Reviews

This documentary follows two different Counter Strike teams as they travel the world and battle each other and show off their skills.

The film makes a case for these e-athletes and treats professional gaming as a sport. However, the film displays why these events will never garner widespread popularity. Unless you are intimately familiar with the maps of a specific game it is not fun to watch as a spectator sport. It would be like the size and shape of a football field changing every single game. In addition, the match footage is not edited together in a way that even fans of the game will find compelling.

That said, some of the talking heads make some interesting points and it is fairly interesting to see some of the back stories of the players, even if they are mostly interchangeable geeks.

The film is also quite sloppily made and misspells words and names of cities. It is also quite condescending in tone to some of the rural families depicted..

This movie is an anachronism. Based on the clothes, music, hairdos, and so forth, it seems like this should be an eighties film.

Horkheimer, Adorno, and others of the Frankfurt School of thinkers argued in the 1940s that mass media was used to control the people and ultimately resulted in sameness. Double Trouble certainly proves the latter. The plot and the villains are all plucked willy nilly from various 1980s films. One of the barbarian brothers accidentally steals a card that gives access to a vault of diamonds just above the subway in downtown LA. The other barbarian brother is a cop forced by the chief to partner with his larcenous brother. Oh, the other barbarian brother...

How could anyone wear what this guy wears? The Raiders sweatshirt/half shirt with high-waisted, acid-washed jeans? But all of that pales compared with the mullets sported by each brother. Paging Billy-Ray Cyrus. The guy can't run either. He has a worse gait than Keanu Reeves.

Whoever thought that wrestlers could act anyway?

This film is about as fragmented and nonsensical as this review of it. In the right company this could be part of a beer-fueled evening with friends, or consumed alone. Regardless, mouths will be agape. The horror, the horror.

The documentary chronicles the meteoric rise of Steve Rocco and his World Industries family of skateboard companies in the late 80s and early 90s.

Up until this point, skateboarding in the 1980s had been dominated by vert skating. Stars like Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Gator, etc. had been the superstars of a sport controlled by the likes of Powell Peralta and Vision. Of course, vert skating required access to a large ramp which most people did not have. Therefore, it is no wonder that street skating evolved into the most popular form of the sport. It took the technical aspects of freestyle and some of the tricks of vert and merged them into something new.

This documentary is a fascinating look into this transition from the perspective of Steve Rocco. It contains recent anecdotes from most of the people involved. Or, at least most of the people involved on the Rocco side of the divide. Granted, a lot of the people here had some sort of falling out with Rocco, but they were all on his side at some point. I would have liked to see some more people from Vision or Powell. As it stands, the only real voice of dissent is from Tony Magnusson of H-Street and Evol fame.

H-Street is also one of my other rubs with this documentary. H-Street was a skater-owned company, released amazing street-skating videos shot on tape and did all this BEFORE Rocco and World Industries. H-Street's Shackle me Not from 1988 was THE quantum shift in skateboard videos. Watching excerpts of it on YouTube today it still amazes. That is not to take away from World Industries' Rubbish Heap, but H-Street did it first. Therefore, I would have preferred some acknowledgment of this. As it now stands, the documentary makes it seem like Rocco created all of these things.

I would also have liked to see more of an emphasis on the negative aspects of Rocco's influence on the world of skateboarding. In some ways, skateboarding shifted away from skateboarding to clothes, videos, music, and lifestyle with World Industries.

However, apart from all of these niggles, I found this documentary to be a compelling look into a long-lost era of the sport. There is amazing footage of skaters like Jason Lee, Guy Mariano, Danny Way, and others doing their stuff, and equally compelling interviews with them today. Well worth watching

Supremely bad film that is almost in the so-bad-that-it-is-good category, almost. The story is a nonsensical hodge podge of various subplots from other films, and the films that it liberally borrows from aren't even that good. Some of the plot elements would not feel out of place in a bad 70s/80s Chuck Norris film like An Eye for an Eye while others feel like rejects from The Fast and the Furious.

There is a lot of TA and car porn on display throughout the film. However, if siliconed women with too much make up isn't your thing you are out of luck. If you are a car fan, however, then you might enjoy some of the car action, even if it often is VERY poorly motivated (hello random bad guys in Las Vegas club who also happen to have a supercar waiting so that there can be a chase....). The Koenigsegg CCX is particularly pleasing to the eyes. The only real upside I can see to this film is that the car stunts were done for real.

Therefore, I would actually recommend the making-of featurette on the DVD as a lot of the behind the scenes stuff on the car stunts is quite interesting.

A young priest from an affluent background with frustrations and doubts about about his faith requests a transfer to a failing church in one of the dreary suburbs of Gothenburg, Sweden (NOT Stockholm as the fellow from Stockholm that wrote another review on here stated).

While going door to door in his new, disinterested parish he comes across a young lady in a wheelchair. The two share an attraction, but he has trepidations about dating someone on welfare and in a wheelchair.

This is an interesting dramedy with some fine performances. It dares to tackle some subjects that are largely taboo in most cinema. The characters and most of the dialog rings true. On the whole, an interesting Swedish film.

In some ways it it is difficult, and even pointless, to try to compete with American action movies. The enormous market, and therefore budgets that an American movie can unleash is simply no match for a movie made in a country of 9 million. I bet the extras-casting bill for Transformers eclipsed the budget of this film.

Thus, as a Swedish action movie, this is pretty good. The set up is not bad and this could make a great American remake with an average Joe, working at an airbase in Alaska is presented with the same conundrum as Shanti Roney's character is in this film. A bigger budget would make a better film.

As it stands now, this has a great concept, some nice locales, a couple of decent action sequences, a pretty good villain, and a decent twist at the end. Livvakterna and Noll Tolerans are still better in my book, but this isn't half bad.

Another example of the women-in-prison genre. This is not exactly a genre known for quality films, but this is a notch below most. A bunch of women are taken from the bordellos where they work to a prison on a rocky island. Once there, they are subjected to lots of poorly directed sex and atrocious "dialog." For a film with an astounding amount of sex and nudity there is really nothing erotic about any of it. The sex scenes are awkwardly acted, and some scenes, like the shower scene, seem to drag on and on. That said, there are at least some minimal production values. On the W-i-P scale I would put it above Frauen fur Zellenblock Neun, but below Chained Heat.

Heavy-handed educational film about the life of one of the (supposedly) worst teens in Stockholm in the mid 80s. Paolo and his friends rob and beat people up for seemingly no reason other than the rush. As the minuscule plot unfolds across many a Stockholm night we get to see a metric ton of bad hair and more laughable 80s fashion than is good for you. A lot of the acting is downright horrible, the fights are over choreographed and stylized, glorified even, and the ultimate message is laughably heavy-handed. In spite of all of this, the film is almost watchable as a document of a bygone era, and as a view in to the burgeoning hip-hop scene in Stockholm at the time.

Big-city girl goes from flashy(but hollow) Stockholm to northern Sweden to meet her father for the first time in a decade. Once there, things do not work out quite as she expected, but she meets some honest country folk who teach her a thing or two about life.

A predictable, intolerably bland, and simplistic yarn.

However, there is a time-capsule aspect to it that is somewhat interesting. There is so much bad eighties hair and music on display that at least hardcore eighties aficionados will have something to keep them entertained.

This movie makes an interesting double-feature with Jägarna. In Jägarna, the country-bumpkins of the north have more in common with the ignorant inbreds of Deliverance, while in this film they are honest, hard-working, and nice. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition of two different paradigms of the same people.

The story of three women from different, but related, backgrounds about to give birth in a hospital in Sweden around the start of World War I.

Via inter-cut flashbacks we are shown how they ended up in their situation.

Often beautiful Sven Nykvist photo and many great directorial flourishes from director Mai Zetterling makes this a treat.

The parallels with Bergman are many. For instance, apart from Mr. Nykvist, many of the actors have appeared in various Bergman productions, the themes dealt with here are very similar to various Bergman films, and so on. Dissimilar enough to be interesting though.

Has some very interesting scenes that I would imagine were very controversial at the time, such as two gay men frolicking and getting mock-married in a church, a graphic shot of a baby's birth, some female nudity, a lesbian kiss, etc..

The sensitive artist guy from the wrong side of the tracks is too busy swooning after the high-school hottie Amanda Jones to notice that his tomboy best friend Watts is in love with him. Naturally, Amanda doesn't notice him either because she is busy dating the wealthy-jerk (improbably named) Hardy Jenns. It is all one big soap-opera from the John Hughes factory(though he only wrote this one) but somehow it doesn't work as well as most of the others as the characters are so very one-dimensional and the plot is so utterly predictable. Though it is still sweet and funny at times making it worthwhile viewing for fans of big-bad hair and the 1980s in general.

"Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer do Pearl Harbor their way. Their story follows the lives of a few people, Titanic style, leading up to the main event. Like Titanic, this has visually and technically impressive production values, but unlike Titanic this is not all that great of a movie otherwise. While there is nothing wrong with any of the acting, the story, or most anything else tangible, there is something amiss in Bay's directing style. He is simply too slick for his own good, and while that is fine for something like The Rock, here it does not feel right at all. Everything is shiny and sumptuously lit, and everything feels too perfect, too Americana, like Norman Rockwell had painted it. The story is still plenty potent and there are great moments, but history would have been better served by a Saving Private Ryan approach than this sometime action-adventure romp.

Mario Van Peebles directs a conspiratorial and fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Black Panthers in America in the sixties. While the subject is powerful and potent, and could have made a great movie, it is rarely allowed to shine through as it is treated as an action movie. There are shoot outs and fight scenes, and the whole thing looks too slick to be what it should have been; a gritty historical drama.

Pretty horrendous horror film about a murderous elevator(?!) in a fictional NYC skyscraper. Not only does it try to make elevators look menacing, but it also fails miserably(and laughably) at doing so. The sad part is that this is artistically on the level of a Troma film trying to pass itself off as something much more, and the really sad part is that the production values are not bad at all with NYC locations and lots of extras, some CG work, as well as other expensive looking shots. Also, interestingly enough, there are several references to terrorists using airplanes against skyscrapers, as well as Bin Laden himself in relation to the 1993 WTC bombing. And as if that isn't enough, there is narration by the US president discussing terrorism while characters talk in front of the twin towers. Makes you wonder if this pre-WTC film was re-edited post-WTC??

As a videogame fan I went to see this movie with no expectations at all, as videogames are usually portrayed abysmally in movies(see: Virtual Sexuality for instance). The one thing this movie does get right though is videogames. Game aficionados will notice various more or less correct videogame references and cameos; everything from Game and Watch to Zelda 64, and even a GameCube controller. Apart from the games themselves though, this movie is a mess. A fractured, confused narrative coupled with dysfunctional, unlikable(and bigoted) characters, sprinkled very lightly with funny, individual scenes.