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We Beat the Dream Team

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  • Title: We Beat the Dream Team
  • IMDb: link

Headlined by Grant Hill, with interviews from both the Select Team and the 1992 USA Olympic Team, We Beat the Dream Team chronicles the only loss of the greatest basketball team ever assembled in the team’s first informal scrimmage with a group of young college kids, who if not for the Dream Team would have all likely been chose for the Olympics that year, giving them everything the team with 11 Hall of Fame players could handle.

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La Dolce Villa

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  • Title: La Dolce Villa
  • IMDb: link

In what could easily been released on the Hallmark Channel, La Dolce Villa is a perfectly fine example of a made for home video tale involving overprotective single dad Eric (Scott Foley) traveling to Italy to try and prevent his unfocused daughter Olivia (Maia Reficco) from buying a rundown villa in a small village with plans to restore it. While there, he falls for the town’s mayor Francesca (Violante Placido) beginning his first real romantic relationship with a woman since the death of his wife.

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Ghosts of Mars

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  • Title: John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars
  • IMDb: link

Not exactly the best of John Carpenter‘s career, Ghosts of Mars gives us Natasha Henstridge as the lone surviving member of a squad (which also includes Jason Statham and Pam Grier) on a terraformed Mars sent to retrieve a prisoner (Ice Cube) from a small mining town. Told mostly through flashbacks, with inserts for Lieutenant Melanie Ballard’s deposition, the officer tells an outrageous story that somehow doesn’t seem to raise any red flags for the tribunal who offer few questions, and even less skepticism, about her tale of miners possessed by Martian ghosts slaughtering an entire town.

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The Shining

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  • Title: The Shining
  • IMDb: link

While I don’t think the film completely succeeds in explaining all the story elements from Stephen King’s novel, Stanley Kubrick‘s version of The Shining is something to behold. A master visual storyteller, Kubrick brings the empty hotel to life in vivid hues as Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as the caretaker for the Overlook Hotel during the winter months along with his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son (Danny Lloyd).

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You’re Cordially Invited

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  • Title: You’re Cordially Invited
  • IMDb: link

There’s a concept at the heart of You’re Cordially Invited which could have produced an okay film. This is not that film. Through the first, of many, contrivances, two families book the same small wedding venue on the same weekend. Oddly, it’s neither the bride nor groom of either side as the main characters but the father (Will Ferrell) of one of the brides (Geraldine Viswanathan) and the sister (Reese Witherspoon) of the other bride (Meredith Hagner).

While at first agreeing to work together to make the best of a bad situation and share the venue, conflicts arise (mostly through more contrivances rather than reasonable actions by any character) leading to each actively trying to destroy the other wedding (but in mostly lame ways as anything truly bad that happens is always accidental).

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