Pretty in Pink

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Marie Antoinette
  • IMDb: link

Marie AntoinetteThis is what a film should look like.  Visually, it’s a cinematic treat in the purest meaning; a vacation for your eyes from the copious dull white streets of suburbia, the stacks of rows of white cubicles, the houses with white trim and white refrigerators.  Marie Antoinette is an assault on the visually dull, attacking the viewer with dulled but somehow vibrant colors that are all too often shunned from our modern world.

Marie (Kirsten Dunst) is just your average teenager.  She lives with her parents, loves her dog and has a prolific wardrobe to say the least.  Really, the only thing that sets her apart is that she marries a Prince and eventually becomes the Queen of France; but that’s it really.

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Terry’s Train Wreck

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Tideland
  • IMDb: link

TidelandTideland is so bad you honestly wonder if it was made as a joke.  It makes Running Scared (if you forgot how much I detested that film check out the review) look merely mediocre.  It’s dreadful, and one of the worst films ever made.

The film opens with the heroin-addicted couple who use their daughter Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) to prepare their needles.  After the mother (Jennifer Tily) dies of and overdose, Noah (Jeff Bridges) takes his daughter to the country to the abandoned farmhouse where he grew up.

There he promptly overdoes himself leaving Jeliza-Rose alone with his decomposing corpse in the middle of the living room.  She’s so screwed-up she doesn’t notice and walks around in her own fantasy world with her only friends, the detached heads of a handful of dolls.  Of course she has to periodically return and give the decomposing body a big hug.

Out one day she runs into a retarded young man named Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), and the evil-crone who takes care of him (Janet McTeer), who are just as screwed-up as she is, if not more so.  They also seem to live in a bizarre world not unlike young Jeliza-Rose.

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The Lisbon Girls

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Virgin Suicides
  • IMDb: link

“Everyone dates the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls.  People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped out elms, the harsh sunlight, and the continuing decline of our auto industry.  Even as teenagers we tried to put the pieces together; we still can’t.  Now, whenever we run into each other at business lunches or cocktail parties, we find ourselves in the corner going over the evidence one more time.  All to understand those five girls who, after all these years, we can’t get out of our minds.”

virgin-suicides-poster

The Lisbon girls were beautiful.  The five daughters of Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) and Mr. Lisbon (James Woods), a high school teacher, captured the minds and hearts of the neighborhood boys in the early 1970’s in the sleepy Michigan suburbs.

The girls, Therese (Leslie Hayman) 17 years-old, Mary (A.J. Cook) 16, Bonnie (Chelse Swain) 15, Lux (Kirsten Dunst) 14, and Cecila (Hanna Hall) 13, would all be gone in the course of a single year.

In the space of two summers the sleepy suburbs would be woken to the deaths of five beautiful young women, all at their own hands.  The haunting suicides would leave behind unfinished dreams and imaginations by the boys they left behind (Anthony DeSimone, Lee Kagan, Robert Schwartzman, Noah Shebib, and Jonathan Tucker).

What caused such events to occur?  The sheltered life of the girls didn’t help matters, nor the strict homelife.  Was that all?  And if so, was there nothing that could be done?  The film’s characters look back with a tearful eye in wonder.

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Elizabethtown disappoints

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Elizabethtown
  • IMDB: link

elizabethtown-posterElizabethtown has everything going for it, good stars, a diverse supporting cast, awesome music, and many of Cameron Crowe’s little trademark touches.  So why did I leave the theater so disappointed? 

The more I thought about the film my disappointment turned to anger.  The only story line that hasn’t been stolen from one of his earlier films, the effect of the death of your father, is constantly interrupted by an overly cute love story and a collection of the oddest and nicest group of hicks you will ever meet.  I guess everyone who grew up in Mayberry moved to Elizabehtown.

Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) is having a bad week.  First he is fired after some kind of tremendous blunder that has something to do with shoes, his shallow girlfriend (Jessica Biel) leaves him, and his boss (Alec Baldwin) makes him give an interview accepting total responsibility for the failure. 

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Comic Book Shelf

/ / Comics

Hey there true believers!  Today, with Authority, we celebrate the tenth issue of our Comic Book Shelf edition hitting our newsstand.  Want to know what’s getting released today at the old comic shop but too busy, or lazy (not that there’s anything wrong with that), to bother?  Well no sweat Bat-fans as we’ve got the scoop of what comics and graphic novels are hitting the shelves today.

This week’s releases include The Authority, Batman and the Mad Monk, Ultimate Fantastic Four, The Flash: Fastest Man Alive, Hellblazer, Ghost Rider, Wonder Woman, Blade, Deadman, The Omega Men, Wolverine, and more!

If you’re looking for graphic novels you don’t want to miss Batman: Gotham County Line, Essential Marvel Horror Vol. 1, Birds of Prey: The Battle Within, Fables: 1001 Nights of the Snowfall, Exiles Vol. 13: World Tour Book 2, Superman Returns: The Prequels, and more.

For the full list check inside…

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