The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans(2009)The sequel/re-imagination bug has appears to have bitten the artsy world of indie cinema with 2009’s “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans,” a new take on 1992’s underappreciated “Bad Lieutenant.” The original film, directed by veteran filmmaker Abel Ferrara with a blitz performance by Harvey Keitel, was a sublime study of an authority figure’s fall into the very vices he’s swore to prevent. Ferrara’s brutally earnest tragedy hardly seems apt to spawn a sequel. In the hands of German auteur Werner Herzog, “The Bad Lieutenant” series is reborn as an eccentric dark comedy about the extremes of an officer left unchecked.
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Kick Ass, well, kicks ASS!!!!
Many life lessons can be learned from Matthew Vaughn’s teenage vigilante satire “Kick-Ass." Lessons such as:
- A misfit youth can obtain self-realization by getting stabbed and hit by a car while wearing an aqua green scuba suit.
- The warmth of fatherly love can be proven by showing a man shooting his 11-year-old daughter right in the chest while she wears a bulletproof vest.
Peter Parker this is definitely not. While our hero Kick-Ass (Aaron Johnson) rephrases the web-slinger’s motto with the euphemism “with no power, comes no responsibility” the same could be said about Vaughn’s reckless and violently funny direction.
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Astro Boy (2009)
“Astro Boy” is a robot created by scientist Dr. Tenma whose grief pushed him to such an extent as to resurrect his son as a machine. Astro has to find his place in the world and, unlike the rest of us, he must do it in 90 minutes. Nicolas Cage, who voices Dr. Tenma, is kind of lame in this one. He sounds so freaking bored in everything he does lately. Movie audiences will not connect with Dr. Tenma’s struggle to bring back his dead son and all the troubles that entails. Here is the issue: When you clone someone’s brain, whether through genetic means or robotic, the minute it is awakened it starts down the path of gaining its own individual personality. Unless every experience is shared exactly alike from the exact same perspective, the thought processes will begin to drift apart due to the slightly different perspectives on different events. |
