Two very different movies about anti-heroes from the U.K. but sadly I can’t recommend either one of them… Filth…James McAvoy stars as a psychotic Scottish detective trying to solve a hate crime so he can get a promotion. But he spends more time trying to unravel or defeat his rival detectives for the promotion, and…
Author: Alabama Liberal
TV Review: “Sons of Anarchy” Final Episode
It was a long, drawn-out final season that definitely suffered from some serious padding. [Each episode was usually 90 minutes, and sometimes longer than that.] Since the entire season’s plot was mostly about revenge for the events of season 6, and not many new characters/storylines were introduced it felt like stalling until we finally got…
TV Review: “Gracepoint” Series Finale
All’s not-so-well that ends not-so-well on this mediocre Fox drama. True, I haven’t seen the BBC’s version (called “Broadchurch”) but others have said that this American version is sometimes a scene-for-scene remake, and has been a pretty faithful adaptation, and it makes me wonder why that show became such a phenomenon. Anyway, the show wasn’t…
TV Reviews: “Eaten Alive” and Rogen/Franco “Naked and Afraid”
Two stunts, but only one of them was intentionally fake… “Eaten Alive”…Everyone else has already ripped this special to shreds…and they were right. It was two hours long with about ten minutes of real action. The first hour was total padding, and it was only at the very end of the second hour that we…
Independent Spirit Awards Review Day: “Test,” “Blue Ruin,” “It Felt Like Love,” and “The Retrieval”
So the first three films were all nominated for the Independent Spirit Awards this year (and all in the same category that honors ultra-indies that were made for 500,000 or less), but the fourth film should have been as well. Even though it wasn’t technically nominated, it sure captures the independent spirit. Test…It’s about a gay male…
Movie Reviews: “Big Hero 6” Vs. “Penguins of Madagascar”
Two animated films currently in theaters; two (tonally) different options battling for dollars…But what if they’re both good options? Big Hero 6…This is a much more serious movie than “Penguins,” and my gut feeling is that adults might like it more while children might like “Penguins” more. I liked the film’s focus on science and…
Movie Review: “The Homesman,” Another Film with Cop-Out Ideology
This movie sucks too. Sure, it’s not as brazenly offensive (to me and my sensibilities) as “Above the Lights” but it is a film that starts off with the novel idea of doing a feminist Western and then betrays that premise completely by the time the credits roll. What Works: It starts out as a…
Movie Review: “Beyond the Lights” the Most Dishonest Movie This Year
If a film is really good, it holds my attention completely as I’m watching it. If it’s not, I start mentally writing the review before the end credits. Firmly in the latter category is “Beyond the Lights” (the black pop star saved by a black bodyguard/cop movie that’s getting rave reviews and white critics saying…
Movie Review: Dumb and Dumber To
I didn’t expect this film to be as good as the first or even a very good movie, but I wasn’t expecting it to be this outright bad either… What Works: Did you like the trailer? Because all the funniest parts are in the trailer. I’d say about 90 percent of the jokes that actually…
Movie Review: Fury
Better late than never…even though it came out in the middle of October, this “Brad Pitt WWII tank movie” is still kicking around in some theaters so it’s worth a review. What Works: I wasn’t big on the movie as a whole, but there were some knockout standalone sequences like a climactic tank battle and…
Real-Life Thrillers Review Day: “Devil’s Knot,” “Whitey,” “The Galapagos Affair”
Three thrillers (two docs, one scripted) that all cover real-life incidents… Devil’s Knot…Skip this mess of a film. The tale of the West Memphis Three (the three innocent teenagers in Arkansas that were arrested and convicted for the murders of three small boys solely because the cops mistakenly thought they were satanists) has been covered…
Indie Thrillers Review Day: “Open Grave,” “Hateship Loveship,” and “Last Passenger”
Two indie thrillers from January of this year, two very different experiences…[And a non-thriller, oddball pick I didn’t have a place for.] Open Grave…A zombie-type thriller wherein Sharlto Copeley wakes up in, you guessed it, an open grave filled with dead bodies. There’s not many scares or compelling moments. The opening sequence is one of the few…
Doubles Review Day: “The Double” and “The One I Love”
Two different films about nefarious doubles, and even though both were critically acclaimed, I can really only recommend one of them… The Double…Jesse Eisenberg plays a ridiculously stilted office worker in a drab, gray existence who’s upstaged by a more confident, aggressive version of himself (it’s a double that only Eisenberg seems to notice looks…