Boys Next Door - Penelope Spheeris - The opening of the film prepares viewers for an unsettling expe

Asphalt Jungle - John Huston - Startlingly good ensemble cast. Atmospheric film noir at its best. Sterling Hayden has the blue-ribbon hang-dog face of the era, a defeated handsomeness and fatalistic posture, but this film also allows him to throw his weight around just a bit. I've never before been so impressed with his looming physicality and the brute at bay behind that five o'clock shadow, but he's only the hub of this picture connected to a half-dozen sturdy as hell spokes populating a workaday criminal underworld infused with as much romantic fatalism as any other picture you'd care to stack it up against. When John McIntire 's Police Commissioner gives his press release about Hayden's desperado on the run, he refers to him as a cornered animal resorts and great hotels without an ounce of humanity left in him, and the images of McIntire's granite righteousness making easy condemnations are juxtaposed with Hayden's mug suffering through his last moments and we all understand that the statement is ass-backward. resorts and great hotels Best moment: Sam Jaffe puts another nickel in the juke while the cops pass by the window outside.
Blood In Blood Out: Bound By Honor - Taylor Hackford - Epic Americana thwarted resorts and great hotels by heavy hands. Man, it should have been fantastic - based on writings of Jimmy Santiago Baca , set in the under-exposed Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles and spanning more than a decade in the lives of three blood relations on vastly different tracks, it was aiming high. The forced affectations of Damian Chapa would be forgivable, as they work with his character - the half-Anglo cousin, resorts and great hotels Miklo, who has a lot to prove - as much as the super-cool-to-hot-blooded Benjamin Bratt 's el Fonzie schtick fit Paco's resorts and great hotels alpha-male identity, if they had aged and developed along with Miklo, as he comes into his own. Instead, the third act finds the much-tested and more confident Miklo working harder than ever to sound correct, and he's doing his part to escalate the over-sell of everyone else on screen. The second act does improve dramatically when the film becomes a prison drama rather than vatos in the barrio , but damn, as soon as Miklo is back out on the street it devolves into all-yelling all-the-time and the quality resorts and great hotels goes way down. It's a shame too, because underneath all the strained Latino accents is a compelling story that unfortunately is largely smothered by bad acting, and awkward pacing. Best moment: Miklo's blood in.
Boys Next Door - Penelope Spheeris - The opening of the film prepares viewers for an unsettling experience by dumping some grisly resorts and great hotels details about notorious serial killers on us before introducing Roy and Bo ( Maxwell Caulfield and Charlie Sheen ), two blue collar um, boys next door - maybe not rich or popular at the high school they just graduated from, and maybe kinda resentful about their prospects, but they ought to make up for their non-homecoming-king status in pure handsome. Except, uh, no. Instead, they decide to take a graduation weekend trip to L.A. before they begin the second, and most likely last chapter of their lives working in a local factory where they've already resorts and great hotels got jobs lined up to begin on Monday. Only, things don't go the way they expect them to, which is funny because these guys seem to have never seen a movie before, even though they behave as if they thought they were starring in one. A weekend getting faced in Hollywood bars turns into a series of misadventures that quickly devolve resorts and great hotels into murders and our local heroes have crossed into the sights of some of L.A.'s finest. This one falls well short of its ambitions. If those opening facts about serial killers are supposed to prepare us for what's to come, they kinda fuck it up. If those opening bits were to be dumped and, instead, we just jumped right into the action that would probably make the film more intense, 'cause stacking Roy Bo's exploits next to say Ed Gein' s can't really lead to a favorable resorts and great hotels shock-factor resorts and great hotels side-by-side comparison for our duo, it can only make them a disappointment. I wonder if those bits were insisted upon by some nervous studio executive resorts and great hotels - it feels that way - though, even with the intro excised, the film has problems. For one, it can't make up its mind what the problem with the kids is. Are they reacting to peer and societal rejection or are they just bad seeds? (Roy does confess to Bo, out of the blue, that sometimes he has urges... bad urges.) We feel for them when they're kicked out of the popular kids' graduation shindig, and they wax lyrical about their blue-collar futures, but then we're invited to want to see them shown up when their attitudes toward women or homosexuals resorts and great hotels is exposed, resorts and great hotels and instead of feeling complex, the film feels divided against itself. It's got a nice finale, though, one that, I'm sure, went a ways toward giving Charlie Sheen the bad boy image that he rode through fare like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Major League resorts and great hotels . Best moment: resorts and great hotels Roy Bo take a leak through the chain-link fence of the factory before heading out of town - literally resorts and great hotels pissing on their future. Get it? No, actually, it's a nice scene.
Copper Season 1 - Tom Fontana - After the first episode I thought perhaps I'd found a keeper - the costumes and sets looked mostly good (which is huge in a period drama), the characters were rough and the violence more so, and the errant knight angle was not stressed as much as the trailers had bludgeoned me to believe. The second episode went darker, though I had a strange sense of dejavu which turned resorts and great hotels out to be from the main story following the first two episodes of Deadwood resorts and great hotels rather closely, but it stopped there. And I wish I had too. After that it sadly became just another body of the week procedural (albeit, one with some nice period touches and a few strands of serialized story that occasionally flared brightly) that pitted one man against the corruption resorts and great hotels of the big city. Worse, he was way into using "science" to solve crimes. Seriously, I lost count of how many corpses this guy trundles off to a doctor's house for an autopsy or some other really time-consuming bit of deduction - and the findings are always right. Man, if you're going to go down the ill-advised road of 'new-technology-to-solve-crime' you have to have the guts to be wrong or have your faith in technique way misplaced once in a while. Or, shit, get all mystical resorts and great hotels and esoteric like Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks or Claire DeWitt in Sara Gran 's books. I wanted to quit many times, but was oddly compelled to finish the season despite ceasing to be interested rather early, and by the end, I'd run entirely out of shits to give. Best moment: Franka resorts and great hotels Potente dispatches of competition.
Expendables 2 - Simon West - Here's the credit I'll give Sylvester Stallone - guy knows his audience and what they want from him. And his Expendables franchise is so precisely calculated to meet those expectations you can watch the gears move in the screenplay resorts and great hotels as if it were super-imposed resorts and great hotels onto the screen. Far from being a detriment, it is exactly that element of self-awareness resorts and great hotels that raises the experience resorts and great hotels to a level just short of meat-head meta, and kept me watching till the end. Did I like the movie? Not really, but I was kinda fascinated by it, and there were a few moments of inspired goofiness laced throughout (including Stallone and Jean-Claude resorts and great hotels Van Damme cranking up the homoerotic elements of action movie mano-a-mano resorts and great hotels to parody level and the one-liners, sheesh, the one-liners are groaners on such a deep level they're like a cleanse of your spirit resorts and great hotels from the last thirty years of action film making - best one: Jason Statham, dressed as a monk and about to stab some motherfuckers at the altar, " I now pronounce you man and knife. ") The level of gung-ho dumbness is stupefying, but it's hard to make that a criticism resorts and great hotels when it is so plainly what they are striving for. Best moment: the opening resorts and great hotels compound siege is like a lost Mad Max sequence.
The Getaway - Sam Peckinpah - Long time favorite revisited. Doc McCoy hires himself out to a corrupt politician, and, in exchange for early parole, must rob a bank. Things don't go as planned and Doc and wife Carol's strained relationship is put through the wringer in tense, violent vignettes that escalate across Texas until they shoot the holy shit out of a dilapidated old hotel near the border. If you've never seen this one you've deprived yourself. resorts and great hotels C'mon, resorts and great hotels I mean, Peckinpah, Steve McQueen and Walter Hill each trying to make Jim Thompson resorts and great hotels 's source novel their own thing - what's not to love? Best moment: Doc buys a shotgun.
A Good Day to Die Hard - John Moore - Oh my. It's come to this. I am a staunch resorts and great hotels supporter of your right to like the Die Hard sequels. They've generally been solid and enjoyable escapist resorts and great hotels action flicks, if unworthy to wear the Die Hard mantle. Here's what I do: imagine everybody is being sarcastic when they refer to Bruce Willis resorts and great hotels as John McClane, 'cause, resorts and great hotels y'know, he kinda looks like that guy from Die Hard . Then I'm free to enjoy the mayhem without thinking that I am actively de-valuing one of the pinnacles of the genre with each new body on the heap. But they've finally done it. The franchise has come full circle and this faux-McClane character is now absolutely the guy that made the original John McClane such a welcome breath of fresh air for action heroes. This new dude is the joke that then-comedic-actor Willis was telling us in 1988. I remember people going into that flick saying resorts and great hotels "Really, the guy from Moonlighting is going to play a badass?" That was the thing, wasn't it? He was so damn vulnerable. Persistent, yes. Resilient, absolutely. Cock-sure hard-ass? Not at all. Not sure why I'm distinguishing between installments five and four, A Good Day to Die Hard (which I really did enjoy), but I am. Maybe four was just more fun. Maybe there was appreciably less flag waving. Maybe it went bigger not broader. Anyway, I enjoyed that one. But this one? It's a terrible movie. Best moment: elevator fight. I always like a good elevator fight, though, come to thi