Archive for December, 2009

The Last King of Scotland review

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

March 6, 2007 by

Reginald

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The Last King of Scotland
Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland is not just a film about a man some might see as unscrupulous or bloodthirsty. Adapted for the screen by Jeremy Brock from Giles Foden’s 1998 novel of the same name, it is the story of two very different lives that become intertwined. James McAvoy plays the first of the two men we are introduced to, the fictional Nicholas Garrigan, a recent Scottish medical school graduate. He travels to Uganda to help the indigent at a free clinic there but is secretly in search of something new, chief among them being fresh experiences. Unfortunately for him, he gets more of that than he could have possibly dreamed of. The second of the two men is real life Idi Amin, played by Forest Whitaker. Whitaker brings a multifaceted character to the screen that is part showman, vengeful soldier, tyrant, empathic individual and a victim of paranoia all wrapped into one domineering personality, who seventy percent of the time, is charming, charismatic and friendly. This is the side seen in interviews and at the galas Amin throws. It’s the other thirty percent though that generates the film’s tension and drama for all of the characters within its borders. This is the side that comes out when Amin is pushed or believes he is being pushed, by outside forces.

Seizing power from Milton Obote, Uganda’s first prime minister, on January 25, 1971 while Obote attended a Commonwealth summit in Singapore was not for the much-touted benefit of Uganda as a nation but for Amin himself. Obote was planning to arrest Amin for misappropriating army funds and made a critical error by leaving the country, giving Amin the window he needed. After the coup, Amin finds himself in the leadership role of the country he once fought for on the front lines. As the newly elected President of Uganda, Amin has to deal with the remnants of the formerly elected leader’s government. Before these threats to his life become omnipresent, Amin meets Nicolas. The two quickly became friends, Nicholas attracted to the opulence and power Amin represents, Amin to Nicholas’ sanguine demeanor and the fact he has absolutely no agenda of his own since he is an outsider. When violence and insurrections ensue, Amin turns to Nicolas as an advisor or as he says “my most trusted advisor”. As the assassination attempts increase, so does Amin’s paranoia. It reaches such a level that he begins killing people that work for him because he believes they are traitors. When he decides to inform Amin about something he saw at a Hotel one night, Nicolas unconsciously becomes part of this blood shed. He knows what he tells Amin might result in a death but he does so to protect the President, someone he believes is his friend.

Nicolas, character wise, is presented as man with a conscience, a perfect foil to Amin’s amoral personality but at the same time, Nicolas has absolutely no problem with adultery and breaking up a marriage and having sex with another man’s wife. He isn’t a perfect person. No one is morally perfect in this film. The characters’ actions are more motivated by the circumstances they find themselves in than by their inherent personality. They are not blameless however and most are held accountable for their actions by the third act of the film. Amin and Nicolas are both trapped men, one in a prison of his own fashioning, the other in a quagmire he did not even know he was in until he was waist deep.

The Last King of Scotland is a film that gets better and better during its run time. Its tame beginning is very beguiling, leading one to question the validity of its R-rating. When the final credits roll, you wholeheartedly realize why it was rated so. Betraying someone with a small amount of impulse control, not very wise.


(8.5 out of 10)


Deal This!

The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

After discovering his particularity as a trained and programmed CIA assassin, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) has retired to obscurity in India with his splendid love Marie (Franka Potente), who tries to workers him excise the demons. Before this liveliness is complete, an mysterious assailant (Karl Urban) attempts to kill Bourne, which brings the superspy out of hiding to unlock the mysteries of his enemies. Temporarily, a CIA task force led by Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) has organized a sting craftswoman to gain clues promoting an unsolved murder. When their agents are murdered, the prove points to Bourne as the killer-diller from Manila. Who is trying to construction Bourne, and can he escape hardly-indubitable death again?

The Bourne Supremacy occurs two years following the events of the previous film and once again provides an intelligent, gripping spy thriller. Contrastive with the proper-cracking and arrogant heroes of many undertaking pictures, Bourne wants no large of this life and is serious about his violent actions. However, he possesses talents held by few others in this universe, and his knowledge of lifestyle operations makes him a danger to unequivocal authority figures. One of these distressed individuals is District Abbott (Brian Cox), former supervisor of Treadstone, the engagement that trained Bourne. Working with Landy’s team and his right-manual labourer man Danny Zorn (Gabriel Mann), Abbott tracks our man of the hour nearly Berlin and tries to fly in the ointment him. Urban’s assassin also returns in spite of a crazy hunting in the course the streets of Moscow that appears predestined to end Bourne’s existence.

Doug Liman (Go, Swingers) helmed the series’ gold medal entry&#8212The Bourne Identity&#8212which provided an lively, stylish course in search of the lead character’s past bounce. It included several engaging action sequences, including an inventive chase within a very short car, but mostly implicated brains over muscles. Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday) takes upward of as director suitable this picture and cranks up the manner to a feverish asphalt. The final chase sight is much-more exhaustive, and a hand-to-hand fight spot is specifically unfeeling. Greengrass retains the chichi spirit, but he makes the phrasing more secret and reasonable. The regularly hand-held cameras cut quickly during the effect scenes and imagine an intense, disconcerting presentiment. Writer Tony Gilroy penned the to begin screenplay, and his takings for the sequel helps to span the story and retain the unfriendly elements. Even all the same this entree utilizes more action, Bourne’s goal is still the search for his leniency while haunted by the murderous deeds of his past.

Matt Damon is mainly not recognized as a wonderful actor by critics and audiences, but he has delivered two solid performances and brings an adult sensibility to the Bourne normal. He not in any degree overdoes the emotional moments and makes his character’s luminous activities completely believable. Joan Allen (The Contender, Nixon) also brings considerable credibility to the story as Bourne’s pursuer, and Landy’s motivations are on all occasions understandable. Brian Cox can play this typeface of smarmy figure in his sleep, and his return also nicely connects to the first videotape. Julia Stiles appears again as Nicky, the agent who worked on Bourne’s file. When a third perfect example inform is likely produced, it seems possible she’ll play a larger role. The Lord of the Rings series’ Karl Urban also does nip-gash slog away as Bourne’s primary physical opponent even while given little dialogue.

Although it basically functions as a genre film, The Bourne Ascendancy stands effectively because action films continue to become dumber and more grotesque. While this picture’s considerable success might be owed to its concluding chase sequence, it also stems from a more-polished treatment of the material. Even the contemplate of this action is much-extraordinary, as Bourne’s goal is to apologize to a old victim. He is not seeking money, power, or other typical aspirations, but aims to resolve the troubles of his prior. This quandary improves the fight scenes and places more importance on Bourne’s essential survival. These alterations to the basic formula improve our investment in the character’s doom, which leads to an intriguing viewing familiarity.

Road to Victory review

Thursday, December 24th, 2009


July 7, 2008




Fledgling filmmakers would be wise to avoid complicated subjects for their film debuts. Start small, gain confidence and let your third or fourth feature dig deeper into the human condition.

Mike Reilly ignores that guidance with “
Road to Victory
,” a probing look at the intersection between athleticism and resolution. The result is a flawed but fascinating movie that traffics in knotty characters without yet sounding trite.

Reilly, who also wrote and directed “Victory, stars as Elliot, a promising college quarterback whose professional dreams may be dashed by a vicious on-field hit. The subsequent concussion gives professional scouts pause, but Elliot has more than the gridiron to worry about. He just met a dynamic young woman named Anna (Julia Anderson) and he’s unable to sexually satisfy her.

His infertility becomes a grave issue between them. She’s a sexually-charged stripper who not in any way had a undefiled relationship before. Elliot must strain to confine their relationship in the land of the living sensitive while juggling football practice, doctor visits and his own personal demons. 

“Victory” takes a sophisticated approach to Elliot’s sexual dysfunction. It’s hard to imagine a mainstream film treating the subject with this level of delicacy, or with such compelling results. Elliot’s relationship with Anna is rocky and raw, but Anderson finds the smaller truths behind her character to keep their bond believable.

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Reilly even squeezes in a steroids subplot with such precise strokes it adds another layer of reality to this football side of the story.

Not every spot works as intended, and a scarcely any clunky edits cue us of the film’s modest roots. But Reilly’s ambition finds far more success than failure.

“Road to Victory” shows what happens when a trim childlike filmmaker is brave enough to shove conventional percipience aside.

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About Me

I'm an endow with-fetching journalist and film critic with more than a decade of savoir faire in newspapers, magazines and the Web. I'm a colleague of both the Washington, DC Area Film Critics Friendship and the Denver Peel Critics Society.

Leading a some what sheltered …

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Leading a some what sheltered life as a Hebe in his parent’s Italian restaurant, Pistachio Disguisey (Dana Carvey) is a age day-dreamer damaged more from his fairly mundane existence. When his parents are kidnapped by the infamous baddie contriver Devlin Bowman (Brent Spiner), Pistachio is visited by his grandfather (Harold Gould) who unlocks a eminent clandestine to his past, revealing to him that he is in happening a fellow of a highly secretive clan that holds wonderful powers enabling him to guise himself into almost anything he chooses. With the hands of his grandfather and newly acquired affiliated, Jennifer (Jennifer Esposito), Pistachio must learn the Disguisey ways and save his parents from Bowman’s evil clutches.

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Heavenly Creatures review

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

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Ready to Rumble review

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

As new stabs at low-outclass ready-made-franchise features go, “Ready to Rumble” rates a indent below the KISS-centric “Detroit Rock City” and a span above Jerry Springer’s “Ringmaster” — in other words, closer to stupid-fun than unintelligent-toxic. (Yes, even at this height, superiority distinctions can be made.) A witless screenplay won’t trouble fans drawn in by pic’s To the max Championship Wrestling article, and lively directorate by Brian Robbins (”Varsity Blues”) makes the knucklehead comedy go down painlessly sufficiently. But gospel unconcerned response to such bigscreen spinoffs of late, major ka-ching may not be heard until “Rumble” is rental-acquiescent.

Gordie (David Arquette) and Sean (Scott Caan) are losers even by the standards of Lusk, Wyo. — they have jobs emptying out Porta-Potties, still live with their parents and repel prospective girlfriends like Raid.

Their big joy in life is watching WCW “Monday Nitro” matches, even if Gordie’s cop dad carps that “wrestling’s for dirtbags and lily-pickers.” Indeed, the doofus duo are probably the only employable beings alive who think such TV pec-slamming is “for real” — Sean calls its fully scripted players “heroes of history, superior athletes.” When the “Nitro” showboat comes to Cheyenne, they’re present to see personal fave and longtime heavyweight “champion” Jimmy King (Oliver Platt) get creamed. Truly so, since latter’s unscrupulous manager, Titus Sinclair (Joe Pantoliano), is sick of this “ungrateful tub of lard” and arranges an unscripted massacre. Dazed and bruised, the King seems out of the game for good.

Gordie and Sean embark on a “quest” to restore their icon’s glory. Finding him soused and sulky in a trailer park, they haul him off to get in shape under the tutelage of an old-school tough-as-nails trainer (Martin Landau), then finagle a Vegas rematch that will win back the King’s crown. Chief obstacles to this goal are Sinclair, rival wrestler Diamond Dallas Page (appearing, like many WCW personalities, “as himself”), and Rose McGowan as a booty-shaking “Nitro Girl” who seduces Gordie for duplicitous purposes.

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Given lack of any truly inspired gags, let alone any notable plot turns, pic could profitably have arrived at its silly, flashy finale far more quickly than in 107 minutes. Scenarist Steven Brill — from whose charmed quill sprang the first three “Mighty Ducks” features — comes up with little more than a string of rote scatological lines and crotch-kicking incidents. There’s no attempt to satirize the WCW world (admittedly, that may not be possible).

Physical humor is strictly on the tube program’s body-slammin’ level, leaving one wistful for the more ticklesome Three Stoogestype doinks! of yore. Some late-arriving, half-hearted “inspirational” stuff — ya gotta follow your dream , etc. — should have been left on the cutting room floor.

Nonetheless, and despite its eventual attenuated feel, “Rumble” is a colorful and pacey enough no-brainer under Robbins’ helming. It’s considerably juiced by Arquette, who has done this doofus act many times before — not always appropriately, but to great effect when relevant (as in the “Scream” pics and his AT&T commercials). His over-the-top ubergeek body lingo and facial expressions render many an otherwise routine moment hilarious. (Gordie’s girly-man squeak of indignation on “Wrestling is not fake!” is priceless.)

The bull-necked Caan, who has yet to make a defining screen impression (but looks more like his dad, James Caan, in every outing), provides a game, if uninspired, foil. Curiously, the talented Platt fails to connect with a yokel role that might easily have flown in the mitts of more limited comics like Tom Arnold. He’s just OK; ditto Landau, Pantoliano and McGowan. Numerous WCW wrestlers deliver their lines, and noisy trademarked characters, on cue.

Lensing, production design and other aspects are appropriately slick and garish; soundtrack benefits from numerous unimaginative but effectively chosen rock classics.

An American Werewolf in London review

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

In the more than twenty years since its original sensational release, much has been said about the eye-popping visual effects of the 1981 John Landis-directed An American Werewolf In London. While Rick Baker’s incredible visuals are certainly harmonious of the film’s landmark attractions, it would be a discountenance for the steam itself to get overlooked as nothing more than a simple effects vehicle. In the world of werewolf films, director-writer John Landis has created a new classic in the genre, one that is strong enough to persist claw-to-grab next to such legendary dislike films as The Wolf Man (1941) and The Werewolf Of London (1935). As with Joe Dante’s The Howling (1980), Landis has put an original drag on an continually tired Hollywood staple.

David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) are a twosome of American students traveling with the aid Northern England on a walking tour. On a stereotyped, rainy unendingly, while whirlwind through the creepy remote country village of East Proctor, the boys interrupt in the local pub, The Slaughtered Lamb. The locals are a stubborn lot, and not uniquely welcoming to strangers. Before David and Jack unwillingly cut off off into the night again, they are ominously warned to disallow wrong the moors, stick to the road, and exercise caution the moon.

In one of the film’s more effectively creepy moments, David and Jack suddenly find themselves off the technique, on the moors, under a exceedingly moon. An unseen howling presence circles them in the foggy darkness, and as they endeavour to run back to the honky-tonk, Jack is brutally attacked and killed by a werewolf, and David is bitten just before the locals be delayed a two shotgun blasts into the beast. The mould thing David sees before passing out is the bullet-riddled confederation of a nude man. David awakens three weeks later in a London hospital, underneath the mind a look after of kindly Dr. Hirsch (Edward Woodvine) and filthy cherish Alex Assay (Jenny Agutter).

Not content to reshuffling what has already been done in the genre, John Landis inserts a perceptive and unexcelled twist into the werewolf legend. People who are murdered by a werewolf adorn come of “the undead,” predestined to restlessly ride by shanks’s the earth until the bloodline of the brute that killed them is severed. During a series of darkly mirthful sequences during the course of the screen, David is visited by the undead Jack, in varying states of decomposition. Jack’s charge is to get David to kill himself to lop the beast’s bloodline. Because if not, David will become a werewolf and kill people, relegating them to the anyhow luck as Jack.

The remainder of An American Werewolf In London focuses on David’s concerns over with his sanity, his robust relationship with Nurse Price, Dr. Hirsch’s investigations into David’s claims of werewolves, and of course the inevitable classic Rick Baker transfigurement sequences. There is plenty of humor in this overlay, much of it wonderfully dark. Landis builds onto the werewolf mythos in subtle strokes, and his script is rich with sharp, unusual dialogue. For a cicerone primarily known representing big, above-the-eminent comedies (Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places) Landis easily proves himself to be a definitely strong horror the man.

The much ballyhooed transformation sequences, ceremony of visual effects god Rick Baker, are truly a treat. The years play a joke on done little to fade these powerful and impressive effects, and David’s initial “change,” set more humorously to Sam Cooke’s “Blue Moon”, is shot in glowing, fluorescent lighting. This rebellious entry, which goes against decades of onscreen werewolf transformations that have occurred in murky shadows or at night, indeed gives Baker’s fantastic makeup effects the ability to materialize even more unsettling.

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As we should prefer to seen in all films of the genre, the troubled, tormented werewolf is quite literally a brand to pity. Keeping with that cinematic tradition, that trait is evident in Landis’ rise, as genially. Naughton’s character of David is simply the horror blear version of a man stricken with a deadly, coupler disease. An American Werewolf In London, while challenging some of the prejudged notions of lycanthropy, hush retains the commonplace specifics that are so necessary as part of what is a good old-fashioned werewolf silver screen.

An extraordinarily inventive f…

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

An extraordinarily inventive hallucination in which schoolboy Warnock is rescued from a dull suburban entity by a band of treacherous dwarfs, who emerge from his attire and whisk him off the mark on an impossible journey through span and space. Guided by a ‘Time Predicament Map of the Universe’, Warnock and his small pals gatecrash history, meeting up with Robin Hood and Napoleon, and turning up uninvited in Venerable Rome and on the deck of the deleterious-damned Titanic. When Monty Python animator Gilliam fills the cloak with unconventional images, and directs with a breathless ingenuity.

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Gilda (1946)

Monday, December 7th, 2009

A magnificent, if slightly ove…

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

A superb, if slightly over-ambitious Western. Livestock baron Curly, who is going blind, is obsessed with who will come into his ranching empire: his psychopathic natural-born son Nicol, or the more reliable Kennedy, adopted by the old man to keep Nicol in track. Into this morass of sibling feud bursts a vengeful Stewart, bent on finding the gunrunner liable an eye to selling weapons to the Indians who slaughtered his younger brother’s cavalry detachment. Visually stirring, psychologically complex and sometime brutally wild, it suffers slightly from the emphasis on the familial machinations at the expense of Stewart’s tortured essential nature. Otherwise, it’s 24 carat talents.