Thighs Wide Shut

The Bank Job
Job Well Done
Trailers & Mo

Jason Statham has built an entire acting career on heists, cons and transporting. The films in which he stars in are usually high on octane and low on brain usage, and no one seems to mind one bit. But what if one of these high-octane Statham action flicks had a brain attached to it? Wouldn’t that be the perfect movie? That question was answered with a resounding ‘yes’ in The Bank Job, Roger Donaldson’s (No Way Out, Thirteen Days) loose take on a real London bank robbery from 1971 that crossed the hairs of everyone from the criminal underground, the police, the secret service, the British government and even the Royal Family. No arrests were ever made and none of the money was ever recovered. Not much information has ever surfaced from the case, thanks to a government D-notice request, but Donaldson does his best to piece together a story from what little facts exist and the fiction he sprinkled in. This is one of the mos entertaining caper flicks we’ve seen since The Usual Suspects. It may not be as taxing on the brain as Suspects, but what do you expect, it’s juss a Jason Statham movie

Job 1: Statham already co-starred in The Italian Job and will be seen next year in its sequel, The Brazilian Job

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

CJ7 (Cheung Gong 7 hou)
Bites Off More Than It Can Chow
Trailers & Mo

What are we to make of Stephen Chow’s CJ7? It’s family film, that’s too strange to be a family film, and while it has the typical Chow hijinks and outlandish action one would expect, it doesn’t have enough of either to truly satisfy the fans that ate up his King Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer. So what are we left with? A so-so Hong Kong knock-off of ET. Cept this alien, known as CJ7, moves a lot faster, and doesn’t have a glowing heart that will melt your own. Since you probably won’t fall in love with the shape-shifting fur ball, you may for his human counterpart, Dicky, a little poor boy who’s actually played by a little girl. He/she hits all the right notes, but it’s not enough sweet music to make up for the rest of the mediocre symphony

Hello Kitty: keep and eye and a thigh on cutie supreme Kitty Zhang Yuqi. she is a niiiiiiiice

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Penelope
Pig Slop
Trailers & Mo

Where to begin. The end credits. If only we could of. Urggggggggggggh!!!

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Slit Your Eyes Out Repoopulous

The Bank Job & CJ7 open this Friday

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

The Other Boleyn Girl
Twisted Sisters
Trailers & Mo

We all know about the six wives of Henry VIII, but any other woman who shared his bed has basically been all but forgotten over time. That’s what The Other Boleyn Girl hopes to fix, as it focuses on Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary and how their father and uncle practically whored them both out to win the favor and riches of the King. The results are a mixed bag, as Boleyn plays out like a less sexy, less historic version of TV’s The Tudors. And by less sexy, we mean it has ZERO bits of nudity, quite unlike its TV cousin. Yet somehow, between the crummy accents and soap operatics, which made many a woman in the audience LOL, this puppy is totally entertaining from ftart to sinish. Btw, Jim Sturgess is so hottttttttttt as the Boleyn guy

The Other Other: back in 2003, the BBC released a cheap-o version starring Natascha McElhone

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Jeepers Worth A Peepers

City of Men (Cidade dos Homens)
Favela of Love & Hate
Trailers & Mo

City of Men isn’t really a sequel to City of God, but more of a culmination of the TV series of the same name, which followed two kids, Acerola and Laranjinha (Li’l Dice and Steak and Fries from CoG), who try their best to keep their heads afloat in the nasty favelas of Rio de Janeiro. So if City of God was the Goodfellas for the 00’s, then City of Men is purty much the same thing that Casino was, a very worthy successor, yet not nearly as yumcredible as the original gangster. If you can get over that fact, then you’ll enjoy it for its own merits. We recommend watching the TV series before you hit up the movie, but it’s not required, like jackets for Phil Collins’ albums

In The Beginning: before there was City of Men and City of God there was the short film Palace II, which also starred our Men Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha, although oddly enuff, playing the opposite roles

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

Chicago 10
Courtroom Drama and Comedy
Trailers & Mo

Documentarian Brett Morgen has the great ability to take a fascinating subject and somehow make it even more fascinating by the way he presents the story. For those who saw the Robert Evans doc, The Kid Stays in the Picture, you know what we speak of. And if you don’t then boy/girl, you better Netflix the shiz outta it AwarrenSAPP! Anywho, his latest, Chicago 10, is juss more of the same from the brilliant filmmaker. Employing archival footage, modern day music, and animation that grows on you by the minute, Morgen tells the incredible tale of the protests that turned violent around the 1968 Democratic National Convention being held in Chicago, and the ensuing courtroom circus, where 8 people (plus their two lawyers, and that’s your 10) were tried for conspiracy and other charges related to the protests. You aint seen anything like this, and heard too, as the toon’s voices are supplied by the likes of Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider (RIP), Liev Schreiber, Jeffrey Wright and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon

Further Reading: another flick that used the trial’s transcript was 1970’s The Great Chicago Conspiracy Circus

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher)
This Year’s Oscar Winning Holocaust Movie
Trailers & Mo

We didn’t find anything all too special about The Counterfeiters, but we heard it’s inhumane to say anything negative about a film that takes place in a concentration camp, so we’ll juss not say anything… cept… this never woulda won best Foreign Language pic had Diving Bell, Persepolis or 4 Months, 3 Weeks been nominated

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Jeepers Worth A Peepers

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Cassandra’s Dream
Crimes and Felonies
Trailers & Mo

 

Before the Woodman headed off to sunny Spain for his next joint, he handed in what appears to be the final pic in his unofficial British trilogy, Cassandra’s Dream. It’s uneven affair that aims for Match Point [review] fervor, and while it may not be serving ace after ace, we’d still say it wins a lot more sets than Scoop [review], and is miles (or is it kilometers?) away from the East Coast double-fault dreck that he’d been handing in earlier this decade. C’s Dream focuses on two working class brothers, Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell (you can tell that they’re brothers cause they have the same hairdo), who are working real hard to move up to the next class. But when they’re both strapped for cash they turn to their beloved money-bagged uncle (the always solid Tom Wilkinson) for help. Little do they know that he in turn needs their assistance, for a most awful deed: offing a colleague of his who could ultimate ruin his life. The boys have a big decision to make, which could also ruin their own lives. WHAT TO DO, WHAT DO TO!!! What they do do, carries the movie. Everything else, like Ewan’s quest to bag supercutie Hayley Atwell (playing the ScarJo role in this one), their struggling ma and pa, and Colin’s bird and betting problems, gets too little attention to make this baby a Breast In Show-er. The denouement is purty good, but it clumsily comes about too quickly to leave the mark it wants to. Anywho, we have no real reason to complain about anything, hispecially since Allen’s European vacation has been the bestest one since the Griswold’s [NSFW].

Leigh High: looks like the Woodman is fan of director Mike Leigh, or at least of the cast from his Vera Drake. 8 of its actors have either appeared in Dream or Scoop. Our flavs? Phil Davis who plays the marked man in this one, and Fenella Woolgar, who simply has the greatestist name mt EVERst

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Cassandra’s Dream opens tomorrow in limited theaters

Rental Round-Up Dawg: skip the hype and Rescue Dawn altogether as Werner Herzog’s own shorter doc on the same incredible events, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, is much much more effective and memorable. another doc you can’t knock is Charles Ferguson’s gut-wrenching No End In Sight. had something like this been released in the ’04 instead of Leni Riefenstahl’s Fahrenheit 9/11, maybe it would have actually prevented people for voting for Bush. and lastly, we’ll never shut up about David Fincher’s Zodiac (more on that when we drop our ‘breast of’ shortly), esp since we know you haven’t seen it. well, even gooder things come to those who wait/wasted a year… the 2-disc super amazing awesome Director’s Cut includes fab-tab-ulous making of features + two franztastic docs about the murder cases and the prime suspect. a must for anyone with eyes. even Britney loves it

 

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

 

Persepolis
And Iran, I Ran So Far Away
Trailers & Mo

A black and white cartoon, drawn like The Critic, about growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, all in French? Sounds about as eggciting as having yer balls shaved with sandpaper covered in skunk and spunk juice, eh? Those were our thoughts eggzactly, that is until we emerged from the theater absolutely glowing over one of the bestest and brightest memoirs we’ve seen this year… and we’ve seen a buttload of good ones too (Diving Bell, La Vie En Rose, etc, etc, etc). Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s telling autobiographic novel beautifully transformed from page to screen, with the help of underground French comic artist Vincent Paronnaud. Not only are we presented with her killah coming of age tale, where her parents eventually send her to a very foreign Vienna for schooling and when she returns back home, she almost feels more exiled than she did in Austria, but it’s also a poignant history lesson on modern Iran, which was more educational than anything we’ve found in an American textbook or periodical. So why’s this baby in French? Well that’s cause Satrapi resides in Paris, and luckily for us, that means we’re treated to some top notch frog voicework. Real-life daughter and mother Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve lend their pipes to play Satrapi and her mother, and not so oddly enuff, Danielle Darrieux voices the grandmother, which marks the 5th time that she’s played Deneuve’s mother in a film! So stop JOing to that fromagey Pixar pic and go see Persepolis, a cartoon that the whole family can not only enjoy, but learn something from

Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want: now could someone peas greenlight a big screen adaptation of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s thumbcredible graphic novel about his Holocaust surviving father

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

Persepolis opens in limited theaters on 12/25

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

There Will Be Blood
Double, Double, Oil and Trouble
Trailers & Mo

When the topic of who the greatest living actor is arises, the name Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t always seem to get a mention. Maybe if he acted a bit more often than he did (this being only his 3rd movie in a decade), there wouldn’t even be a discussion on the matter. So when DD-L sinks himself into a meaty role, whatever the film, it is indeed worth watching. Take Gangs of New York for example. We’ve been quite lucky to erase most of that overbloated mess from our memory banks, but we’d never want to forget Day-Lewis’ cunning performance as Bill The Butcher, a character which still haunts us to this day. There Will Be Blood finds Day-Lewis in a similar place, a 2 1/2 hour plus period piece where there will be mustaches, but this black gold tale fares a heckuva lot better than Scorsese’s old New York story. While we were a bit befuddled by what the movie was eggzactly trying to say, we still couldn’t help but being mesmerized from the first frame to the last (even during the slow boring parts!). Props de leon galore go out to director Paul Thomas Anderson, who for once makes a pretentious movie that justifies its pretentiousness. Also lending a helpful hand are DD-L’s Ballad of Jack and Rose co-star Paul Dano (your probably know him better as the quiet kid in Little Miss Poopshoot) as a manic man of the cloth, and Radioheader Johnny Greenwood, whose score was one of the mos bone-chllin we’ve heard since Wendy Carlos‘ work on The Shining. Blood comes awfully close to being a masterpiece, and could of been had roller skates [NSFW] been invented back then. Why? Cause then and only then, there would have been boobs!

Marfa My Dear: Blood joins No Country For Old Men and the other oil epic Giant on the small list of movies filmed in Marfa, Texas

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): for D D-Lewis’s work alone, this thang is Breast In Show

Blood opens in limited theaters on 12/26

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…