Tag Archives: A

All Soul's Day: Dia De Los Muertos (2005)

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Here’s a rather hilarious predicament for “All Soul’s Day”. Stay with me: in the film, the town are celebrating Dio De Los Muertos which means in English “Day of the Dead”, now this is a film including cannibalistic zombies… you see where the predicament lies? How to make a zombie film revolving around the holiday “Day of the Dead”, yet not being able to call it that at risk of being compared to the famous zombie film “Day of the Dead”, or risking copyright infringement. Amazing, even when the Scifi channel aren’t even trying, they’re ripping off other people’s shit. But, trust me, at this point, Scifi would benefit in being compared to “Day of the Dead”, though don’t think I didn’t see the small hints at the title around the movie!

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America's Heart and Soul (2004)

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To say this is not a politically charged film is to ignore the elephant in the room. Disney, a strongly conservative company refused to release “Fahrenheit 911” and once that film went to another company and raked in the big bucks there was immense controversy over Moore’s views (big surprise) and then came this. To anyone who denies this is a rebuttal to Moore’s documentary, they obviously can’t read between the lines. Disney stated publicly this was a positive portrait (so to speak) in response to Moore’s documentary plain and simple and wanted to portray America as a positive place aside from Moore’s more truthful portrait. After watching this in the two longest hours of my life, I wasn’t sure whether to put this under documentary or comedy, because if the makers of this film think this is what America is like, well then they’re grossly mis-informed and completely ignorant, and if they expect American audiences to believe this fairytale, then they’re grossly under-estimating the intelligence of American audiences.

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Abandon (2002)

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This is a movie that is so murky, so dark and so dreadful on the eyes that it’s remarkable if the viewer sits all the way through up until the last moments. There are a whole lot of nonsense here you have to sit through until you get to it, and by then you’re not surprised because you’ve either been so bored you gave up on caring, or you fell asleep. “Abandon”, despite its marketing, is a drama, not horror, not thriller, no sir. The worst thing is this tries desperately hard to pass itself off as horror or at least a decent supernatural thriller. Only by the second half does it tend to actually become a supernatural thriller.

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AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)

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This is it, the two bad asses of science fiction cinema finally clash. Fans have been waiting years for the chance where we’d see them finally go head to head, and we get… this. In the right hands, with the right people, “Alien vs. Predator” had the potential to be a balls to the wall action packed epic, and that’s what’s sad. Anderson is not a good writer, decent director, but no good as a screenwriter. There’s not a lot of set up until we get to the actual plot at hand. Anderson surely wastes no time in taking us to what is the actual point of the movie. But it wouldn’t have hurt to spend time with the characters before we got into the action, which would have made us care more for these people who were basically trade offs. I didn’t really care who died or who lived because there’s nothing for us to care about in this movie.

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American Splendor (2003)

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“American Splendor” is the biographical film of cult underground critically acclaimed writer Harvey Pekar, a man whose become synonymous with underground comics. What “American Splendor” does is rare, rather than adhering the normal formulas of the biopic with dramatic tones, the obligatory villains and hardships, it’s approached rather with a realistic combination of comedy, drama, animation, and documentary style with interviews along with Pekar’s usual loving sense of self-loathing. “American Splendor” is a film rich with human overtones, and human characters that aren’t appealing to the eye, but are completely realistic.

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Alex & Emma (2003)

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No matter how hard “Alex and Emma” tries, it’s still the same package but with new wrapping. It’s another recycled romantic comedy, with more recycled characters, but only with a different twist. Kate Hudson has a nasty habit of choosing horrible films of late, and Luke Wilson is no exception. In this vapid formulaic film, Luke Wilson plays Alex Sheldon, an author who released a book and is in debt with what looks like the Cuban mafia. Two Cuban thugs break into his apartment and threaten him, but then again they just could be thugs from another mafia. So, Alex has thirty days to write and publish a book and get them their money or else he goes bye-bye (death), so he hires a stenographer. Why not a ghost writer? Someone from the publisher to help? You figure he being an author he’d be able to type fast, but he instead hires a stenographer by posing as a law agency to which we meet Emma, a beautiful (despite how hard Hudson pretends to be plain), young and uptight stenographer who is convinced by Alex to write the book as he dictates it to her.

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A Guy Thing (2003)

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Jason Lee is a prime example of a very talented actor who has the chops to make primo movies yet consistently star in cinematic fecal matter such as “A Guy Thing”. Lee continues starring in half-baked terrible films like “Dreamcatcher” and “Stealing Harvard” and continues to waste the talents he presents in his past films. “A Guy Thing” has the plot of a sitcom with a storyline done to death and is inevitably doomed to the fate of posing as an hour and a half long big screen commercial sitcom and is just as bland. Lee has shown promise in films like “Chasing Amy”, “Dogma” and the excellent “Almost Famous” in which he managed to steal most of the scenes he was in, but Lee has proved that though he’s excellent as a supporting actor, he just can’t hack it as a leading man yet.

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