Just the Ticket

With films like Mirror Mirror (coming to Netflix this month) and Snow White and The Huntsman , not to mention TV's two recent (successful) cracks at fairy tale lore, NBC's Grimm and ABC's Once Upon a Time (and their requisite direct-to-video knockoffs) peppering the visual zeitgeist these days, it's fitting that my latest shipment from Netflix would be The Woodsman , starring Kevin Bacon ( X-Men: First Class ), wife Kyra Sedgewick (the "I thought it was supposed to be over last season" TNT hit, The Closer ), and Mos Def ( The Italian Job ). Let's be clear: its subject matter may be grim (LOL), but  The Woodsman is no fairy tale. Walter (Bacon) is a registered sex offender, convicted prior to the film's events of molesting his niece and spending 12 years in prison. Unbelievably, he is allowed to live in an apartment across the street from an elementary school (supposedly it's far enough away that he's not in violation, but still; what ...

I wasn't sure what to expect from Take Shelter  besides what the trailer suggested, but it turned out to fit in perfectly with my Dead Parade series, which I will give you the reasoning behind later. For now, let's stick with the commercial representation of Take Shelter , starring Michael Shannon as a kind of modern day Noah. Ohio native Curtis (Shannon) has a steady construction job and a supportive wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain, with too long a list of movies to her credit this past year). Ohio gets torrential rain on occasion, but rarely a tornado, so of course everyone (including Curtis himself at one point) thinks he's crazy when he starts upgrading the old bomb shelter in his backyard to prepare for a twister of apocalyptic proportions. And it doesn't help that Curtis' little home improvement project is in response to nightmares he's been having about the storm to come, or that Curtis' mother (Kathy Baker) was institutionalized for paranoid schi...

"We don't have any original ideas. We just dig around in the garbage and use the same old shit over and over." I may not have the quote exactly right, but that's what Ice Cube's police captain says at one point in the R-Rated comedy send-up of the 80's TV series, 21 Jump Street . And that's just the beginning of the self-referential bitch-slapping of Hollywood as written into the new Jump Street , courtesy of star and executive producer Jonah Hill. The idea of having the often immature Hill and co-star/co-executive producer Channing Tatum play adult police officers who look young enough to go undercover in high school where most of the students are played by youthful adult actors is kind of funny. With today's emphasis on tolerance in schools, I found  Jump Street  to be a smart, if cursory commentary on bullying that had the well-matched Tatum and Hill not only inadvertently swapping cover identities, but reversing their roles in high school socie...

One of my favorite USA Network shows,  Burn Notice , is on for its sixth season as of June 14th, and as it happens, the network also re-ran a Burn Notice movie I missed out on (thank you, TiVo). So I decided to write a review of The Fall Of Sam Axe and get you caught up on the series so far in a Just the Ticket Burn Notice double feature. Michael Westen: My name is Michael Westen. I used to be a spy. Until... voice on phone: [phone rings] We got a burn notice on you. You're blacklisted. Michael Westen: When you're burned, you've got nothing: no cash, no credit, no job history. You're stuck in whatever city they decide to dump you in. Michael Westen: You do whatever work comes your way. You rely on anyone who's still talking to you. A trigger-happy ex-girlfriend... Fiona Glenanne: Shall we shoot them? Michael Westen: An old friend who used to inform on you to the FBI... Sam Axe: You know spies... bunch of bitchy little girls. Michael Westen: Family...

As movies that are only kinda  bad go, Bad Ass  is like the loveable grandparent who says inappropriate things at the dinner table: You laugh on the outside, cringe on the inside, and pray they go back to the nursing home as soon as possible. Last season's guest villain on Sons Of Anarchy , Danny Trejo, stars as Frank " Bad Ass " Vega, a Vietnam War veteran with Fidel Castro facial hair who becomes a YouView sensation (man, it sucks to not be able to afford the rights to a free social media site, huh?) when he uses his mano-a-mano  skills to subdue a pair of rowdy skinheads on a bus. Having guest parts in Bad Ass  are SOA  regulars Winter Ave Zoli (as a subversive masseuse) and Ron Perlman ( Hellboy , reviewed here , as the dirty city official pulling the strings on a shady land deal). Trejo's Vega takes the accolades and the accompanying perks with a nonchalant wink and a smile bubbling with suppressed ego, but when his best friend is killed while lo...

EDIT: One critic for Entertainment Weekly  wrote this week that "the biggest miracle is that this movie is only kinda  bad." And I would tend to agree on the subject of Big Miracle , the latest family-oriented animal rescue adaptation that Hollywood has dropped at our collective doorstep (wipe most of the images of flaming bags of dog crap from your mind). The 80's are drawing to a close at the top of the world, and Drew "Lash Blatht" Barrymore, looking far outside her comfort zone in this kid-friendly drama (aside from clumsily portraying her awkward chemistry with onscreen ex John Krasinski), lisps and whines beneath a pile of bag-lady hair extensions as an environmental activist trying to annoy everyone into helping a family of three grey whales (Fred, Wilma, and Bam-Bam--"Wait. Isn't Pebbles Fred and Wilma's kid?" Yes, Drew. But don't mention it in front of Bam-Bam) reach the ocean before they get trapped under the ice and suffoca...

Nicholas Cage ( National Treasure , reviewed here , and Lord Of War , reviewed here ) actually tries to have conversations with other people for once in Seeking Justice , a political crime thriller co-starring Guy Pearce ( The Count Of Monte Cristo ) and a who's who of TV ( Mad Men 's January Jones, Lost 's Harold Perrineau, Dexter 's Jennifer Carpenter, The Good Wife 's Mike Pniewski, and Nikita 's Xander Berkeley). Cage is your typical douchebag English professor. He goes for a run in the morning, plays chess with his friend (Perrineau) at his wife's violin recitals, eats pretentious food, drinks anal-retentive coffee, and asks profound questions in his lectures that he gives no one but himself time to answer (a trait reminiscent of Cage's past introverted monologue performances). But when his wife (Jones) is raped and beaten within an inch of her life, Cage's closed-minded professor Will Gerard is approached by the mysterious Simon (Pearce), a ...

Judd Apatow and company are still smokin' with their latest effort (a word you don't see often when a certain kind of grass is involved), yet another inappropriate, heartfelt comedy. Wanderlust  (a German word meaning "a desire to hike") stars the ever-tense Paul Rudd and the ever-beautiful Jennifer Aniston as a New York couple screwed by conveniently compounding cliche's of our time (corporate Ponzi schemes, expensive-yet-worthless housing) who chance to move into a cliche'd "voluntary community" ("we don't like the word 'commune.' It sounds like we're a bunch of hippies who sit around all day smoking pot and playing guitar." Cue acoustic guitar solo and doobie smoke from the other room) that changes their outlook on life for the better. Ugly nudists, psychologically disturbed horny chicks, public childbirth, open intercourse, doorless bathrooms, mud-drinking, and uncomfortably single- entendre strings of sexually sugg...

Old meets new in today's review, with a brilliant deduction perfected in grade two. That's elementary, my dear Watson. So what's on? A dance most macabre, best served with corn that's popped, not eaten from the cob. It's Sherlock Holmes in A Game of Shadows , where he and Moriarty finally come to blows after a long time of production, so let's get back to  the  Game   so lax  on deduction that it's in need of some critical reduction. The year is 1891, twenty-three years before World War I was incited by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ("I say don't you know/you say you don't know/I want you/to take me out"), and in a delicious blend of historical fiction and modern day terrorist plots, Professor James Moriarty (who made his unseen presence known at the end of 2009's Holmes , played by Resident Evil: Apocalypse 's Jared Harris--my Resident Evil reviews can be read here ) is orchestrating a fa...

Attention, Ticketholders: This is awesome! Today's post marks some major milestones in the history of  TimeDrop Productions (my fake, unprofitable company, which has been bringing you such publications as Just the Ticket, SW@ Ticket, Coming Distractions, and Piece Offerings since 2004). Not only is it my fiftieth issue of Just the Ticket, it is my 200th post on Blogger, and as of last night, Just the Ticket crossed the 1,000th pageview mark despite some technical difficulties with yesterday's draft of issue #49: Gerry Got A Gun . While we're making history, let's start in the place where history is made every day: the History Channel's three-part miniseries, Hatfields & McCoys . If you've read anything about the presentation, you probably don't need to hear yet another critic go on about the dusty, sepia-toned cinematography or the long-winded, unevenly paced scripting, which I didn't find any issue with until the last hour or so of uneventful wr...

No anecdotes or words of wisdom today, so I'll just jump right in with Machine Gun Preacher  blazing. MGP  is one of the two films discussed by star Gerard Butler at his final appearance on The Tonight Show  last year (the other being Coriolanus , reviewed here), and is based on the true story of Sam Childers, a murderous drug dealer who finds God and embarks on a quest of obsessive redemption that leads him to war-torn Sudan and the farthest reaches of his own sanity. Butler, doing a better job of hiding his Scottish roots this time in an on-and-off blend of Southerner, New Yorker, and Pennsylvania tough-guy, shows he is just as adept at playing the uber-focused tortured soul as he is at leading an army into battle. Michael Shannon ( The Runaways ) fills his typecast role as Butler's enabling, co-dependent biker buddy/drug partner, and on-screen wife Michelle Monaghan ( Gone Baby Gone ) and mother Kathy Baker (the Jesse Stone  TV movies) provide moral...

Before I get into today's reviews, I thought I'd share some Piece Offerings with you. While I was going through my old posts looking for reviews to link to for The Skeleton Key  and The Station Agent  in the last issue of Just the Ticket, I came across a couple of posts that were blocked for inappropriate content based on their titles, and I'm going to link to them here to give you a laugh or two: A throwback to my college days with SW@ Ticket Archive #37, titled "Incredibly Long" : Blogger automatically thinks it has something to do with Viagra or Ron Jeremy, but it's really a review of Disney/Pixar's The Incredibles , regarding the film's excessive running time. Now we go from long to short with SW@ Ticket Archive #29, titled "A Critical Quickie" , which has absolutely nothing to do with sex. Rather, it is a pair of movie reviews too brief and simple to be fledged out into full-length rants. There may be more out there, since I have y...

Well, my local video store didn't have A Game Of Shadows  in stock today, so I had to settle for the next thing (notice which word is missing there). A Little Piece of Shit --oops, I mean A Little Bit of Heaven . Sorry, my fingers are suffering from HTS this evening. That's H onest T ourette's S yndrome for the clueless among you. Anyway, A Little Bit of Heaven is named after the little male escort (Peter Dinklage, The Station Agent , reviewed here ) hired to entertain Kate Hudson's ( The Skeleton Key , reviewed here ) dying ad executive in this too-heavy romantic comedy about what to do when you run out of time to do all the things you ever wanted. Hudson is back to copying the goofy, doe-eyed blonde that worked so well for mother Goldie Hawn in her heyday, but trying to squeeze it into the man-hungry powersuit so frequently worn by the likes of Sarrica Parker in every sub-par rom-com over the past decade. Be prepared for a barrage of hyphens in the rant to come...

I haven't posted much lately on account of resuming work on my Kyo Kusanagi character for MUGEN . He's about as done as I want to get him right now. The rest is just bells and whistles I think. Anyone who wants to test him out can download him here . Just unzip him into the mugen/chars folder and add his name (Kyo-AS) to the mugen/data/select.def file and he's ready to play. As I'm writing this, I'm getting messages from one of my testers saying to update his sounds so it feels more like a King Of Fighters XIII-style Kyo. Will do, if I can find all the sounds I need. Until then, like I said, he's done. On to today's edition of Just the Ticket, where I'll finally review a film that has me using the term "Circle-Jerk" in the most endearing sense possible:  Columbus Circle , starring Selma Blair ( Hellboy , reviewed here ), Amy Smart ( Crank ), Jason Lee ( My Name Is Earl ), Giovanni Ribisi ( Flight Of the Phoenix , reviewed here ), Kevin Pol...

Tell me about the rabbits, George. As it turns out, I'm not cut out for back-breaking farm labor (by the way, why is it that if you're cut out for a kind of work, it's easier for you, but having your work cut out for you makes it harder? Anyone? Beuller? Anyone?). Yesterday's work load consisted of heavy lifting unlike any I had ever experienced. In teams of two, we would make stacks of six 10ft steel posts, prop them up on our shoulders, carry them an eighth of a mile uphill, carry them another eighth of a mile down rows of loose, rocky soil unloading them one at a time, then walk back and do it again. After three hours of that, both of my shoulders were almost injured. After four hours, I was ready to fall down and my arms had gone stupid. By the sixth hour of work, I was still having a hard time standing and using my shoulders, and my nerves were so shot that my middle fingers were curling up all by themselves. By the time another half hour had passed, my thighs had ...