July 2, 2020 “Inmate #1: The Rise Of Danny Trejo” (*** out of four) was a moving documentary chronicling the star’s journey from impoverished upbringings in L.A. to a life of drugs and crime to prison to rehabilitation counselor to an extra on movies that led to him becoming a B-movie legend in his own right (“From Dusk Till Dawn”, “Machete”, countless others) who works tirelessly and endlessly to this day. An interesting story of a man who took his hard lessons learned in life and turned his life around to help others and to achieve worldwide fame. Features good interviews with Michelle Rodriguez and Robert Rodriguez but this wouldn’t work as well and be so heartfelt without Trejo himself who is heavily interviewed and comes off as a genuinely nice man who sought to turn his life around and turned his love for the streets into a love of people and a love of movies. Continue reading →
July 2, 2020 “Alive” (*1/2 out of four) was an overbearing horror thriller set in an abandoned sanitarium in which a man and a woman (Thomas Cocquerel and Camille Stopps) awake and find that a psychotic doctor (Angus Macfadyen) is holding them hostage and he holds the keys to their true identity and thus their survival. Seedy production design and decrepit cinematography are creepy but you’ll eventually be swallowed up and numbed by all the unpleasantness. This is what audiences get for having made “Saw” such a huge hit. Continue reading →
July 1, 2020 “Viena And The Fantomes” (*1/2 out of four) was an incomprehensible slog about a young roadie (Dakota Fanning) who goes on tour with a noxious and hard-living punk bank (Phillip Ettinger, Ryan LeBeouf, and others) in the 1980’s and this leads to an odyssey of discovery and a self-catharsis of revelations for her. Unpleasant, uninvolving, and pretty much unwatchable all the way through; even the usually bright Fanning is a one-note zombie and she starred in a much better rock ‘n’ roll movie “The Runaways” in 2009. This was filmed in 2014 and was re-tooled and re-edited for years to no avail and hasn’t exactly aged like fine wine. Continue reading →
July 1, 2020 “Jasper Mall” (** out of four) was a curiously flat and unmoving documentary about a shopping mall in Jasper, Alabama and its declining fortunes in today’s economy. Potentially incendiary look at capitalism, consumerism, and the effects of internet commerce on today’s shopping mall revenue is indifferently handled, as most of the focus is on various shoppers and store workers and their own lives, instead of the mall itself. As a result, film meanders and never comes to life. You can only imagine what the Michael Moore of “Roger And Me” or the Charles Ferguson of “Inside Job” would have done with interesting material like this. Continue reading →
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