Welcome to Collinwood (2002)

Posted on November 2, 2003 by Felix Vasquez

Coming across as a pseudo “The Sting” except with much more comedy, five lowlife criminals discover the ultimate heist and decide to pull it off, but discover it’s not as glorious as it may be. This is hilarious. I have never laughed so hard in a modern comedy as I have with this; most of the antics reminded me of an “I Love Lucy” episode from the incident in the funhouse, to the water filled sewer, to when they have to cross the heated pipe and carnage ensues, this is hilarious. Director/writer team Anthony Russo and Joe Russo create fresh and original comedy out of a typical plot for a movie that could have easily fumbled into bad territory.

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Half Past Dead (2002)

Posted on November 2, 2003 by Felix Vasquez

This is like the action masterpiece “The Rock”, except for the fact that “The Rock” was original, and this is just as awful as anything I’ve ever seen. After being busted in a car theft ring, two gangster friends Nick (rapper Ja Rule) and Sasha (Steven Seagal) are jailed in New Alcatraz prison where mercenaries break in and storm the prison to hold a prisoner ransom who knows the location of a secret stash of over two hundred million dollars in gold. Now they must team up with other prisoners and beat the mercenaries before they kill everyone. I got the sense this is supposed to be a futuristic film, but there’s never truly verification. The prison is re-opened due to overcrowding and it’s supposedly advanced but shockingly stone age. The prison is supposed to be state of the art and advanced but there’s a shockingly low head count when it comes to prisoners (I counted twenty-five).

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Tart (2001)

Posted on September 7, 2003 by Felix Vasquez

This is yet another grim portrayal of troubled teenagers mingling among more troubled teenagers; and what’s truly disturbing is that most of it seems exaggerated. I’m not sure if the movie was inspired by true events or concocted by Christina Wayne, but it’s grim, and I wish most of it was even remotely interesting. Catherine Storm is a middle-class reject who hangs out with her seductive best friend Delilah whom tends to stay away from the posh in-crowd. After a chance encounter with a popular girl, she begins to become accepted among the status quo until she begins to see that popularity among upper class isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

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Donnie Darko (2001)

Posted on August 24, 2003 by Felix Vasquez

Over the past two years, “Donnie Darko” has slowly managed to achieve an underground cult status among movie lovers and horror lovers, so when I was able to grab hold of this, I had to check it out. Jake Gyllenhaal, independent actor for critically acclaimed films such as “Moonlight Mile”, and “The Good Girl” stars as the anti-social delusional boy known as “Donnie Darko”. Instantly, the movie begins with a mystery: we see Darko lying along a road looking out upon the city and so forth a voice tells the prophecy to him about the end of the world occurring in 28 days. Throughout the entire film, a demonic spirits in the form of a rabbit begins telling him these omens, and thought Donnie struggles to fight it, can’t escape the messages.

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Road to Perdition (2002) (DVD)

Posted on August 24, 2003 by Felix Vasquez

Adapted from the graphic novel and based on a true story of the Sullivan family in the early thirties who are all tight knit with a rich old man named John Rooney whose known Mike Sullivan, the head of the Sullivan family since he was a child and raised him. Mike’s kids Peter and Michael (Tyler Hoechlin) soon become curious of Mike’s job. One night, young Michael follows his father on one of his “missions” and learns the gruesome secret of his job. In an attempt to protect his son from being hunted by a vicious assassin named McGuire, he sets out on the road with his son to search for salvation and dodge death.

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Stealing Harvard (2002)

Posted on August 24, 2003 by Felix Vasquez

Sure, this is a lame comedy, and surprisingly, I wanted to see this because I’m a big fan of Jason Lee. The movie is so silly and inept it’s pretty enjoyable. It’s not hard to see that much of the dialogue in the movie is improvised, especially by “comedian” Tom Green who looks like he made up his entire monologues. At one point he throws a paper ball into a car at a girl, and you can tell she wasn’t expecting it. Tom Green manages to be funny in some very rare parts of the movie and had me chuckling occasionally. Jason Lee whose starred in great films like “Dogma” and “Almost Famous” is a pretty good straight man in the film and just stands around reacting to Tom Green’s foolishness.

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Red Dragon (2002)

Posted on August 24, 2003 by Felix Vasquez

I was very skeptical as to whether this would work; first off I really enjoyed the first film and the second film was completely violent and senseless, but inevitably, I was surprised with the end-result. To any one who has thoroughly reviewed this website and inspected its contents, I am a big fan of Edward Norton. He is a great asset to this trilogy and really manages to absorb his role. His character is naive and ultimately shy in the beginning and manages to evolve into a tougher and cooler person by the climax. I assumed he would end up being just a Clarise Starling character clone, but I was glad because he ended up being a much better antagonist towards Lecter. I enjoyed the way he had a special ability to see things on a crime scene but the writer’s never truly put a lot of emphasis on it and it never truly became the basis for his character which made him a lot more interesting.

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