Tag: Stephen Dorff

A ha, my first review of a movie that has been guest reviewed! Here I am, following up someone else’s opinion, on my website. Not even mad. I try not to read opinions about film before I write my own, so obviously, my review of The Iceman breaks that creed unfortunately. If you want to read their review of The Iceman, click that link I just linked.

The flipped across the vertical line version of this picture exists on the internet. I…I don’t know which one is real.

The Iceman tells the true story of Richard Kuklinski (Michael Shannon), a famed Polish man who killed over 100 men as a contract killer in NYC. He was arrested in 1986, much to the surprise of his friends and family who did not know he was leading a double life for so many years to provide for his loved ones. Well, not his brother (Stephen Dorff), he was a dick and in prison already. For killing a man. What a criminal.

Of course, he didn’t start as a contract killer. He had a small time job, and came from humble beginnings. He met his future wife (Winona Ryder), and somehow charmed her into marriage, and had two kids. But when he accidentally fails the wrong customer, Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta), he has to repay a debt and does so through a nice assassination or two, which come with nice bonuses.

Eventually, his lives start to collide, as he is forced to work with a rival contract killer, Mr. Freezy (Chris Evans), and work amongst all the mob bosses in the city. The film begins and ends with his confession on the witness stand, and a whole shit ton of remorse. Kind of. Also, James Franco plays a small role who totally dies, and David Schwimmer awkwardly a mob man, and he freaks me out.

The Iceman Cream.

Michael Shannon has been a good actor for sometime. He was arguably the best parts of Man of Steel and Premium Rush, so it is nice to see him again in a leading role like this one. He knocked it out of the park, going completely in character, and nothing like his other recent roles. Dude knows how to act, yo.

In the early 90s, HBO released a documentary on the subject, called The Iceman Tapes: Conversations with a Killer, with actual dialogue with Richard. Presumably this fictionalized version was made to tell the twisted story after his death in 2005. I haven’t seen it, but I think it is on youtube, and I really kind of want to now.

A lot of the assassinations they show are generally really well done, with lots of planing/details gone in to making sure they are perfect.

By basing this movie on a true story, it adds an extra layer of chill as you watch it, knowing that it isn’t just another mob movie starring Ray Liotta. The ending is especially the most chilling aspect of the film, his final courtroom plead and communication with his family. You felt sorry for the guy, even though he killed hundreds of people. Shit, that is rough.

Definitely a movie I’d recommend as well. Even if you have to see David Schwimmer’s goofy face.

The first thing I thought of when I saw the cover for Brake was of course the movie Buried. Both movies feature basically only one person, trapped in a box unexpectedly, and want to get out.

You know. Because who wants to be in a box?

Buried, features Ryan Reynolds, under ground in a coffin, with a cellphone and a lighter.

Brake, features Stephen Dorff, in a plastic see through box, that moves, with a Ham radio like device, and lots of tubes. It’s kind of sexy when you think about it.

Especially if you think about it in this angle.

No, don’t leave yet. There is more plot outline to go over.

I mean, not a lot more. Dude is in a box. How much more could you possibly need to know.

Well, his CAREER is a pretty important one. Turns out he is a member of the secret service, and is in charge of keeping the President alive (duh). If there is ever an emergency, there are multiple secret bunkers throughout DC and the nearby areas to take the President and to keep him safe. It is not based on a pattern, it is random, and only two people know the exact location each day.

Jeremy (Dorff) happens to be one of those guys.

So when he finds himself awake in some strange car trunk, he realizes what is up. It is up to his wits to stay alive and stay cool, despite the torture and threats to his family, to save the big man in the White House.

All the elements, even urine! (That’s not urine).

One man, one movie. That is basically what happens in this film.

He talks with a lot of people, none of which he knows he can trust. So it becomes a mental game, and a physical game, because of course he is going to get tortured. Just look at those tubes.

Unfortunately, I liked Buried a lot more than this film. One problem occured at the start of the film. Despite being one man in a box, a LOT of stuff was going on, pretty quickly. Count downs and flashes of light, and voices. It was hard to tell what was going on in the first 10-15 minutes. I felt lost, much like Jeremy probably felt loss, but it is worse if the viewer starts to get a headache.

That wasn’t a good tone for the rest of the movie, which eventually did calm down, but it was too late.

The ending was terrible. Just terrible. Ugh. What a shit fest. It went from making a bit of sense, and making the movie okay. Then it just went back into “Wtf” territory, ending the movie with us having no real explanation. Just kind of stops. Well, it doesn’t stop good. Bad Brake, bad.

Somewhere is a film about a man and his daughter. A famous man, and his daughter, in Italy.

Fuck, I already explained the whole plot.

Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a Hollywood actor, staying in Italy for a week or so. Among the random interviews and movie spots he has to do, there is at least one awards ceremony where he is going to win something too. He meets lots of beautiful women for the sexy time, and even sometimes hires twin pole dancers that occasionally put him to sleep. So he is pretty successful.

DEPENDING ON YOUR DEFINITION OF SUCCESSFUL.

More like meaningless. One of these days, he finds his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), waiting for him outside of his hotel room. Whoops. That is unexpected. His ex wife sent her to him, and he wasn’t planning on it. No big deal, he does love his daughter and they spend lots of time together before she goes off to camp.

During their time together, he relies less and less on random women, and realizes his relationship with his daughter is pretty important. Thus, changing his life for the better. Then she goes on to summer camp. Then he leaves Italy.

But I agree with him. Their performance was pretty sleep inducing.

Did I accidentally explain the whole movie? My bad.

But trust me, if there is any way to enjoy the film, it is in the subtle transformation of Dorff. I mean super subtle. It isn’t like you see him go from snorting coke in the clubs to helping his daughter with homework. (Repetition) The transformation is a lot more subtle than that.

I recognize the effort, think Dorff did a good job, and still hate this movie. It was definitely not made for me, and I had to try incredibly hard to keep watching the whole thing. I heard a complaint before that “nothing happens” in the movie, which is now pretty much true. It is going for super realistic here. Just a guy in his life for a week or two.

The first words aren’t spoken in this film until 9 or 10 minutes in. Lots of silence, lots of realism. And I found it all to be incredibly dull.

I have now seen 5 of the last 7 movies that Dorff has been in, and I haven’t liked any of them. Yet interestingly enough, it is never his problem. Normally I would probably consider that a turn off from his movies, but eh, that is why there are the other two I haven’t seen yet.

Before I review this, it might be important to remember that I am not a “real critic”. The ratings are all based on how much I liked the movie, so everythin I give is opinions.

Always good to give that reminder, before I clumsily explain why I didn’t like Public Enemies.

Short answer? I found it boring.

I am going to explain the plot probably badly too. My bad, but ehh. Whats to say really?

It is also kind of about the birth of the FBI (a lot like J. Edgar was). Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) is kicking some ass in the FBI, using finger printing and stuff. He took down Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) afterall. So he gets a promotion and is supposed to take down John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) in the first ever America War on Crime. Have to get these Gangsters, damn it.

The movie is biographical too, I guess. But Dillinger does get caught and subsequently escapes. He goes on lots of bank robberies with some of his boys, including Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) and Homer Van Meter (Stephen Dorff).

He also gets the fancy of a girl (Marion Cotillard). But yeah. Bank robberies, some possible betrayal, and the eventual catching of John Dillinger.

Bitches love Johnny Depp.

I am not really sure why I put “short answer” as my caption below the first picture. It is about as long as my real answer. I just found this movie boring. Really boring. I started to watch it probably last October or so, but after 30 minutes, had stopped it and figured I would never try again. Same thing happened to me with The Fountain.

But this time, I thought it would be different. I had a nice night when nothing else was going on, plenty of free time. Turned off the distractions. And watched it all. And was just bored. It just did not interest me in the slightest. I have both seasons of Boardwalk Empire, and I want to watch it, but just…gangsters apparently hold zero appeal to me.

I guess that’s all I really have to say? Well acted, sure. But I don’t want to ever see it again.

This movie, Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star, was a bad idea, and I am pretty sure everyone in America knows that. Even the actors. They got into a meeting and said “Lets make a bag of shit. And then drop a book on it so it splatters funnily. We will call this art, a Jackson Pollock.”

Or at least I hope so. Even this ad campaign that I just found out about was made, and it is horrible. There are a bunch of these videos, and they ran for a few days before it came out in theaters. But apparently they were pulled for being too damn sucky, a whole week before the movie came out.

Nick Swardson plays the title character and is from Idaho or something. He is an adult, living with his parents, and doesn’t even know what masturbation is until his friends teach him. But when they teach him and use a random old porno, they discover that it is Bucky’s parents as the lead couple. What?! (Bucky finds this news great. His parents were stars!).

So he decides to go to Hollywood and become a star, just like them. He meets Christina Ricci at a random diner, and she hooks him up with one of her friends who needs by roommate. The crazy roommate played by Kevin Nealon.

Eventually he finds a gig with a producer (Don Johnson) who used to know his parents, hoping there is a nostalgia audience out there for a quick buck. Turns out people love the movies he is in (because yes, he has a very small dick and it makes the women feel better about their men, and the men feel better about themselves). Can his new stardom take him out of Dick Shadow’s shadow (Stephen Dorff)?

Above: An Idea Thought To Be Good

This is probably the lowest IMDB rated movie I have reviewed thus far. Way lower than the Twilights and other “bad movies”. People hated it. Understandably so, because this movie is horrible.

But what are the positives? Kevin Nealon was hilarious. He was in maybe 5 scenes, where he was just bad/controlling/weird roommate to Bucky, like in the clip from above about grapes. And they were fantastic. Also Christina Ricci was super wasted in this movie. Bad news for her career. This movie is bad enough, but with Pan-Am getting cancelled, she has nothing now, which is a sad day for America.

But yeah. Dicks and tits are in this movie, as expected. And a lot of it is pretty gross.

The cover of this movie looks like a normal action thriller hostage like thing, where a lot of abuse happens to the main characters until they beat the bad guy by the end and somehow are better off.

I mean, that’s just by the cover.

This would have been a better cover. Seriously, all I did was look up the title and got this. Main characters and all.

But on the back description, I like it even more. It must be a lower budget thing that didn’t do well anywhere, so to make it seem better they tried to make it seem modern and cool. After all, it stars Maria Bello from Prime Suspect (a now canceled in its first season television show) and Stephen Dorff, from Immortals (a minor character, and a movie you know I didn’t like).

Okay, I am just making fun of celebrities now. Either way, those are the stars. And those are the shows/movies they want you to think about to get this movie.

I have been stalling on the plot. Carjacked has a mom and her kid get carjacked from a bank robber. They are poor too. He forces her to drive him to a meet up in Mexico, and after that? Who knows.

So she has to figure out how to save her child, without like, you know, dying.

Unfortunately there is MANY options that she had available to her, and she never took in the movie. Had to make it last after all. The ending is ridiculous, based on the choices she made. The cops seem to be just as ridiculous.

Also, the jabs at her ex husband come from nowhere. All we are told is they are divorced, so I guess we have to assume he is a bad guy and shouldn’t be raising children. So she has a happy ending. Yay!

Now she just needs to stop making bad decisions in terms of shows and movies.

To give it some credit, the Dorff as robber / fear monger was decent.

Wooo. Another movie in theaters! I don’t like movies in theaters normally. People are there. Yuck. Similarly I tend to like movies way more than normal on a big screen, so I can’t necessarily think straight.

I am pretty sure though that after seeing Immortals the big screen factor didn’t come into play at all.

It hit me like a spear in the head.

The movie starts off with some fake Greek mythology, alright. Fine. Theseus, played by Henry Cavill, is pretty bad ass. That is him with the spear. Mickey Rourke, a King, wants to fuck everything up, find some bow, and release the Titans. With the help of a thief (Stephen Dorff) an Oracle (Freida Pinto) and occasional god tamperings (like Zeus / Luke Evans), they must try to stop the King before he releases the TItans. Or else everyone will die?

First off, for an action movie, there was a whole lot of not action. The main character himself didn’t seem to be that good. He could get the jump on a big group, kill some, and then bam. Get captured. He kept failing against big groups, it wasn’t funny. At least twice. The only amazing things he really did were two one on one fights. He even found the magical bow, and lost it almost instantly. The plot had a lot of holes in it, but if I told about them, it would provide more than one spoiler. But the bow? I guess just by saying it is magical or powerful, it can do anything? Sure it made its own energy bolts. But when he somehow sent arrows so quick four of them hit four targets at the same time. But later? These arrows make powerful explosions that go through stone walls. Way different properties out of nowhere.

So instead of action, they had the bad plot with bad acting. Because of the holes, I kept getting confused at what was going on. Confused may be a strong word, because it was simple. But still. You know.

I also didn’t find the visuals to be good at all. Everything just felt brown. I think a less realistic CGI or something might have helped the movie a bit. Which yeah doesn’t make any sense. The ending? Besides the confusion gained from the plot holes, it just didn’t make overall sense. I cannot tell if they are just trying to set up a sequel, or what.

It does feature some nice God on God action though. Even though this scene also was pretty stupid.