Tag Archives: movie

Film Review: Darkest of Lies (dir by Kelly Schwarze)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Travis (Christopher Brown) is a military veteran who is struggling with both PTSD and an addiction to pills.  After some unspecified troubles in New York City, Travis and Rochelle (Hailee Lipscomb) move into a new home.  The house isn’t particularly fancy and Travis isn’t really sure who Rochelle is renting it from but it does seem like a place where they can start to rebuild their lives.  Rochelle has a job at a law firm and is excited that the house has a pool.  “I’m going to swim everyday,” she says.  Travis, meanwhile, can work on his sculptures in the basement.  Travis has a show coming up and it’s important that he get his work done.  Perhaps not surprisingly, he spends most of his time sculpting replicas of heads.  Perhaps he feels that if he can create someone else’s head, he can figure out what is going on inside of his.

From almost the moment that Travis moves into the house, he starts to feel that there is something wrong with the place.  He is haunted by nightmares of finding a body in the pool and of Rochelle calling out for help.  He has sudden bursts of rage and paranoia and he soon becomes convinced that Rochelle is cheating on him.  It doesn’t help that Rochelle’s friends from college, the materialistic Linda (Sabrina Cofield) and the douchey Tom (Michael Forsch), keep coming by the house.  Rochelle is always happy to see her friends but Travis doesn’t feel that he has much in common with either of them.  As well, it’s hard not to notice that Tom seems to be obsessed with trying to get Travis, a recovering addict, to drink wine.  With Travis convinced that Rochelle is cheating on him with almost everyone that he sees, it doesn’t take much to set him off.  Even a simple card game is not a safe activity when Travis is around.

Early on, we discover that Travis and Rochelle’s house is sitting on a street called Shining Way and I imagine that was a deliberate decision on the part of the director.  The film has much in common with Stephen King’s classic novel and the subsequent Kubrick film version.  Much like Jack Torrance, Travis struggles with addiction and the dark memories of the past.  Jack Torrance tried to escape his demons through writing while Travis tries hold them at bay with his sculpting.  Much like Jack, Travis has to deal with people who seem to be intent on forcing him to drink despite the fact that they know that Travis has issues with substance abuse.  The viewer is left to wonder whether it’s the house that’s driving Travis mad or if Travis was always mad and the house just provided him with an excuse to embrace that madness.

It’s a deliberately paced film, one that occasionally feels a bit too slow for its own good.  The movie has a nearly 2-hour running time and it’s hard not to feel that some of the nights with Tom and Linda could have been trimmed down a bit.  That said, the overall film did hold my interest (which is no small accomplishment when you consider just how short my attention span actually is) and the film created a suitably ominous atmosphere of growing dread.  Travis, bearing both the physical and mental scars of his service, become a symbol of the damage that the horrors of war and addiction can do to both the individual and to society as whole.  Darkest of Lies is currently streaming on Tubi.

Live Tweet Alert: Watch The Odds with #ScarySocial

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter.  I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie!  Every week, we get together.  We watch a movie.  We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, for #ScarySocial, Tim Buntley will be hosting 2018’s The Odds!

If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag!  The film is available on Prime.  I’ll probably be there and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well.  It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

Film Review: Air (dir by Ben Affleck)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Air opens with a montage of the 80s.  Ronald Reagan is President.  MTV is actually playing music.  Wall Street is full of millionaires.  Sylvester Stallone is singing with Dolly Parton for some reason.  Because the specific year is 1984, people are nervously giving George Orwell’s book the side-eye.  Everyone wants an expensive car.  Everyone wants a big house.  Everyone wants the world to know how rich and successful and special they are.

What no one wants is a pair of Nike basketball shoes.  All of the major players are wearing Adidas and Converse while Nike is viewed as being primarily a company that makes running shoes.  CEO Phil Knight (played by Ben Affleck) is considering closing down the basketball shoe division.  Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), however, has a plan that he thinks will save the division.  Instead of recruiting three or four low-tier players to wear and endorse Nike shoes, Sonny wants to spend the entire division’s budget on just one player.  Sonny is convinced that a young Michael Jordan is destined to become one of the best players in the history of basketball and he wants to make a shoe that will be specifically designed for Jordan.

The problem is that Michael Jordan doesn’t want to have anything to do with Nike because Nike is not viewed as being a cool brand.  Jordan wants to sign with Adidas, though he’s considering other offers as well.  He also wants a new Mercedes.  Even though everyone tells Sonny that he’s wasting his time and that he’ll be responsible for a lot of people losing their jobs if he fails, Sonny travels to North Carolina to make his pitch personally to Jordan’s mother (Viola Davis).

For it’s first 50 minutes or so, Air feels like a typical guy film, albeit a well-directed and well-acted one.  Almost all of the characters are former jocks and the dialogue is full of the type of good-natured insults that one would expect to hear while listening to a bunch of longtime friends hanging out together.  For all the pressure that Sonny is under, the underlying message seems to be one of wish fulfilment.  “Isn’t it great,” the film seems to be saying, “that these guys get to hang out and talk about sports all day?”  When Sonny runs afoul Michael Jordan’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina), one is reminded of the stories of temperamental film executives who spent all day yelling at each other on the telephone.  The efforts to sign Jordan feel a lot like the effort to get a major star to agree to do a movie and it’s easy to see what attracted Damon and Affleck to the material.  Even though the majority of the film takes place in the Nike corporate offices, it deals with a culture that Damon and Affleck undoubtedly know well.

But then Jason Bateman delivers a great monologue and the entire film starts to change.  Despite his reluctance to sign with Nike, Michael Jordan and his family have agreed to visit the corporate headquarters.  Sonny has a weekend to oversee the creation of the shoe that will hopefully convince Jordan to sign.  When Sonny shows up for work, he’s excited.  But then he has a conversation with Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), the head of marketing.  Strasser talks about his divorce and how he only sees his daughter on the weekends.  Every weekend, Rob brings his daughter the latest free Nike stuff.  His daughter now his 60 pairs of Nike shoes.  Rob admits that, even if he loses his job, he’ll probably still continue to buy Nike shoes because that’s now what his daughter expects whenever she sees him.  Rob compares Sonny’s plan to the Bruce Springsteen song Born in the USA, in that the tune sounds hopeful but the lyrics are much darker.  If the plan succeeds, Nike will make a lot of money.  If it fails, Rob and everyone in the basketball division will be out of a job and that’s going to effect every aspect of their lives.  Rob points out that Sonny made his decision to pursue only Michael Jordan without thinking about what could happen to everyone else.  Sonny says that success requires risk.  Rob replies that Sonny’s words are spoken, “like a man who doesn’t have a daughter.”

It’s an honest moment and it made all the more powerful by Bateman’s calm but weary delivery of the lines.  It’s the moment when the film’s stakes finally start to feel real, even though everyone knows how the story eventually turned out.  As well, it’s in this moment that the film acknowledges that the Air Jordan legacy is a complicated one.  Rob talks about how the shoes are manufactured in overseas sweatshops.  Later, when discussing whether or not Michael Jordan should get a percentage of the sales, Jordan’s mother acknowledges that the shoes aren’t going to be cheap to purchase.  They’re going to be a status symbol, just as surely as the Mercedes that Jordan expects for signing with the company.  Air becomes much like that Springsteen song.  On the surface, it’s a likable film about a major cultural moment, full of dialogue that is quippy and sharply delivered without ever falling into the pompous self-importance of one of Aaron Sorkin’s corporate daydreams.  But, under the surface, it’s a film about how one cultural moment changed things forever, in some ways for the better and in some ways for the worse.

It’s an intelligent film, one the creates a specific moment in time without ever falling victim to cheap nostalgia.  Matt Damon gets a brilliant monologue of his own, in which he discusses how America’s celebrity culture will always attempt to tear down anyone that it has previously built up.  Ben Affleck plays Nike’s CEO as being an enigmatic grump, alternatively supportive and annoyed with whole thing.  As for Michael Jordan, he is mostly present in only archival footage.  An actor named Damian Delano Young plays him when he and his parents visit Nike’s corporate headquarters but, significantly, his face is rarely show and we only hear him speak once.  In one of the film’s best moments, he shrugs his shoulders in boredom while watching a recruitment film that Nike has produced to entice him and, because it’s the first reaction he’s shown during the entire visit, the audience immediately understands the panic of every executive in the room.

Air is a surprisingly good film.  It’s currently streaming on Prime.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Jess Franco Edition

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!

Today is the 93th anniversary of the birth of Jesus Franco in Madrid, Spain!  One of the most prolific filmmakers of all time, Franco made movies that …. well, they’re not easy to describe.  Jess Franco was responsible for some of the most visually striking and narratively incoherent films ever made.  He made films that you either loved or you hated but there was no mistaking his work for being the work of someone else.

Today, in honor of his birthday, here are….

4 Shots From 4 Jess Franco Films

The Girl From Rio (1969, dir by Jess Franco)

99 Women (1969, dir by Jess Franco)

Nightmares Come At Night (1970, dir by Jess Franco)

Oasis of the Zombies (1981, dir by Jess Franco)

Live Tweet Alert: Join #FridayNightFlix for Goon!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

 

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter.  I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie!  Every week, we get together.  We watch a movie.  We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, at 10 pm et, #FridayNightFlix has got 2011’s Goon!

It’s a hockey classic!

If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag!  It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

Goon is available on Prime!  See you there!

Film Review: On a Wing and a Prayer (dir by Sean McNamara)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Having just attended the funeral of his brother, Doug White (Dennis Quaid) and his family — wife Terri (Heather Graham) and daughters Bailey (Abigail Rhine) and Maggie (Jessi Case) — are flying back to their home in Louisiana.  Unfortunately, shortly after takeoff, their pilot suffers a heart attack and dies.  Now Doug, who’s had only one flight lesson in his entire life, has to not only fly the plane but also land safely.

Doug has people on the ground, trying to talk him through the landing even though they don’t know what is actually happening in the cockpit.  Hard-drinking Dan Favio (Rocky Myers) calls his friend, Kari Sorenson (Jesse Metcalfe).  Kari has never gotten over the death of his family in a similar plane crash so, for him, helping Doug land is about more than just saving Doug and his family.  It’s also about achieving his own personal redemption and hopefully finding the strength to forgive himself.

While this is going on, two kids — Donna (Raina Grey) and Buggy (Trayce Malachi) — follow the flight online and then head down to the airport so that they can watch it try to land.  To be honest, I’m really not sure why either one of them is in the movie.  When Donna first showed up, talking about how she wanted to be a pilot because “Mr. Jones” told her that girls can’t fly planes, I found myself dreading the inevitable moment when the kids would take it upon themselves to help Doug land the plane.  I dreaded Donna calling the cockpit and Doug going, “Wait a minute …. you’re just a kid!”  Fortunately, that moment didn’t happen but I was still left wondering why Donna and Buggy were in the film to begin with.

It feels almost churlish to be overly critical of a film like On a Wing and a Prayer because it is based on a true story.  Doug White really did have to land an airplane after the pilot died mid-flight and he really was instructed on what to do by a group of air traffic controllers and Kari Sorenson.  It’s a good story and the film ends with some undeniably touching shots of the real people involved in the landing.  That said, this is ultimately a film that many filmgoers will want to like more than they actually do.  Thanks to some dodgy special effects, the viewer never forgets that Dennis Quaid and his family aren’t really tapped up in the sky.  Instead, one is always aware that they’re just watching a movie and a rather cheap-looking one at that.  As well, the script is full of awkward dialogue and heavy-handed moments.  As soon as I saw that one of the daughters wouldn’t stop looking at her phone, I knew that she would be the one who would be forced to grow up in a hurry.  As soon as the other daughter ate something with nuts in it, I knew that there was going to be a desperate search for an epi-pen.

On the plus side, Dennis Quaid was as likable as ever and Heather Graham managed to wring some genuine feeling out of even the most sentimental of dialogue.  On A Wing and a Prayer was directed by Sean McNamara, who also directed one of my favorite films of 2011, Soul Surfer.  (Later this year, McNamara and Quaid have another project that is scheduled to be released, a biopic of President Ronald Reagan.)  On A Wing and A Prayer doesn’t really work as a film but, as a story, it at least reminds us of what people are capable of doing when they all work together.

Film Review: M3GAN (dir by Gerald Johnstone)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Gemma (Allison Williams) is a roboticist who works for America’s most successful Seattle-based toy company, Funki.  Funki is the company behind the Purrpetual Pets, the really annoying Furby rip-offs that every child wants to have.  Gemma has developed a child-sized humanoid robot that she calls M3GAN.  She thinks that it could be the new big toy but her boss, David (Ronny Chieng), disagrees.  David says to stick with what works and develop a new Purrpetual Pet.

While Gemma is trying not to lose her job, she also has to deal with a new arrival in her home.  Following the tragic deaths of her parents and the destruction of her Purrpetual Pet, Gemma’s eight year-old niece moves in with her.  From the minute that Cady (Violet McGraw) shows up, things are awkward.  Gemma is more comfortable dealing with technology than with other humans.  When Cady attempts to play with a toy on Gemma’s bookshelf, Gemma quickly explains that it’s not a toy.  “It’s a collectible.”  In fact, it’s not until Gemma introduces Cady to M3GAN (played by Amie Donald with Jenna Davis providing her voice) that Cady finally starts to become comfortable in her new home.  M3GAN is the friend, older sister, and maternal figure that Cady is desperately looking for.  And even though Gemma knows that M3GAN is still being developed and could possibly malfunction, Gemma is kind of happy that Cady finally has someone other than Gemma to look after her.

And, of course, M3Gan is happy too.  M3GAN proves to not only be a quick learner but she also takes her duty to look after Cady very seriously.  When the neighbor’s dog bites Cady, the dog vanishes shortly afterward.  When the neighbor suggests that either Cady or Gemma had something to do with the dog’s disappearance, the neighbor ends up getting attacked in her garage.  When a bully tries to push Cady around before then attacking M3GAN, M3GAN reacts by ripping off his ear.  It may seem like it’s good to have M3GAN on your side but what about when M3GAN decides that Gemma isn’t doing a good enough job raising Cady?  What about when M3GAN herself starts to suspect that Cady needs to be disciplined?

M3GAN came out in January and it was, to the surprise of many, the first big critical and commercial success of 2023.  Some of that, of course, is because there really wasn’t much competition back in January.  Audiences that didn’t want to rewatch the Avatar or Black Panther sequels really didn’t have many other options other than M3GAN and Plane.

That said, M3GAN is an undeniably effective mix of satire and horror.  It works precisely because it captures what we all secretly fear, that AI is eventually going to kill us.  M3GAN may look adorable and she gets to show off some pretty good dance moves towards the end of the film but she’ll kill anyone who gets on her nerves and, as both Gemma and Cady find out, it’s pretty much impossible to turn her off.  It’s not just that M3GAN replaces Gemma as Cady’s primary caregiver.  It’s that the viewer knows that it’s totally possible that there’s an army of M3GANs out there, waiting to replace all of us.  At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the future, at least 50% of the reviewers over on Rotten Tomatoes will actually be advanced AIs, programmed to overpraise studio productions while only giving negative reviews to films that don’t necessarily need good reviews to sell tickets.

M3GAN works as both a satire and a horror flick.  The movie opens with a macabre  Purrpetual Pet commercial that’s cringey specifically because it feels so accurate.  As brought to life by Amie Donald and Jenna Davis, M3GAN is a wonderfully creepy character who is occasionally made sympathetic by the fact that, much like HAL in 2001 and the robots in Creation of the Humanoids, M3GAN seems to have more genuine feelings than the humans around her.  Indeed, with the exception of Violet McGraw’s Cady, there are no sympathetic human characters.  Gemma, for instance, is a very familiar type, someone who knows how to write code but who has no idea how to relate to anyone on an actual emotional level.  In many ways, her relationship with Cady is just as a manipulative and destructive as M3GAN’s.

M3GAN is a strong movie up until the final 20 minutes, when M3GAN suddenly starts to target people who she really doesn’t have any reason to go after.  But, overall, it’s an effective look at the future that we may have waiting for us.

Film Review: Champions (dir by Bobby Farrelly)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In Champions, Woody Harrelson plays Marcus Marakovich.

Marcus is a basketball coach.  He believes that he has the talent and the ability to be a coach in the NBA and he’ll tell that to anyone who will listen.  Unfortunately, Marcus also has a reputation for being self-destructive and temperamental.  He has sabotaged his career with too many public fights.  As his friend and fellow coach Phil (Ernie Hudson) tells him, Marcus knows everything about basketball but he doesn’t know how to connect with the players.  Marcus is so concerned with winning that he never gets to know the people that are playing for him.

Of course, Marcus has more problems than just his inability to connect with players.  An on-court brawl leads to Marcus losing his assistant coaching job.  A drunk driving incident leads to Marcus landing in jail.  Phil bails him out but Marcus will still have to do community service to avoid serving time.  Marcus is assigned to spend the next 90 days coaching The Friends, a basketball team made up of players who have learning disabilities.  Though at first reluctant, Marcus doesn’t want to go to prison and, after a rough start, he and the Friends start to bond.  Marcus becomes a better coach and the Friends become a better team and soon, it looks like they might even be playing in the North American Special Olympics Finals in Winnipeg.  Along the way, Marcus also falls for Alex (Kaitlin Olson), the sister of one of his players.

Champions is a heartfelt film that suffers from the fact that there’s really not a single surprising moment to be found within it.  As soon as Woody Harrelson shows up as a hard-drinking and cynical basketball coach who is looking for one more chance to make it to the NBA, most members of the audience will know exactly what to expect.  It’s not a shock that he eventually bonds with his players.  It’s not a shock that he falls in love with Alex nor that he eventually calls Alex out for using her brother’s needs as an excuse to not get close to anyone.  It’s not even a surprise when Cheech Marin shows up as the cheerful manager of the rec center where the Friends practice.  And it’s certainly not a surprise that Marcus’s work with the Friends leads to him getting an offer from an NBA team, an offer that might not be as altruistic as Marcus wants to believe.  (The team is mired in a scandal and feels that hiring Marcus would bring them some good publicity.)  Marcus is faced with a big decision and the choice that he makes won’t surprise anyone.  At one point, Marcus specifically mentions the film Hoosiers, as if the simple act of acknowledging the fact that Champions isn’t exactly breaking new ground will somehow make up for the film’s predictability.

That doesn’t mean that Champions isn’t a likable film, of course.  It’s a crowd pleaser.  The actors playing the Friends actually are all learning disabled and the film portrays them all as individuals with their own unique personalities and abilities.  It’s hard not to get excited for them when they succeed on the court and the film refuses to use any of their disabilities for cheap laughs.  The film’s heart is in the right place and there’s always something to be said for that.  But, as I watched Champions, I became very much aware that this was a film that I wanted to like more than I actually did.  It was hard for me not to compare Woody Harrelson’s well-meaning but self-destructive coach to the similar character than Ben Affleck played in The Way Back.  The Way Back worked because it took a familiar character type but then allowed that character and the story to go in an unexpected direction.  Watching Champions, it was hard for me to not wish that the film had been willing to take a few more risks.

Monday Live Tweet Alert: Join Us For Drive and Top Gun!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon.  I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie!  Every week, we get together.  We watch a movie.  We snark our way through it.

Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1997’s Drive!  Selected and hosted by Sweet Emmy Cat, this movie features Mark Dacascos!  So, you know it has to be good!

Following #MondayActionMovie, Brad and Sierra will be hosting the #MondayMuggers live tweet.  We will be watching 1986’s Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, and John Stockwell!  The film is on Prime!

It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in.  If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Drive on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!  Then, at 10 pm et, switch over to Twitter and Prime, start Top Gun, and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag!  The live tweet community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy. 

Film Review: Rumble in the Bronx (dir by Stanley Tong)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1995, Rumble in the Bronx is known for two things.

First off, it’s the film that finally made Jackie Chan a star in America.  Chan had been an international star for two decades before starring in this film but he had initially struggled to break into the American film industry.  Before Rumble in the Bronx, no one in Hollywood was quite sure what to do with an actor who was both skilled at martial arts and who also had perfect comedic timing.  Indeed, the very title of  Rumble in the Bronx seems to designed to make Americans feel comfortable with the film.  Jackie Chan may have been from Hong Kong and the film itself may have been dubbed and it may have been released internationally before New Line got around to releasing it in the States but it was a film about the Bronx!  And what’s more American than the Bronx?

Except, of course, Rumble in the Bronx wasn’t filmed in the Bronx.  The other thing for which this film is remembered was that it may have taken place in the Bronx but it was filmed in Vancouver.  From the minute the audience sees Jackie walking through this film’s version of the Bronx, it’s pretty obvious that he’s in Canada.  All of the extras are very polite.  The city streets are surprisingly clean.  Even the graffiti is rather mild in tone.  (Reportedly, the production spray-painted the locations every morning and then cleaned up all the graffiti at night.)  When the film shows us its version of an NYPD stationhouse, the building is so neat and clean that it seems like it should be in a Canadian tourism brochure.  New York has never looked more inviting than when it was played by Vancouver.

Of course, the main giveaway that this film was shot in Canada was that there are mountains in the background.  Majestic mountain ranges are one of the few things that you cannot find in New York City.  When the bad guys drive someone out of the city so that they can threaten him, they end up in front of an absolutely gorgeous mountain stream.  Seriously, I’m sure I’m not the only person who wanted to travel to Canada after watching Rumble in the Bronx.

But, hey …. it’s a Jackie Chan movie!  If you can’t suspend your disbelief while watching a Jackie Chan movie then when can you suspend it?  The film’s plot is not terribly complex.  Jackie plays a Hong Kong cop who comes to New York for his uncle’s wedding.  While his uncle is on his honeymoon, Jackie looks over his uncle’s store and protects it from the local gang.  Jackie also befriends Nancy (Francoise Yip) and her wheelchair-bound brother, Danny (Morgan Lam).  Both Nancy and Danny need someone to look out for them and to encourage both of them to reject the seedier temptations of the Bronx.  They also need Jackie to protect them from the golf-loving crime lord, White Tiger (Kris Lord).

The plot is mostly an excuse for a series of increasingly elaborate fights and stunts.  As always, it’s fun to not only watch Jackie Chan in action but to also try to spot all the moments in which he nearly killed himself performing his own stunts.  Rumble in the Bronx is the film in which Jackie Chan broke his ankle while jumping onto a hoverboat.  One can actually see the ankle bending at an extremely awkward angle.  I actually covered my eyes when I realized what was happening because it was obviously very painful.  If anyone had any doubt of how painful it was, Jackie included footage of him howling in pain during the end credits.  That said, as painful as it was to watch Jackie’s ankle snap, it doesn’t change the fact that this film’s finale actually involves a hovercraft!  Even without Jackie’s stunts, the action in this film’s finale would be enjoyably and shamelessly over the top.  But knowing that Jackie was out there risking his life to make the film makes it all the more enjoyable.  And it also helps that Jackie Chan is a legitimately good actor, one who gets a lot of laughs out of the fact that the characters that he plays are often as shocked by some of the things that he does (and survives) as the audience is.

Myself and a few others watched Rumble in the Bronx on Friday as a part of our weekly #FridayNightFlix get-together.  We had a blast.  Another film that we recently watched for #FridayNightFlix, Escape From The Bronx, is famous for its line of “It is time to leave the Bronx”  but you know what?  Why would anyone ever want to leave beautiful Vancouver?