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  • Review: Warrior

    Review: Warrior

    By Daniel N. Gullotta.

    Warrior is a different kind of fighting movie for a few reasons. The most obvious change up is that the story centers around not one, but two protagonists, each one desiring to win the final comp and each one with their own reasons why they must. The other change is that it features mixed-martial arts rather then one particular style and this really adds to the intensity of some of the fights and hits in the film. The premise is a simple one: two brothers, separated and divided by current problems and past sins, must fight in a world tournament in order to survive.

    All the characters in this are broken people. The brothers, Brendan (Joel Edgerton) and Tommy (Tom Hardy) were raised in a house with a violently alcoholic father (Nick Nolte) and a sick mother. Since then Brendan is facing money troubles and family issues that he cannot break free off and Tommy is haunted by the events of his time in Iraq as a marine. Also, at this time their father has managed to pull his life together after 1000 days without alcohol and a return to Church, but to Brendan and Tommy, it’s far too little far too late. While it may have all the components of a redemption story, Warrior does not contain much forgiveness, but more survival. It is tale about what broken and wounded people do to try and break free and get ahead.

    The real beauty of Warrior is that you don’t want to see either Brendan or Tommy lose. The films perfectly sets up the story that the audience really cares about the hurt and lose of both characters and both of their futures hang in the balance on one of them winning this prize money. Warrior could have easily broken into a feel good turn around money, but the pain and heartache in Warrior is so real, the decision characters make are completely believable.

    Gavin O’Connor must be commended for Warrior. The vision and delivery of this film is outstandingly good. The script grounds the audience in such raw and energetic emotion. Both Edgerton and Hardy are fantastic in their roles, both playing different styles and different angles in and out of the arena. Hardy’s anger and cutting dialogue really stand out and Edgerton’s moments of down time with his wife and kids amongst his uncertain financial future are absolutely moving. Yet, the flood lights are thrusted upon Nick Nolte in a performance that would make any father and son pair cry. However Jennifer Morrison as Edgerton’s wife and Kevin Dunn as his boss should be praised for this great supporting roles in the film.

    The only real problem with Warrior is it’s sometimes unnecessarily slow pacing and editing discussions. Many scenes linger and loom for longer then what is needed and the film could have been shorted with some smarter editing choices. However, no dialogue or scenes should have been removed from this film, as they all work so well together. The fighting is impressive and gripping to say the least, and it looks absolutely real. You feel every single hit and with some impressive stunts, you feel like you are in the ring. All of this action, drama, and intensity make for a very enjoyable viewing experience and one that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

    ONE SENTENCE REVIEW:
    Take your Dad out to the movies and prepare to hug out your problems.  

  • Berlin 36 Trailer

    Berlin 36 Trailer

    As we reach the first anniversary of the London Olympics, here’s a dramatic new film that tells an extraordinary true story of women’s athletics from the Berlin Olympics 1936.

    Despite American threats to boycott the games if the Nazis didn’t allow Jews on the team, medal contender Gretel Bergmann was replaced in the high jump by the mysterious Marie Ketteler, who’s secret identity was kept for many years afterwards.

  • Five Serious Actors With Ridiculous Early Roles

    Five Serious Actors With Ridiculous Early Roles

    Some actors have a natural sense of gravitas that they bring with them to every film – a persona that immediately adds a bit of class to whatever role they fill. This kind of stage presence doesn’t happen overnight, though, and some of these serious actors have some rather embarrassing roots. Everybody has to start somewhere, and these five powerhouse actors had some surprisingly undignified early roles.

     

    Sean Penn – Fast Times at Ridgemont High 

    Fast Times at Ridgemont High was an iconic 1980s teen film that managed to help launch the career of a number of successful actors. In 2005, the movie was even selected for preservation as a historically significant film. It’s not, however, likely to be confused with highbrow entertainment.

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    The film followed an ensemble cast of high school students as they attempt to navigate jobs and relationships. Penn’s character, a stoned-out surfer and unrepentant underachiever, is the star of a recurring subplot and a role fondly remembered by fans.

    It’s not a role that Penn seems particularly proud of today, though, and he’s been in very few comedies ever since. Instead, he’s preferred to fill emotionally hard-hitting roles in classics like The Thin Red Line and Mystic River.

     

    Tom Hanks – Mazes & Monsters

    Tom Hanks is a versatile actor who’s played a wide range of roles. Even when some of those films didn’t turn out so well, Hanks is still generally regarded as a pretty serious, respectable actor, with five Oscar nominations and two wins under his belt. Outside of fiction, he has also lent his talents to numerous documentaries, most recently narrating a two-part anniversary film commemorating the 9/11 attacks directed by New York Film Academy professor Eddie Rosenstein.

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    All of his achievements in cinema are probably why the 2005 DVD re-release of Mazes & Monsters displays his face so prominently on the box, despite it being a movie Hanks is probably all-too-eager to forget.

    Mazes & Monsters was a 1982 cautionary tale about the dangers of tabletop role-playing games, loosely inspired by real events. The film progresses roughly as one might expect: Once Hanks is introduced as an obsessed gamer, he starts a slow descent into madness, accompanied by some cheesy costume-wearing monsters and even cheesier action sequences, before culminating in murder. As every RPG should, really.

     

    Brendan Fraser – Encino Man

    Most people would consider Brendan Fraser’s breakout role to be With Honors, a poignant dramedy about a Harvard student and his relationship with the wily homeless man who’s holding his honors thesis hostage. These people are overlooking Fraser’s first real role, though, in 1992’s Encino Man. 

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    Encino Man is a lighthearted romp about two high school outcasts who find – and subsequently attempt to socialize – a caveman who’s been shielded in a block of ice. The teens are played by Sean, Astin and Pauly Shore, and a young Brendan Fraser plays the caveman Link. This wouldn’t be the last time Fraser would take this sort of role, as the cringe-worthy George of the Jungle would prove five years later, but it’s not exactly a film Fraser looks back on with pride.

     

    Philip Seymour Hoffman – My Boyfriend’s Back 

    On a list of “best character actors,” Philip Seymour Hoffman would have to score right at the top. He’s got an impressive resume of supporting roles in great films like Magnolia, The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Big Lebowski. He was recently nominated for an Academy Award for The Master. 

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    And then there’s My Boyfriend’s Back, a 1993 film that’s mysteriously absent from all but the most thorough of Hoffman’s filmographies. The story revolves around a high school student who returns from the dead to court the girl he was afraid to pursue while alive, a situation that’s further problematized by his hunger for flesh.

    Hoffman plays a school bully whose pursuit of the undead protagonist is cut suddenly short by a comically disturbing incident with an axe. Interestingly, though My Boyfriend’s Back was a major box office flop, it did help launch the careers of several young actors including Matthew Fox, Matthew McConaughey; Renee Zellweger was also involved in filming, but her scene never made it into the film.

     

    Joseph Gordon Levitt – Angels in the Outfield 

    Unless you were really paying attention, Joseph Gordon Levitt seemed to come out of nowhere. He’s one of the best things about Inception; he nails his role(s) in The Dark Knight Rises, and Academy-Award-winning Lincoln. But where did this guy come from, and how did he end up being so good?

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    Attentive audiences from the 90s might recognize him from his relatively small role in 10 Things I Hate About You, a teen film that also helped launch the career of Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles. They might have even remembered that he played the long-suffering teen alien character in the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun.

    What they might not realize, though, is that Levitt was a prolific child star, appearing in a number of small roles – and as the leading act in the feel-good Angels in the Outfield. It’s a little hard to imagine innocent young Roger Bomman playing a hardened killer in Looper, but that just goes to show how far Levitt’s come over the past decade.

  • Review: A Thousand Kisses Deep

    Review: A Thousand Kisses Deep

    By Gordon Foote.

    Well, thank God they gave me this to review in the same week that Nintendo finally released Earthbound in Europe, otherwise it would have been a real slog.  At last, the WiiU’s second screen makes sense!

    Ok, so A Thousand Kisses Deep is the story of Mia, a woman who, eight years ago, got out of a life-destroyingly abusive relationship with her boss,  jazz club owner ‘Ludwig’ (how wonderfully Bohemian). Mia’s life is moving on gradually, until an elderly woman in her building jumps from a window and is found with a photograph of Ludwig on her when they scrape her off the asphalt.

    What follows is a bizarre jaunt through some of the defining moments of Mia’s life which all appear to have, simultaneously, taken up residence in the same building as her present self, but she hasn’t noticed until now: It’s a bit like an entire movie wrapped around the lift/memory building metaphor from Inception.

    Add to this a lift with a mind of its own which appears to be some kind of forerunner to the phone-booths in Bill and Ted, and a Janitor/Building Supervisor who evidently knows exactly what is going on but has adopted fortune cookie speak, as all spiritual/temporal advisers seem contractually obliged to do, and you have a film that sounds fascinating, if quirky.

    Sadly, it’s not.

    How not?  Well, so far this 84 minute film has taken me 2h13mins to watch and I still have 15minutes to go, due to me pausing regularly and having an amble as a direct result of poor pacing, excruciatingly embarrassing scenes which go on far too long, equally awkward scenes of abusing relationships, and a script which makes less sense that you’re average friendly, neighbourhood drunk.  What’s worse is that I am approaching my tea limit for the day which gives me scant reason to get up again anytime soon.  Oh, well, time to stop whinging, put on the big-boy pants, and power through to the end of this monster. Never know; maybe it’ll surprise me…

    —–Interlude—–

    Nope. Still terrible.

    Right…let’s do some reviewing….force the bile down….deep breaths…go.

    Dana Lustig’s 2011 Sci-fi lite/Romantic Drama, A Thousand Kisses Down, is not a good film.  Worse, it’s a bad film that thinks it’s a lot cleverer than it is, giving it a slightly smug air.  Throughout its blessedly brief runtime, it seems that poignancy and deep undercurrents of meaning are just a scene away that, any second now, the script will make that final jump and hit what it’s so desperately striving towards, but it never makes it; the insight never materialises.  This leaves the viewer with a mess of half-explained ideas, unlikeable characters, and a central message which is entirely undercut by the films own ‘shock’ ending.

    On the upside, performances all round are robust, dragging what characterisation can be salvaged from such copy-paste favourites as “Drunk Mum”, “Asshole musician”, “Soft-spoken, liberal Dad”, and “Weak-willed, mildly irritating female protagonist”.  Here is where one of the main story problems arises.  Wading through Mia’s emotional baggage is only interesting if she is…and she isn’t, and neither are most of the people around her.  Instead we’re forced to take part in a voyeuristic return to some of Mia’s own most painful memories; it forges a deeply uncomfortable bond between the audience and the person whose ‘side’ we are clearly meant to be on.

    Sitting on grown-up Mia’s shoulder while she watches her own ninth birthday party where soft-spoken dad attempts to entertain a room of despondent children while drunk mum broods in the kitchen smoking and child-weak-willed protagonist hides in the cupboard claiming that she is soooo above this kids stuff, is one of the most awkward, embarrassing, and uncomfortable scenes I have ever had to sit through.  I felt embarrassed for Dad, doing his best to make his little girls party a success and failing miserably, I felt embarrassed for mini-Mia whose friends can only have taken her to pieces at school the following Monday, and I felt sorry for Adult-Mia who, with the gift of hindsight, is trapped watching her family unravel from a third-person perspective.  Awkward viewing is not my idea of entertainment…especially when the scene never ends, and the sole purpose of my discomfort appears to be to reinforce information I already had about the character tropes.

    In short, the script is woefully under-equipped to support the films admirably ambitious premise.  It seems to spend the majority of the short run time (I really can’t thank them enough for not making this a three-hour epic) ramming the words “YOUCANNOT CHANGE YOUR PAST” down the audience’s throats, before ending on a “Well…unless you really want to” note, which the film doesn’t feel the need to elaborate on….that said, there is a foreshadowing moment to the ending, which they either forgot about, or decided not to refer back to, but whatever.   I gave up assuming this film was going to make sense somewhere around my fourth cup of tea.

    In conclusion, squandered opportunities are always difficult to cope with.  Wasted ideas sting worse than almost anything in cinema; take last month’s World War Z, for example.  It was, by no means, a bad movie, but has blocked the option of a faithful adaptation of the superb book being made for at least the next five years.  A Thousand Kisses Deep commits a similar sin.  It promises so, so much, a strong, interesting central concept, and delivering so very, very little.

    I’ve taken this bullet for you – avoid.  Don’t worry about it, buy me a drink some time.

    1/5

  • The Monster Of University Debt

    The Monster Of University Debt

    Going to university look great in the movies. It’s a non-stop party and you get to learn at the same time as getting to go out on the lash every night of the week. Films such as Monsters University and Legally Blonde are great; because they make the university life look fun, encourage young people to go to university and to do better for themselves. But they don’t reveal the harsh realities that some student may face as they end up in debt.

    Going to university is very expensive. After three years of university, you can end up in more debt than you think. Student loans from the government might not have to be paid back until you are earning over the threshold of £21,000, but student living works out very expensive for some people and that can mean overdrafts, loans and credit cards that have to be paid back regardless of your income.

    It can start out small, borrowing some money off one of your friends to pay for a night out until your student loan comes in. But these small debts can soon spiral. There are unscrupulous companies out there who will charge you extortionate fees and rates that mean that if you miss one payment you could end up with a huge amount of money debt and credit issues further down the line.

    Some students are ending up with debts of £60,000 when they leave university, almost a small mortgage. There are ways of keeping your spending in check while you are a student to stop this happening to you. You can take a part time job while you are studying to offset any costs that you incur. This will fill up your time so that you can’t go out spending, and give you extra money for when you do go out.

    University is an experience not to be missed, and if you are careful, you could come out with barely any debt and get yourself a job that will mean that it doesn’t matter about how much debt you are in as you earn enough to pay it off and then some. It doesn’t have to be a Scream 2 style nightmare, just be sensible and budget your money. Take note of your outgoings and incomings and try to stick to a reasonable financial budget. There are a number of competitive student bank accounts that can help you with your cash flow by offering free overdrafts, but just remember you’ve got to pay it all back when it’s over.