Review: THE EXPENDABLES 3 Isn't Execrable...Mostly

Review: THE EXPENDABLES 3 Isn't Execrable...Mostly


Review: THE EXPENDABLES 3 Isn't Execrable...Mostly

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 10:01 PM PDT

"It's better than the last one!" Faint praise, perhaps, but given that Expendables films don't aim very high, it's probably praise that will be graciously accepted for The Expendables 3. Probably. It's fair to say the entire Expendables franchise is a "what if" proposition - if the scope of action movies has moved into CGI fests, comic book capers and Young Adult ennui, the way to make space for "old school" brawlers is to do a package deal. We're long past the point where simply seeing Sly and Arnie on screen at the same time holds any weight, so it's come down now to just what if any story can be wrung from having a mass of testosterone on screen at any one time....

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THE EDITOR: New Poster May Be NSFW, But It's Darn Pretty

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 08:00 PM PDT

The Editor, by members of famed group Astron-6, and the final entry announced for this year's Midnight Madness program at the Toronto International Film Festival, has a pretty new poster! This new poster was illustrated by London, UK based artist Graham Humphreys. It could be considered slightly NSFW (Not Safe For Work), so be careful where you are looking at this. The following trio of posters were also created for the film by Humphreys and there are no mistaking the nudity on that last one of these below. Do mannequins count? Only if it was Kim Cattrall would I hope yes. Boom with the 80s film reference!!!We will have our dedicated team of reviewers running around The 6 during the festival so keep your eyes peeled...

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The Creator Of Indie Scifi Hit INK Returns With THE FRAME

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:30 PM PDT

Denver based writer-director Jamin Winans created quite the stir with his 2009 indie scifi effort Ink. Winans' debut film had ambitions worlds beyond its budget and talent to match, winning love around the world thanks to its impressive visual style and while Winans has been largely quiet in the years since he's back now, having freshly released the trailer for sophomore feature The Frame.Plot details are being kept deliberately under wraps for now but the visual aesthetic very much remains intact. The trailer is a bit of a puzzle box, hinting at quite a lot while actually revealing very little, but it's a compelling one. Check it out below....

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Review: THE GIVER Tells Recycled Story In One Shade of Grey

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:01 PM PDT

To say that the apocalypse is the gift that keeps on giving is probably too easy and too predictable in this context, but then again, so too is The Giver. In the current age of The Hunger Games, Divergent, and umpteen other similar clones, it's quite simple and probably appropriate to lump The Giver in with all the rest: Dystopian teen romance, check. Overcooked self-seriousness, check. Tired systemic commentary... check. All of that would render this pulseless new entry completely dismissible, if not for the fact that its source material, a youth novel by Lois Lowry, predates The Hunger Games by at least a decade. Apparently, star Jeff Bridges purchased the rights and has been trying to make this film for the better part of twenty years....

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Farah Khan's HAPPY NEW YEAR Sports The Gaudiest Trailer You'll See This Year

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 03:10 PM PDT

This day has been years in the making.Director Farah Khan reunites with her muse, Shah Rukh Khan, for Happy New Year, a film with nearly a decade of production delays under its belt. Development for Happy New Year began in 2005, between the twin Farah Khan/SRK blockbusters Main Hoon Na and Om Shanti Om, but was tossed aside to focus on the latter. Thank heavens for that, because Om Shanti Om is an absolutely brilliant film that not only gave SRK an umpteenth notch on his belt of record setting successes, but it also introduced Deepika Padukone to Bollywood. Frankly, Om Shanti Om is a incredible film that works for those well versed in Bollywood film lore, and introduces potential fans to the glamour of Bollywood...

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VARSITY BLOOD: Finger Puppet Theater Makes It Less Violent

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 12:00 PM PDT

Jake Helgren's slasher flick Varsity Blood is due out on DVD this coming Tuesday, August 19. While some folks are content to show a clip or a trailer for their movie, the makers of this flick decided to reenact one of the kill scenes using finger puppets. It makes it easier to digest because, heck, finger puppets. This football season, Hogeye High's Warriors and cheerleaders are out for blood. Unfortunately, someone is out for theirs, and they'll be forced to take one for the team. After the big Halloween football match, the students are joined by an uninvited guest dressed as their high school mascot, armed with a bow and arrow, a battle-axe, and an insatiable appetite for butchery. Soon, they find themselves fighting for more than the...

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Watch The First Eight Minutes Of Chick Tract Adaptation DARK DUNGEONS

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 11:31 AM PDT

Oh my. Single tear. Prepare thy selves, for ye art about to embark on a quest fraught with moral peril and dangers! J R Salls' film adaptation of the Chick Tract Dark Dungeons will premiere today to a sold out crowd at Gen Con in Indianapolis. The film's producer, Zombie Orpheus Entertainment, has made the first eight minutes of the film available for your viewing pleasure. And I do mean pleasure. Dark Dungeons was financed via a successful Kickstarter campaign and Salls' lottery win. All he wanted to create was a straight-as-an-arrow adaptation of one of Jack Chik's most popular tracts. I have to tell you, I think the results are awesome! I am not talking about production quality here. I am talking about sheer entertainment value. The...

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Review: WE ARE MARI PEPA (SOMOS MARI PEPA), An Honest Portrait Of Youth With A Dose Of Punk Rock

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 11:01 AM PDT

Mari Pepa is the name of a punk rock band in We Are Mari Pepa (Somos Mari Pepa), Samuel Isamu Kishi Leopo's extension of his own 18-minute short film Mari Pepa. "Mari" refers to marihuana, while "pepa" is slang for vagina; so, indeed, we are dealing with a band composed of four (Mexican) teenagers, who scream such lyrics as "I want to cum in your face" while playing power chords. There's a funny nature attached to watching skinny teenagers playing music like that, fighting during rehearsals, or just having casual/vulgar conversations between them. We Are Mari Pepa functions as a really entertaining film for the most part, with a style that tries to recreate the home movie look. This is not a dirty/aggressive look at...

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Check Out The Key Art For DAY OF THE MUMMY

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 10:31 AM PDT

So you are saying to yourself, 'Self. Day of the Mummy comes out of DVD on December 9 and I do not want to miss it. But how will I know what to look for?' Well, fear not, faithful reader, for we have the key art right here. It is a fine example of Photoshop prowess.Welcome to Egypt, land of the Pharaohs. A place steeped in history and legend; Gods and spiritual guides; untold wealth - and the bone-cracking, blood-spilling guardians of its riches. Jack Wells has arrived in Egypt in search of the famous diamond known as The Codix Stone. His journey leads him to the tomb of the cursed King Neferu, cursed not by name but by nature. With his centuries-old slumber disturbed by timeless human...

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Review: THE TRIP TO ITALY, Very Funny, Yet Overly Familiar

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 10:02 AM PDT

Michael Winterbottom's The Trip was an enormously pleasant surprise. The 2010 UK TV series -- also cut into feature form for the international market -- was built on what appeared to be the flimsiest of premises, featuring British comics Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan as barely fictionalized versions of themselves as they drove around northern England reviewing restaurants. All the premise promised was two very funny friends driving around and riffing on one another, and while it delivered that in spades, it also delivered far more in the form of a surprisingly melancholic and richly rewarding performance from Coogan, wrestling with the toll his lifestyle had taken on himself and his family. The Trip was something of a perfect storm: a very, very funny piece...

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Morelia 2014: Mexican Film Noir Program Announced

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 09:31 AM PDT

October is near and so is the 2014 edition of the Morelia International Film Festival! Taking place from October 17 to 26, the 12th edition of Morelia is going to be celebrating the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, with an image that evokes those times and a program dedicated to classic Mexican film noir. With the support of Cineteca Nacional, Filmoteca UNAM, and Fundación Televisa, Morelia will screen seven Mexican films that classify as film noir. Those include three pictures by Roberto Gavaldón and a couple from Alejandro Galindo, both renowned directors from the Golden Age. "Thanks to these institutions, an extraordinary labor of film preservation is going on. This is the first film program dedicated exclusively to Mexican film noir; and with it, Morelia tries to promote...

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Review: FRANK, Close To Being A Masterpiece

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 09:01 AM PDT

All the ingredients are here for me to adore Frank. You've got a quirky premise surrounding a bunch of musical fun, a standout performance by one of the world's best actors, a mix of the somber and the slapstick all coming together with a bunch of memorable one-liners. Yet for all its pieces, I'm not sure Frank adds up to what it could have been. It comes close enough to being a masterpiece that it's a bit frustrating, its ending just a bit too contrived, as if it ran out of steam. Along the way, however, there's a hell of a lot to admire. We're introduced to Jon, played by Domhnall Gleeson with a terrific manic air. He's coming up with tunes on the spot,...

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Review: RAGNAROK, Monstrous Family Fun, Norwegian Style

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 08:01 AM PDT

Curse you, Indiana Jones! The bullwhip-toting, fedora-wearing, hard-loving professor created unrealistic expectations for all cinematic archaeologists who have followed in his footsteps. Thus, the gentle, mild, soft-spoken Sigurd, a tall and slender family man who is still coping with the loss of his wife, hardly seems the type to chase after a Viking myth about the end of the world, especially with his two children in tow on a supposed "family vacation" in the desolate, far north Finnmark region on the border between Norway and Russia. Yet watching the unlikely adventure hero Sigurd try to balance the competing interests of family and work -- to be more accurate, a personal obsession -- is one of the pleasures offered by Ragnarok, directed by Mikkel Brænne Sandemose,...

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Review: COLDWATER, A Potentially Incredible Concept

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 07:01 AM PDT

Shedding light on important issues through the power of narrative filmmaking can be a tricky proposition. The very nature of fictional storytelling can sometimes make the issues brought to the forefront seem less worthy of inspection (i.e.: 'it's just a movie'). At the same time, calibrating a film's emotional impact to a pitch perfect balance, somewhere between ineffective and sensational, is a razor-thin tightrope walk. Coldwater, directed by Vincent Grashaw and written by Mark Penney, unfortunately stumbles at the starting gate and never fully recovers. The film begins with teenager Brad Lunders (P.J. Boudousqué) being snatched from his bedroom in the middle of the night by unknown assailants. Within a few minutes, it's made clear that these strange men have come from a juvenile reform...

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