When I first saw “This Film…,” I loved it.  I thought it made a valid point and pointed out incisive truths about the film industry.  When I watched it again, I didn’t love it so much.  Those two positives still exist, but once you know what’s coming you can focus on the execution, which is bias and almost ignorantly idiotic…

A positive start, yes?

You’ve seen this before: the drinkin’, gamblin’ rabble-rouser who – for some reason or another – has to take a youngster under his wing whilst he goes about his drinkin’ and gamblin’ ways.  Surely that youngster won’t cause him to expose a heart of gold and turn his life around…  While Real Steel doesn’t miss a beat for that genre, it gets some key things right to keep you enjoying the movie…

The key thing here is that you click this link

3-Way Split

The 5th Musketeer

10.5 Apocalypse

12 Days of Terror

Death Race

Delicatessen

Seed

Timecrimes

I was all set to love Drive.  All the right people liked it, I dig Ryan Gosling, and the write-ups spoke of a blend of dark elements which normally make me purr.  The opening scene had me convinced that I was about to be blown away by some moody awesomeness, but by film’s end I found myself almost completely unaffected…

Need i make a joke about being unaffected by clicking here…  NEED I?

On the road to comedy, there are ups and downs.  If it’s in the pursuit of the eventual ‘big laugh,’ I’ll let it pass.  ‘The Ten’ is uneven in a new way, drumming up a formula that could’ve been a non-stop laugh fest but ends up a muddle, one of those movies for which I’m sure repeated viewings will expose the hidden hilariousness…

exposed

Black Swarm is watchable.  That sounds like a brush off, but many films are not watchable.  Winning has also helmed several not-in-theater monster movie affairs, and Swarm shows a competence with the concept.  But, much like a lot of 90s DTV that have CGI’d covers promising wackiness that never quite rears its head on film, Winning follows a tried and true lower budget formula of promising a lot and showing us little…

i only promise that everything you wish for will come true if you click here

Whoosh and bedazzle!  Brucey made a couple bad movies recently.  Hint: Catch .44 was one of them.

It’s not that Catch .44 is incompetent in presentation, it just lacks it’s own soul…

yay for soul-lacking!

Wake Wood sets off okay, but as is common with *movies*, some elements present from our first few scenes creep up to cripple chunks of the movie later on.  But what really kills it is that age old horror movie problem of “let’s ditch the logic as soon as the killin’ starts.”

ditch all logic by clicking here

The success of (Eden Lake) is to prevent the movie from seeming like it exists just to terrorize you.  It’s rarely exploitative in its violence, and the affair proceeds as though the film wants to be about a leisurely vacation but cannot avoid getting entangled in the horrible sequence of events it presents…

horrible events to follow

Re-Animator is my first true love.  I had my years with Rushmore and Eyes Wide Shut, but those were fleeting relations, before I truly understood the range of emotions available for film.  While director Stuart Gordon would somewhat suffer from Tobe Hooper-esque one-hit-wonderness, Re-Animator nonetheless remains an amazing film, unique in its dedication to its tone and style, still capable of eliciting “holy crap” moments from a post Dead Alive-over-gored horror viewer…

More hyphens await thisaway