BrandonFibbs.com

Machete

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 03:29:42 +0000

Believe it or not, the character of Machete was not invented as a fake commercial in 2007’s Grindhouse, though that was the first time he showed his face to the world. Director Robert Rodriguez conceived of using his cousin, Danny Trejo, as an ex-Federale-turned-crusading assassin while making Desperado in the early ‘90s. The popularity of [...]

Going the Distance

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 03:18:14 +0000

It’s about time someone made a romantic comedy about long distance relationships. The set-up is ripe with both comic and dramatic possibilities, dueling polarities that Going the Distance mines equally. This leads to a bit of narrative schizophrenia that will doubtless cause those interested purely in romantic comedy to bemoan some serious relationship introspection, [...]

The Tillman Story

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:59:22 +0000

Pat Tillman, an all-star defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals, walked away from a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist in the Army special forces with his younger brother just months after 9/11. Two years later, the celebrity soldier was dead, killed in a Taliban ambush. At the memorial service celebrating his life, military members extolled [...]

The American

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:45:16 +0000

The American, based on Martin Booth’s 1990 novel “A Very Private Gentleman,” is not an action movie in the conventional sense. It is perhaps more accurately described as an art house film with guns. George Clooney’s character does something in the first few minutes of The American that lets us know right off the bat [...]

The Last Exorcism

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:30:08 +0000

I cannot remember the last time I left a movie as angry as I left The Last Exorcism, a film that, for the first three quarters of its running time positively purred and then, as it rounded the final lap, completely, utterly, absolutely, unquestionably, indubitably ruined any good feelings I had for it with a [...]

Animal Kingdom

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:29:03 +0000

The machinery animating Animal Kingdom feels unfathomably epic even though the story it tells is relatively trivial. While the events it unfolds are, in the grand scheme of criminal lore, comparatively inconsequential, while you’re watching it, they feel as primal and as visceral as any of cinema’s greatest crime epics. Animal Kingdom tells the story [...]

The Extra Man

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:27:13 +0000

The Extra Man is not a film—it is a sequence of extended personality ticks. No one in the movie remotely approximates a recognizable human being. These are not characters; they are caricatures. We do not care about any caricature nor are given reason to. Forced whimsy is still forced. And yet, as paltry and unsubstantial [...]

The Switch

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 03:53:57 +0000

Don’t be fooled by misleading advertising or even your own preconceptions. It turns out The Switch is a heck of a wonderful film. Wally (Jason Bateman), a neurotic and insecure Wall Street type, has been in love with Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) for years, though she only regards him as a friend. Hearing the thundering of her [...]

Eat Pray Love

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:55:33 +0000

My biggest fear with Eat Pray Love was that, as with so many adapted works of a more intimate, interior nature, it would be Hollywood slick, over-produced and about as subtle as a bull in a china closet. Thankfully, my concerns were unfounded. The film, which admittedly stumbles in the home stretch and just misses [...]

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:37:17 +0000

Dear Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, I think we should break up. It’s not you, it’s me. I admitted when we first met that I’d never read Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel on which you’re based, but that hasn’t stopped me from enjoying similar films I was ill equipped to see. I think you’re great. [...]

The Expendables

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:25:47 +0000

The Expendables oozes testosterone from every pore the way stale alcohol oozes from the pores of a drunk. The film, a class reunion of some of the biggest action genre stars of the last three decades—particularly the 80s—is about 20 years too late. Yet preposterous and honestly awful as it is, there’s a part of [...]

Get Low

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:07:53 +0000

Get Low, a Faulknerian story of poor Southern charm, desperate grace and polished sincerity, is a character showcase for some of this country’s finest statesman actors—Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek. With names like that, does the plot even matter? Get Low is gripping from the very first shot—a house, isolated on a hill, wreathed [...]

The Other Guys

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 04:21:38 +0000

The Other Guys is the second buddy police comedy to come out this year. But unlike the highly anticipated but roundly dismissed Kevin Smith outing, Cop Out, The Other Guys is actually, well, funny. Will Ferrell plays Det. Allen Gamble, an emasculated, Prius-owning, milquetoast forensic accountant with a compulsion to dot every i and cross every t. [...]

The Kids Are All Right

admin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:10:41 +0000

The Kids Are All Right is an odd little film to find in the middle of an over-stimulated Hollywood summer. Heartfelt and funny, the film is like a cool shower on an oppressively hot day—refreshing and invigorating, the sort of unexpected surprise that catches you off guard and sticks with you for days. Nic (Annette Bening) [...]

Salt

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 06:03:24 +0000

I’m not ashamed to say I love these sorts of movies—espionage thrillers jammed to the gills with hairsbreadth escapes, gladiatorial bouts and death-defying stunts. So it was disappointing when Salt turned out to be little more than a larger budgeted episode of 24, a double agent concept that started out successfully enough but quickly flew [...]

The Girl Who Played with Fire

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 05:51:57 +0000

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first film in the Millennium trilogy by the late, incandescently popular Swedish author Stieg Larsson, was a cross between the achingly forlorn films of Ingmar Bergman and another spine-chilling, suspenseful novel similarly adapted into a mesmerizing film, Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs. Bleached of color and at [...]

Agora

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 05:40:29 +0000

Agora, extraordinarily ambitious and majestically cerebral, is a flawed film to be sure. Its reach—nothing short of celestial mechanics and the frequently violent intersection of science and religion—certainly exceeds its grasp. But the reach itself is worthy of praise. Religion is not alone in claiming martyrs; the secular has its fair share of fallen heroes [...]

Inception

admin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:22:46 +0000

Do you remember how you first felt upon leaving the original The Matrix, that shell-shocked sense of having been given a heady glimpse into another fully formed world, that feeling of suddenly possessing dangerous and unearthly knowledge, that giddy realization that you’d just witnessed something intellectually breathtaking and truly original? Prepare for those sensations all [...]

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 04:31:46 +0000

Don’t tell my wife, but I love being wrong. At least when it comes to films. I’ll admit it, I came to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice prepared to hate it. It had all the hallmarks of a film that would rub me the wrong way—produced by explosive style over substance Jerry Bruckheimer and starring hammy overactor [...]

Despicable Me

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:33:21 +0000

Despicable Me is the sort of movie about which it is the most difficult to write. It is not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, it didn’t set my heart racing either. It is a sort of lukewarm winner, neither terrific nor terrible. While that hardly sounds like [...]