Tekken Tops the 3rd Annual Straight-to-DVD Movie Awards

Video game adaptation Tekken has won Best Picture in the 3rd Annual Straight-to-DVD Movie Awards, also grabbing the best Sci-Fi/Fantasy award. Other winners include Tamer Hassan who won best actor for his performance in Bonded by Blood, which also took Best Director for helmer Sacha Bennett. Romola Garai won Best Actress for her work in Glorious 39. Ballistica took both Worst Picture and Title-S0-Bad-It’s Good kudos.

Here’s the full list:

Best Picture: Tekken

Best Actor: Tamer Hassan, Bonded by Blood

Best Actress: Romola Garai, Glorious 39

Best Director: Sacha Bennett, Bonded by Blood

Worst Picture: Ballistica

Best Comedy: A Matter of Size

Best Horror: Hostel: Part III

Best Action/Thriller: The Man From Nowhere

Best Family Film: Barbie: Princess Charm School

Best Documentary: Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

Best Sci Fi/Fantasy: Tekken

Title-So-Bad-It’s-Good: Ballistica

Getting High Interviews: People Who Showed Up at the Premiere

Russ Russo with IFQTV has a bunch of video interviews with folks peripherally related to Getting High which, at the time of the interviews—the premiere in fact—was called 5up 2down.  He interviews an unidentified actor who appears in the film and knows the people on whom the druggy drama’s characters are based (beware, here be spoilers).  He also interviews Dean Winters (Liz’s ex on 30 Rock) who is not in the film but showed up at the premiere to “represent.”  Actress Heather Leonard, also not in the film, is interviewed.  Also, he interviews someone identified only as “my man Sean.” You can see all the interviews here.

Getting High, which stars Kirk Acevedo, Isaach De Bankolé, and Andre Royo, is available now.

Here’s the Dean Winters interview, which is the most fun of the bunch.

Here’s the NSFW trailer.

Upcoming Release Calendar Added!

For years now (has it been that long?) you’ve been clamoring (okay, asking politely) for an upcoming release calendar.  We’ve finally got one.  From here on out, you’ll be able to find it in our top nav bar, right next to “Reviews”.  It’s only got a few months so far, but we’ll add more as we go.  Check it out!  (And thanks for your patience.)

My Own Love Song Reviews: No Rose

Director Olivier Dahan’s follow-up to the fantastic La Vie en Rose isn’t getting nearly the critical reception of its predecessor.  My Own Love Song, his American debut starring Renée Zellweger as a down-and-out singer who joins her schizophrenic friend (Forest Whitaker) for a road trip is—in the words of the AP’s Jon Frosch (as posted by The Hollywood Reporter)—”a sappy, weakly plotted road movie with a wildly self-conscious style probably meant to disguise its cliches.”  IFC’s Stephen Saito agrees, calling it “utterly adrift when it comes to a coherent narrative,” while conceding that it “couldn’t be anywhere near as bad as it is without being as ambitious as it is.”  Jason Bailey at DVD Talk is less appreciative of Dahan’s flourishes, decreeing “The damage his script leaves undone, his look-ma-no-hands direction takes care of.”

These critics applaud Zellweger’s performance, with Saito calling it her “first genuine performance in years.”  They are less enamored of Whitaker, whom Baiely accuses of “the worst kind of overheated acting.”  They are split on Zellweger’s singing, with Bailey calling her two songs in the film “well-performed” while Frosch claims those scenes “make one grateful she’s no longer attached to the Janis Joplin biopic.”

The film also stars Nick Nolte, Madeline Zima, and Elias Koteas.  It also includes original music by Bob Dylan.

Glorious 39: The Straight2DVD Review

Remember that Friends episode where Rachel tried to bake something, but the two pages of the cookbook stuck together so she made something that was half a meat dish and half a dessert? And while Joey liked it (“I mean, what’s not to like? Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good!”), Ross summed it up best with, “It tastes like feet!”

Glorious 39 tastes like feet. The ingredients are wonderful. Actors, locations, costumes, makeup. All good. But the two recipes, one for a murder thriller and the other for a period drama, got merged together and made a big mess.

I can’t find any issue with the film’s raw materials. The BAFTA-winning writer/director Stephen Poliakoff is not well-known here in the States, but has a long career of writing and directing stage plays, television dramas and films, and feature films in Great Britain. There is amazing power both in the acting and production talent. For actors, you’ve got Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Julie Christie, Eddie Redmayne, David Tennant, Charlie Cox, Jeremy Northam, Christopher Lee, and Jenny Agutter. The locations in Norfolk and London draw you in with their beauty, and the cinematography, makeup, and costumes are superb thanks to DP Danny Cohen, Jenny Shircore, and Annie Symons, respectively.

But it’s those stuck pages, first in the screenwriting process, and then in the editing, that lead to a marred final product. Subplots meant either to 1) illustrate what had to be done in Britain before the war by the populace to survive or 2) show Garai’s lead character of Anne to be an outsider in her own family both only slow down the overall pace of the murder mystery. Tension, which should increase as a thriller plays out, is deflated by these subplots. Now, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate a good, slow burn in a film, if it’s interesting. But here, the end is not all that interesting enough to be shocking.

In the end, you’re asking why Anne was put through it all. Her tormentors don’t have a really good reason, other than they’re evil, I guess, which most of the time can be enough, but given the level of planning and thought involved in what they do to her, it is hard to see them simply as evil people playing with her like a toy, especially when they have something larger at stake that they’re trying to accomplish. Why not just kill her at the start? They don’t even try to recruit her to their cause, so why screw with her? And in the final 10-15 minutes of the film, logic continues to break down, and it all ends in an overly-dramatic way for no real reason.

If you’re a big fan of Garai or Nighy, then you’ll want to see the film for their performances. If you love British period pieces of the 30s, then you’ll want to see the film for the locations and the costumes. Just don’t expect a tight, well-paced thriller.

Steve Austin Said Knock You Out

In Knockout, Steve Austin plays Mr. Miagi to a kid who’s being bullied and learns to box to defend himself.  MovieWeb has an excellent interview with the writer, Evan Jacobs, who is candid about his goals for the script, the challenges of changing it from the original concept (the boy in question used to be autistic), and the possibly misleading marketing tack the distributor is taking.  Read the interview.

Knockout arrives on DVD and Blu-ray April 26th.

Mixed Reviews for A Summer in Genoa

The first thing reviewers can’t seem to agree on is whether it’s Genoa or Genova.  Actually, it’s not their fault.  Some reviewers got to this while it was on the international festival circuit as Genova, Italian spelling.  Others got to it upon its stateside DVD release, taking on the new title with the American spelling, A Summer in Genoa.  Their other division are a bit more significant.

Eugene Novikov of Cinematical has nothing but praise for the film, calling director Michael Winterbottom’s (A Mighty Heart, 24 Hour Party People) portrait of a grieving family “…understated, down-to-earth, quietly sad…” and “one of the highlights of [Winterbottom's] career.”  While DVD Verdict’s Clark Douglas appreciates the film’s lack of sentimentality, he laments, “Winterbottom hasn’t provided anything interesting in the absence of clichéd melodrama,” and declares the film “an empty cinematic experience” with “glimmers of quality.”  Angie Errigo, writing for Empire, falls somewhere in between:

Michael Winterbottom is one of the foremost exponents of the documentary-drama style, and he makes good use of his technique in this intensely intimate piece, while the cast achieve a degree of realism…But these people still seem detached, sketchy, and too many incidents seem routine.

A Summer in Genoa stars Colin Firth, Catherine Keener, Perla Haney-Jardine, and Willa Holland.  It’s available now.

Coming Soon—Street Kings: Motor City

In Street Kings: Motor City, the sequel to the 2008 crime drama starring Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker, the action moves from Los Angeles to Detroit, where a narcotics officer (Ray Liotta) teams up with a homicide detective (Shawn Hatosy) to investigate a series of cop killings. This being a Street Kings film, odds are they will run into at least one corrupt police officer, or twelve.

The film is directed by Chris Fisher who also directed the direct-to-video sequel S. Darko. The film also stars Kevin Chapman, Clifton Powell, and Linda Boston. It arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on April 19th.

Two Big I Am Interviews with Producer/Actor Robert Fucilla

The Big I Am tells the story of a crime world underling who suddenly gets put in charge of the family.  It’s the producing debut of Robert Fucilla (Bonded by Blood, Shank) who also acts in the film.  In this interview with Screen Jabber, Fucilla discusses the notoriously disaster-laden shoot, the pressures of being a producer, and his entree into the world of acting.  If you’d like to hear his voice, he discusses a lot of the same stuff (in more detail) in this interview from the Chris and Phil Present podcast.  Interview starts at about the halfway mark.

The Big I Am also stars Leo Gregory, Vincent Regan, Michael Madsen, Steven Berkoff, and Paul Kaye.  It’s available now.

Trailer is NSFW.

Generally Meh Reviews for Role/Play

Role/Play, the new romantic comedy from writer/director Rob Williams (Make the Yuletide Gay) is getting a tepid response from critics.  In the film, a recently outed soap opera star (Steve Callahan) goes to a resort and meets a gay marriage activist (Matthew Montgomery) headed for divorce and the usual fighting with and falling for each other ensues.

eFilmCritc’s Charles Tatum gives the film two stars, stating:

“Williams’ direction is as static as his screenplay, which seems more like an aborted stage production than a filmed comedy-drama . . . Both main characters discuss the price of fame ad nauseum, and I was eventually turned off by the whining quality of some of the klunky dialogue.”

As part of a dual review with BearCity, Jonathan Youster of Sound on Sight cites both films as evidence of the sorry state of gay romantic comedies:

“However, for whatever merit they may have, the films unfortunately come wrapped in such formulaic scripts and pedestrian execution that the finished products are, at best, passable date movies, and, at worst, guilty of committing what is an unforgivable sin for any movie, gay or straight: being bland and dull.”

This Week in Texas’ Duane Simolke has kinder words for the film, saying, “Even amid the fighting, the chemistry between real-life couple Montgomery and Callahan comes through on the screen. They both work well as romantic leads,” while admitting, “In a few spots, those debates drown out the natural rhythms of story-telling, and the two lovers sound like they’re reading essays out loud, instead of carrying on a conversation.”

Oh, and it has Jim J. Bullock.

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