Just an oddball mama’s boy from the back bayous of Louisiana, Bobby Boucher (Sandler) never wanted anything more than to quench the thirst of the dehyrdrated athletes who treat him like dirt. But when Coach Klein (Winker) makes the call that allows Bobby to finally stand up for himself, it unleashes a torrent of bottled up frustration and exposes a talent for tackling that tansforms him from a meek water distribution engineer to the hardest hitter ever to roam the gridiron. Read the rest of this entry

Perhaps the highest compliment you can pay to Edward Norton is that his Oscar-nominated performance in American History X nearly convinces you that there is a shred of logic in the tenets of white supremacy. If that statement doesn’t horrify you, it should; Norton is so fully immersed in his role as a neo-Nazi skinhead that his character’s eloquent defense of racism is disturbingly persuasive–at least on the surface. Looking lean and mean with a swastika tattoo and a mind full of hate, Derek Vinyard (Norton) has inherited racism from his father, and that learning has been intensified through his service to Cameron (Stacy Keach), a grown-up thug playing tyrant and teacher to a growing band of disenfranchised teens from Venice Beach, California, all hungry for an ideology that fuels their brooding alienation. The film’s basic message–that hate is learned and can be unlearned–is expressed through Derek’s kid brother, Danny (Edward Furlong), whose sibling hero-worship in (more…)

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Studio: Gaiam Americas Release Date: 02/03/2004 Rating: Nr Read the rest of this entry

Take off your thinking caps and toss ‘em in a corner, ‘cuz you won’t need ‘em when you’re watching this deliriously dumb thriller from 1997. Bruce Willis stars as a demoted FBI agent who comes to the aid of an autistic boy whose mind holds a potentially deadly secret. It seems that by gazing on a puzzle magazine and making order out of a hidden system of numbers, the 9-year-old autistic boy (Miko Hughes) has accidentally deciphered a sophisticated top-secret government code. This makes him the prime target of the ruthless bureaucrat (Alec Baldwin, in one of his silliest roles), and Willis comes to the rescue. This formulaic thriller sets up this plot with a lot of entertaining urgency, but you can’t give any thought to Mercury Rising or the whole movie collapses under the weight of its own illogic and nonsense. The redeeming values are the performances of Willis, young Hughes, and newcomer Kim Dickens as a woman who agrees (perhaps too easily, it seems) to aid Willis in h (more…)

There was such a magic on the screen in 1995 when the people at Pixar came up with the first fully computer-animated film, Toy Story. Their second feature film, A Bug’s Life, may miss the bull’s-eye but Pixar’s target is so lofty, it’s hard to find the film anything less than irresistible. Brighter and more colorful than the other animated insect movie of 1998 (Antz), A Bug’s Life is the sweetly told story of Flik (voiced by David Foley), an ant searching for better ways to be a bug. His colony unfortunately revolves around feeding and fearing the local grasshoppers (lead by Hopper, voiced with gleeful menace by Kevin Spacey). When Flik accidentally destroys the seasonal food supply for the grasshoppers he decides to look for help (”We need bigger bugs!”). The ants, led by Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), are eager to dispose of the troublesome Flik. Yet he finds help–a hearty bunch of bug warriors–and brings them back to the colony. Unfortunately they are (more…)

There was such a magic on the screen in 1995 when the people at Pixar came up with the first fully computer-animated film, Toy Story. Their second feature film, A Bug’s Life, may miss the bull’s-eye but Pixar’s target is so lofty, it’s hard to find the film anything less than irresistible. Brighter and more colorful than the other animated insect movie of 1998 (Antz), A Bug’s Life is the sweetly told story of Flik (voiced by David Foley), an ant searching for better ways to be a bug. His colony unfortunately revolves around feeding and fearing the local grasshoppers (lead by Hopper, voiced with gleeful menace by Kevin Spacey). When Flik accidentally destroys the seasonal food supply for the grasshoppers he decides to look for help (”We need bigger bugs!”). The ants, led by Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), are eager to dispose of the troublesome Flik. Yet he finds help–a hearty bunch of bug warriors–and brings them back to the colony. Unfortunately they are (more…)

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This straight-to-video animated story is set in the Beast’s castle which, as viewers know from the original Beauty and the Beast film, is under a spell until the Beast can learn to love. Starting with this familiar premise, Belle’s Magical World plummets into three disjointed episodes surrounding Belle’s life as a captive in the castle. In “The Perfect World,” a misunderstanding of words erupts between Belle and Beast, made worse by a feigned apology. Fifi and Lumiere take the spotlight in “Fifi’s Folly,” when a romantic evening together becomes a chilling adventure inside a runaway sleigh. In “The Broken Wing,” Belle entreats the Beast to act kindly toward a tiny songbird. Each tale offers a diluted moral message, yet the entire effort feels contrived and confusing, a ploy by the folks at Disney to add cash to their coffers by exploiting the popularity of the original motion picture classic. (Ages 5 and older) –Lynn Gibson Read the rest of this entry

If you’re a fan of brooding comic-book antiheroes, got a nihilistic jolt from The Crow (1994), and share director Alex Proyas’s highly developed preoccupation for style over substance, you might be tempted to call Dark City an instant classic of visual imagination. It’s one of those films that exists in a world purely of its own making, setting its own rules and playing by them fairly, so that even its derivative elements (and there are quite a few) acquire their own specific uniqueness. Before long, however, the film becomes interesting only as a triumph of production design. And while that’s certainly enough to grab your attention (Blade Runner is considered a classic, after all), it’s painfully clear that Dark City has precious little heart and soul. One-dimensional characters are no match for the film’s abundance of retro-futuristic style, so it’s best to admire the latter on its own splendidly cinematic terms. Trivia buffs will be interested to know that the (more…)