scope of the picture is larger than Mamet's usual canvas: This is a thriller on a global scale, involving the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA, the White House, a secret Special Ops unit and Middle Eastern kidnappers.Such a scale could lend itself to one of those big, clunky action machines based on 700-page best sellers that put salesmen to sleep on airplanes. But no. Not with Mamet, who treats his action plot as a framework for a sly, deceptive exercise in the gradual approximation of the truth.Before I get to the plot, let me linger on the dialogue. Most thrillers have simple-minded characters who communicate to each other in primary plot points ("Cover me." "It goes off in 10 minutes." "Who are you working for?") "Spartan" begins by assuming that all of its characters know who they are and what they're doing, and do not need to explain this to us in thriller-talk. They communicate in elliptical shorthand, in shop talk, in trade craft, in oblique references, in shared memories; we can't always believe what they say, and we don't always know that. We get involved in their characters and we even sense their rivalries while the outline of the plot is still murky. How murky we don't even dream.Val Kilmer, in his best performance since "Tombstone," plays a Special Ops officer named Scott, who as the movie opens is doing a field exercise with two trainees: Curtis (Derek Luke), and Jackie Black (Tia Texada). He's called off on assignment after the daughter of the president is kidnapped. The Secret Service was supposed to be guarding her, but ... what went wrong is one of the movie's secrets.Ed O'Neill plays an agent in charge of the search for the daughter, William H. Macy is a political operative from the White House, and it turns out that the daughter, Laura Newton (Kristen Bell), was taken for reasons that are not obvious, by kidnappers you would not guess, who may or may not know she is the president's daughter. Kilmer's assignment: Go anywhere and get her back by any means necessary. Curtis and Jackie want to get involved, too, but Kilmer doesn't want them, which may not be the final word on the subject.And that is quite enough of the plot. It leaves me enjoying the way Mamet, from his earliest plays to his great films like "House of Games," "Wag the Dog," "Homicide" and "The Spanish Prisoner," works like a magician who uses words instead of cards. The patter is always fascinating, and at right angles to the action.He's like a magician who gets you all involved in his story about the King, the Queen and the Jack, while the whole point is that there's a rabbit in your pocket. Some screenwriters study Robert McKee. Mamet studies magic and confidence games. In his plots, the left hand makes a distracting movement, but you're too smart for that, and you quick look over at the right hand to spot the trick, while meanwhile the left hand does the business while still seeming to flap around like a decoy.The particular pleasure of "Spartan" is to watch the characters gradually define themselves and the plot gradually emerge like your face in a steamy mirror. You see the outlines, and then your nose, and then you see that somebody is standing behind you, and then you see it's you -- so who is the guy in the mirror? Work with me here. I'm trying to describe how the movie operates without revealing what it does.William H. Macy, who has been with Mamet since his earliest theater days, is an ideal choice for this kind of work. He always seems like the ordinary guy who is hanging on for retirement. He's got that open, willing face, and the flat, helpful voice with sometimes the little complaint in it, and in "Spartan," he starts out with what looks like a walk-on role (we're thinking David found a part for his old pal) and ends up walking away with it. Val Kilmer, a versatile actor who can be good at almost anything (who else has played Batman and John Holmes?), here plays lean and hard, Sam Jackson style. His character is enormously resourceful with his craft, but becomes extremely puzzled about what he can do safely, and who he can trust. Derek Luke, a rising star with a quiet earnestness that is just right here, disappears for a long stretch and then finds out something remarkable, and Tia Texada, in the Rosario Dawson role, succeeds against all odds in actually playing a woman soldier instead of a sexy actress playing a woman soldier.I like the safe rooms with the charts on the walls, and I like the casual way that spycraft is explained by being used, and the way Mamet keeps pulling the curtain aside to reveal a new stage with a new story. I suppose the last scene in the film will remind some of our friend the deus ex machina, but after reflection, I have decided that, in that place, at that time, what happens is about as likely to happen as anything else, maybe likelier.Download here
Metro (Action,Comedy,Crime,Drama,Thriller)
Life is a negotiation.
San Francisco's top police hostage negotiator is about to get more than he ever bargained for.
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Scott Roper is the best hostage negotiator in San Francisco. His girlfriend Veronica "Ronnie" Tate is a newspaper reporter. Scott and Carmen have a dog named Troy. While listening to a baseball game on his car stereo, Scott is called downtown where a man named Earl is holding 17 hostages in a bank. Scott rescues the hostages by shooting Earl. Scott is then assigned a partner -- sharpshooter Kevin McCall. That night, Scott takes his friend, Lieutenant Sam Baffert, to see a man named Michael Korda. Scott waits downstairs while Sam is in Korda's apartment. Sam asks Korda about a man who deals in stolen jewelry, because Sam suspects that some of the dealer's jewels came from Korda, who is a professional jewel thief. Sam's visit with Korda ends with Korda killing Sam. When Scott hears a woman in the building scream at the sight of Sam's body, Scott runs inside the building and sees the body. Scott wants revenge on Korda, but Captain Frank Solis refuses to let Scott work the case, so Scott decides to work the case on his own. Scott and Kevin go to a horse race track, where they win a bundle of money, then they are called to a downtown jewelry store where hostages are being held. When Scott notices that Korda is the hostage taker, Korda grabs a hostage and leaves in a truck. Scott and Kevin use Captain Solis's car to chase Korda. Korda wrecks the truck, and leaves the hostage behind when he gets out of the truck. Korda then boards a trolley car, and Scott and Kevin start chasing the trolley car. While up close, Scott jumps onto the trolley car, leaving Kevin to drive Solis's car. Scott and Kevin manage to stop the trolley car, and they chase Korda into a parking garage, where Korda tries to hit Scott with a car. Scott and Kevin still manage to grab Korda. During visitation at the jail with his cousin Clarence Teal, Korda orders Teal to kill Ronnie as a way to get revenge on Scott. Teal shows up at Ronnie's apartment that night and attacks Ronnie. Scott shows up and chases Teal down the fire escape, and Teal is hit and killed by a car. On the next morning, Korda escapes from the jail, and soon after escaping, Korda kidnaps Ronnie, luring Scott into a confrontation at an abandoned shipyard.
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