Just the Ticket

I don't particularly enjoy movies about the hoplessness of being endangered at sea. Films like Open Water  and Dark Tide  turn the treacherous majesty of the ocean into a coma-inducing exercise in boredom ad nauseum . True stories like The Perfect Storm  and Titanic  toy with our emotions by constantly leading us to believe that everything will turn out alright, even though history tells us otherwise, and we wind up pissed off that Leonardo Di Caprio freezes to death on a wooden plank and Kevin Costner gets drowned by a monster wave. Although the events behind  Captain Phillips  were unknown to me, it is in many ways no different than the films mentioned above. It may not spend as much time covering the blue abyss as Open Water  or Dark Tide , and it may not string us along for four hours like Titanic  ( Captain Phillips  is only two hours and fourteen minutes long) or manipulate us like The Perfect Storm , but it is full of repetitive dialo...

Welcome back, Ticketholders, to the world of intriguing-yet-low-budget cinema. From the preview reel preceding Sweetwater , Just the Ticket  brings you a review of Bounty Killer , the film adaptation of the successful Kickstart Comics series featuring cameos by Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines  star Kristanna Loken and the always captivating Gary Busey. Enter a dystopian world full of sex, blood, and corruption where the most deadly get rich and famous and the rich and infamous wind up dead. Not much can be said of the acting on anyone's part, nor of the special effects that turn a storm-torn radioactive wasteland into a scene from Sharknado . But between the numerous creatively choreographed exhibitions of exsanguinous expiration, there oozes a measure of charisma that keeps you watching, even when you're still wondering what you're watching and why. It's the same quality of cult-classic strangeness that made Bubba Ho-tep  so strangely great. While the titular hero...

I'm back with another small rental release for you: the brutal yet entertaining western, Sweetwater . In the film,  Mad Men  star January Jones plays a former prostitute looking to make a new life with her husband, a Mexican farmer (Eduardo Noriega, The Last Stand ). Her lurid past and mixed-race relationship draw the unwanted attention of a prominent cult leader from Utah (Whedonverse regular Jason Isaacs), with fatal consequences that lead Jones' prostitute on a bloody quest for revenge. On her trail is a bounty hunter-turned-sherriff with a brutal streak of his own. I like the occasional western, and this was one of the better ones I've seen. Everyone in Sweetwater  plays their part adequately (no one stands out as horrible, and hopes for Oscar here, either), but Ed Harris steals the show with a mix of no-nonsense morality and gleeful insanity that show why he has been an Oscar contender in the past. Just watching him work is entertainment enough for me. B Stay tu...

Welcome to a new year in critical cinema, Ticketholders! We begin 2014 with a more-than-commendable (to understate the point a considerable amount) effort by actor/writer/director Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In Don Jon , JGL stars as the titular porn-addicted man-boy who thinks he's found a proverbial 10 in Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), but differences of opinion on everything from the reality of porn and romantic comedies to the necessity of Swiffer pads challenge the strength of their relationship. Jon's rapid-fire exchanges with his preist inject an extra edge of social commentary on commercialized religion, as he rattles off his sins like a man who wants fries with his Hail Marys, receiving only a blanket response from the unseen Father, who might be a robot for all we know. The laughs come smartly and often, without resorting to excessive crudeness or fantastic spectacle. Don Jon  is a film with purpose, going through the usual romantic comedy motions and R-Rated man...

Well, I wasn't very active in the Ticketverse this last quarter of the year, so my goal of reaching 20,000 hits didn't come to pass. I've resolved to be more of an active roll in the success of my writing endeavors, and have set a goal of accruing another 10,000 hits by year's end. To get things rolling, here's a collection of Critical Quickies from the past year I missed out on. The Internship --Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson: Two laid-off idiot watch salesmen try and somehow succeed against a mental dream team after faking their way into an internship competiton at the Google campus. If you can convince yourself that Vaughn has a charming wit rather than an infuriating inability to shut his mouth, you might also enjoy the entire nonsensical bulk of whatever is left. But honestly, more thought went into making the end credits look clever than went into making The Internship a worthwhile expenditure of tine and money on either side of the screen. D- Furious 6 --th...

Been awhile, Ticketholders. As we speak (so to speak), I am tapping out this post on my new smartphone. And some might say that there wouldn't be such things as smartphones if not for Steve Jobs and his iPod, the device that began as a way to carry music in your pocket and has since blurred the lines between everything from media players and gaming systems to cellular phones and personal computers. From it's first moments, when Ashton Kutcher recreates the iPod's inaugural press conference, it becomes clear that Jobs is more than a serious take on The Walden Shmidt Story . Kutcher's Jobs is not a joky charicature of the billionaire playboy, he is a ruthless, demanding, perfectionist asshole of a walking thinktank, not unlike how Jobs has characterized himself in many onscreen interviews. Whether you despise this aspect of Jobs' personality or embrace his revolutionary spirit, the idea that Kutcher has dimension beyond the comedic is reason enough to enjoy Jobs ....