Category: reviews

video review : The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

video review : The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

There may not be a point to this Morgan Spurlock documentary other than the obvious fact that sales-based corporations market and advertise themselves in all sorts of ways, but it sure is entertaining watching him illustrate the point. And it’s not as obvious as you might think; in the sense that the general public is so bombarded with plugs; they’ve become such a normal part of our lives; that we tend to overlook them. They just sort of blend in with everything else. So when he takes us to São Paulo, Brazil; a city in which the mayor has banned all public advertising; it looks like some kind of weird ghost town; a place I wouldn’t want to live.

That’s because, with a few annoying exceptions like internet pop-ups and people stopping me on the streets, I don’t mind companies trying to sell me things. It’s an effortless way to discover new products I might find useful or otherwise like. Whether they’re psychologically manipulating my brain “activity” or not, I don’t feel as if I’m being taken advantage of because it’s ultimately my choice whether to buy in or not. And the fun tone Spurlock presents as he goes around meeting with different executives to sponsor his “Movie”; the fourth-wall-collapsing irony is that a documentary about ads is funded by ads; suggests he’d agree with me.

my rating : 4 of 5

2011

video review : Uninhabited

video review : Uninhabited

Beth is a skinny girl who doesn’t need to cover her face in makeup to be cute. She’s on a beautiful island. Those are the good parts. Everything else about this modern-day ghost story is either downright bad; dead people being able to work video cameras makes no sense; or just plain boring.

my rating : 2 of 5

2010

video review : Retreat

video review : Retreat

The two protagonists in this movie; the couple we’re supposed to care about; are so faggy and make such stupid decisions that it’s hard to have any positive feelings toward them. That’s especially true with the guy, named Martin. Most of the dumb decisions him and his girlfriend make have to do with guns, but what he does at about the halfway point is so idiotic that I started to hope for his death. Is that to say that brainless cowards deserve to die? Not necessarily. I just didn’t want to look at his stupid face anymore.

The girl, played by Thandiwe Newton, is kind of cute. A few deliberate body shots even give her a sexual allure; I was hoping for a rape scene; but her looks aren’t attractive enough to make-up for such a silly story. The underlying premise, which has to do with a deadly airborne disease and a bad guy; her potential rapist and Martin’s potential killer; could’ve worked, but screen-shouting suspense can only go so far in a movie in which the characters are such retards when it comes to what to do and what not to do with a gun.

my rating : 3 of 5

2011

video review : Cast Away

video review : Cast Away

There’s a great movie in Cast Away. The time in which a Fed Ex worker named Chuck Noland is stranded on an island, most of the movie, is a triumph in movie-making. It puts a single actor on what appears to be a single set for a long time with no real dialogue, other characters to interact with or cuts back to the normal world, and manages to stay both captivating and believable the whole time.

Well, there’s one thing that isn’t very believable. It has to do with a Fed Ex package; one of the few man-made items Chuck Noland has at his disposal. There’s also a volleyball, ice skates and not much else. This is a tale of survival in the truest sense. What almost ruins the experience is the epilogue, which lasts for too long and seems irrelevant in comparison to everything that came before it.

my rating : 4 of 5

2000

Damla

Damla

Damla is an assortment of chewy (fat-free) candy, center-filled with gooey fruit juice. You don’t get the sweet burst you might expect, but it’s certainly enough to keep your taste buds intrigued.

Apple, orange, peach, strawberry, cherry; they’re all in the mix. But you wouldn’t know until you put one in your mouth because they all look the same; like white, odd-shaped pieces of taffy.

my rating : 4 of 5

audio review : Revenue Retrievin [ Overtime Shift | Graveyard Shift ] ( albums ) … E-40

audio review : Revenue Retrievin [ Overtime Shift | Graveyard Shift ] ( albums ) ... E-40 audio review : Revenue Retrievin [ Overtime Shift | Graveyard Shift ] ( albums ) ... E-40

Apparently E-40 likes Revenue Retrievin a lot more than I do; enough to release another set just one year after the first. That’s another two albums; twenty songs each or forty new songs. Get it? “40” new songs? It’s a concept you can appreciate only if, rather than being a fan since the beginning, you didn’t really start fucking with E-40 until his Ghetto Report Card gave him a sudden burst of mainstream popularity. By then, the overall quality of his music, once consistently good, had fallen off tremendously. That’s thanks mainly to an array of underproduced beats influenced by California’s Bay Area “hyphy” movement.

This album is still new-school E-40, but there’s a song included in which he declares at the beginning of the track that he “had to bring back that old-school mob sound”. The beat he proceeds to rap to, with its melodic bassline, sounds just like the kind of beat he used to rap to, which suggests he hasn’t completely lost touch of what helped make him the rapper he is today. Why he doesn’t make an entire album that sounds like that, instead of letting his son (Droop-E) tarnish his catalog with amateur run-of-the-mill production, is the question. That song though, entitled My Money Straight, is one of the album’s best.

There are a few wack songs, but most are just mediocre with dull hooks. The very first track, for example; a 2011 remake of the Mister Flamboyant anthem from two decades ago; relies on repeated snippets of movie or TV-show dialogue, which just sounds stupid. What’s smart, on the other hand, is E-40’s decision to start rapping fast again, rather the fact that it seems he’s starting to rap faster more often like he used to. That, along with the fact that what he says in his verses is almost always interesting and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, makes the hundred-or-so verses he spits the best thing this album has to offer.

my rating : 3 of 5

2011

video review : The Hangover

video review : The Hangover

With all its outrageousness, The Hangover, about four guys on a bachelor party trip to Las Vegas, is short on laughs. I laughed once, when the fat jail-tour kid was about to take a photo of the fiancée’s brother, and smiled a few times. That’s it. The rest of the script is hack city, not amusing in the least, as hard as it tries to be, and the wandering plot isn’t interesting enough to make-up for that fact.

It’s all about what happens during the trip, much of which none of the guys can remember. They awake in their hotel room on their first morning in Vegas, the place is wrecked, there’s a tiger in the bathroom and one of the four guys, the bachelor, is missing. It’s a lazy plot device that allows for random wackiness that doesn’t have to be explained as the three try to piece together what happened the night before.

my rating : 1 of 5

2009

video review : The Beaver

video review : The Beaver

I don’t mind the puppet. It’s not cute, clever or particularly interesting, but it’s about the only memorable thing this dud of a movie has to offer. The story is about a “sick” man who develops a split personality complex in an effort to mend his broken life. He does that by living thru a “prescription” hand puppet he finds in a garbage dump. Its name is The Beaver and he wears it all day every day. He also has conversations with it and uses it to converse with other people, including his estranged family.

He’s supposed to be the crazy one, but his Beaver at-least serves a psychological benefit and doesn’t seem to pose any danger. His supposedly normal oldest son handles his troubles differently; by repeatedly banging his forehead against the bedroom wall, causing a dent that eventually breaks thru to the outside. The plots bounce back and forth between father and son; the latter of which revolves around a banal romance the boy has with a girl from his school; a relationship I couldn’t care less about.

It’s that boring narrative parallel that kills what could’ve come close to being a decent movie. Then again, while the first third is engaging as it makes you wonder how director Jody Foster; who also plays the boy’s mother and the puppetmaster’s wife; is going to make such a silly prop work with such a serious story, the novelty eventually wears thin and leaves a strange silliness where real feelings should be. The ending tries especially hard to build emotional depth, but it just sort of comes off as a maudlin mess.

my rating : 2 of 5

2011

video review : Horrible Bosses

video review : Horrible Bosses

This is a movie a lot of working people can relate to. The main characters, men with white-collar jobs, hate their bosses for good reason. Even Dale, a dental assistant who’s sexually harassed by his hot chick boss, is justified because he wants to remain monogamous to his fiancée. Those constant advances are supposed to be funny, sometimes they are, but the sexist double standard they take advantage of isn’t lost on me.

As far as malice goes, the dentist is by far the least horrible of the three bosses. She is at least attracted to Dale in a positive way. His two best friends, Nick and Kurt, have to put-up with bosses who seem to hate them right back. Sitting in a bar one day, the three goofballs come-up with the idea to kill their bosses. Once that plot point is set, you’re hooked in, waiting to see how everything is going to turn-out in the end.

Too bad the story doesn’t go for real suspense. It’s built upon a simple yet potentially brilliant concept that could’ve worked wonders in a serious movie. As a comedy, one that’s consistently almost funny but never really funny, everything from how horrible the bosses are to how the workers go about planning to kill them is caricatured to unrealistic proportions. The ending you wait an hour and a half for is especially ridiculous.

my rating : 3 of 5

2011

video review : Horrible Bosses 2

audio review : Loved By Few Hated By Many ( album ) … Willie D

audio review : Loved By Few Hated By Many ( album ) ... Willie D

Willie D doesn’t holler that much anymore. Hollering was his trademark. He’d tell Bald Head Hoes to suck his dick at the top of his lungs and I’d laugh. The only time he really raises his voice here is at the end of If I Was White. “We are black, they are white,” the racist anthem goes, “Our blood is red, but we can never unite.”

He’s still rapping about Geto life from the perspective of an inner-city street thug, which I guess is appropriate because these days his vocal delivery sounds more like 2Pac than the Willie D from back in the day. There’s also a song entitled Lil Killaz that has him sounding oddly similar to his homeboy Scarface.

Still I prefer even this Willie D over Scarface and 2Pac. This album is a disappointment, but there are standouts. The best is Freaky Deaky featuring Pimp C. The two trade sex verses over a sultry beat, but the best verse comes from Willie D’s cousin Nay-Nay, who steals the spotlight with her country flow.

my rating : 3 of 5

2000

audio review : Black Summers Night ( album ) … Maxwell

audio review : Black Summers Night ( album ) ... Maxwell

It’s actually Maxwell’s band that makes the music sound so damn good. The songs themselves, in terms of melodic arrangements and such, generally hold-up decently, but it’s the accommodating instrumentation that makes them drip with soulful sexiness.

This is a muddy mix of bassy funk music; the kind jazzmen jammed to in the summers of the 1970s. There’s what sounds like a live trumpet section in the mix; a nice backdrop for Maxwell’s voice, which can go from whiny to falsetto at a moment’s notice.

He’s singing mostly to a girl, pleading and protesting his love for her to the point of worship, which would be acceptable if it were just about sex. When it comes to pretty girls, Maxwell is a sucker for romance and that the crooner has no qualms about.

What’s redeeming is a dance groove called Phoenix Rise. It’s the one song that isn’t held back by sappy lyrics. That makes one wonder how much better this lukewarm album could be vocal-free as just a straight music soundtrack for black summer nights.

my rating : 3 of 5

2009

audio review : Daddy’s Home ( album ) … Big Daddy Kane

audio review : Daddy's Home ( album ) ... Big Daddy Kane

Big Daddy Kane is getting older in age and, judging by these album pictures, plumper in size. His vocals are also starting to sound more labored. When he goes into hardcore battle mode; the Raw vocal delivery he’s been known for since “88”; there’s an audible gasp between almost every phrase. The Sex song suggests he’s still a multi-ladies man in the bedroom, but his voice is starting to sound more like a veteran church preacher.

As far as rap skills go, he’s still sonning the competition with a stockpile of funny lyrics. Lyrical Gymnastics, featuring a clever Whitney Houston nod, ranks among his best. He’s generally fallen off a little though since the last album. Impressive similes and metaphors have become harder to find among all the corny or awkwardly constructed fillers. “You think that I be shaving my rhymes,” he says on the title track, “Cause they be so smooth.”

my rating : 3 of 5

1994