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The film "21" isn't so much based on the true story of a scheme
about beating the house in Las Vegas as it is intrigued by this idea: A
charismatic but corrupt MIT math professor lures his top students into a
gambling team, coaches them in card counting and codes for passing information,
and then rakes in 50 percent of their winnings without setting foot in a casino.
Jim Sturgess ("Across the Universe") is the working-class math genius Ben, a
charismatic science nerd lured from his geek squad buddies by the allure of Team
Vegas' sexy golden girl (Kate Bosworth, on hand largely as eye candy) and the
charm of Kevin Spacey's professor-turned-gambling godfather. The film simply
drops them all into a conventional tale of innocence corrupted by the dazzle of
easy money, the fantasy life of Vegas excess, and the thrill of the illicit.
It's pure formula jazzed up with music and sex and visual razzle-dazzle -- all
the easier to distract from the idiotic behavior of ostensibly smart people.
It's the old Hollywood game of payback in place of amends, which makes for
short-term satisfaction but a hollow payoff: a morality tale without a moral.
Laurence Fishburne plays the only real wild card in this stacked deck of
characters, an old-school security director who picks up Ben on his
radar. The release features commentary by director Robert Luketic with
producers Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca, and three featurettes, including
the 25-minute "Basic Strategy: A Complete Film Journal," a perfectly engaging
little production that really does get behind the scenes of the production (they
shot on the floor of a working casino) and the culture. Whether the film is
interesting enough to warrant that much of your attention is a call you have to
make. Personally, I'd rather fold and cut my losses. The "2-Disc Special
Edition" features a digital copy of the film (which can be downloaded to PC,
iPod or other compatible players), and the Blu-ray release offers an interactive
"21 Virtual Blackjack Game," which essentially means you can gamble virtually
without having to get on to your computer. But if you have a BD-Live enabled
player, you can compare high scores to other disc players.
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| The Last Winter |
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Larry Fessenden's eco-twist on the ghost story is set in the
isolation of an Arctic oil company outpost. The atmosphere evokes John
Carpenter's "The Thing," a team surrounded by a frozen desert where storms whip
up out of nowhere and something seemingly alien is out there trying to get to
them. "The corpses of animals and plants from millions of years ago," is how
environmental scientist James LeGros describes oil. He may also have pegged the
source of the angry spirits of the Earth rising to stop the destruction. Ron
Perlman (Hellboy himself, sans makeup) is excellent as the company man invested
in the culture of oil, but also dedicated to protecting all the people on his
team as they come under assault for simply drifting into madness. It's
Fessenden's biggest and most visually evocative production to date, and the
marriage of environmentalist and animist themes makes for a resonant (and very
timely) horror film. Connie Britton, Zach Gilford and Kevin Corrigan co-star.
The DVD features commentary by Fessenden and the feature-length "The Making of
The Last Winter," a rather impressionistic survey of the production followed by
deleted scenes and a video interview with Fessenden.
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| Turn the River |
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Famke Janssen, a good actress too often cast in flimsy roles,
plays a small-time gambler who gets by hustling poker and pool games in upstate
New York. In her periodic jaunts to New York City, she checks in on her
tough-love mentor (a cheerfully grizzled Rip Torn in fine form) and secretly
sees her son Gulley (Jaymie Dornan), whom she abandoned at birth. Now she plots
to scrape together enough money to get Gulley away from his angry, alcoholic dad
(Matt Ross) and oppressive grandmother (Lois Smith). Chris Eigeman, who
co-starred with Janssen in "The Treatment," turns writer and director with this
film. If the script is less than polished, he shows good instincts for character
and atmosphere in his directorial debut. And Janssen is convincingly
weather-beaten and frayed as the tough cookie who has been bounced around by
life, and risks it all to save her son. The DVD features commentary by Eigeman,
and "The Final Shot," the raw, uncut footage of Janssen getting into character
and then taking the difficult final pool shot in the climactic game -- and
sinking it in one take.
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| Heartbeat Detector |
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Mathieu Amalric plays a corporate psychologist in the human
resources department of a multinational petrochemical corporation who is sent to
evaluate the increasingly unpredictable behavior of the firm's CEO, Mathias Just
(Michael Lonsdale), in the head office in Germany. The interviews twist into
mind games and battles of wits, but the deeper he digs into Just's delicate
condition, the more evidence he finds of the hidden history of corporate
complicity in the crimes against humanity by the Third Reich in World War II.
Director Nicolas Klotz described the film as the final film in his loose
"Trilogy of Modern Times," though the psychological drama is based on the novel
by François Emmanuel and stands alone as a self-contained story. Edith Scob, Lou
Castel and Jean-Pierre Kalfon co-star. The original French title is "La Question
Humaine," which translates to "The Human Question."
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| 21 Up South Africa: Mandela's Children |
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The "7 Up" series that has followed British children from age 7
to age 49 has been exported (so to speak) around the world. This production from
director Angus Gibson checks in with a group of children rich and poor, black,
white and "mixed race," from township slums to apartheid-era mansions to the
bushveldt who were first profiled at age 7 in 1992. In the intervening years
(in which AIDS claimed the lives of three of these children) is a sketch of the
social history of South Africa over the past two decades. Features an interview
with "49 Up" director Michael Apted and a stills gallery.
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In addition to his regular contributions to MSN Movies, Sean Axmaker is a
film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a DVD columnist for MSN
Entertainment. He is also a contributing writer for GreenCine.com, Turner
Classic Movies Online and Asian Cult Cinema, among other publications.
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Get Smart! Please!In honor of bumbling Maxwell
Smart, a brief history of our favorite clueless detectives On the RocksWith 'Iron Man' and 'Hancock' featuring
heavy-drinking protagonists, we reflect on the most memorable drunks in movie
history UnclassicsThough they may be listed among the
greatest films of all time, these 10 movies deserve to be
downgraded | |
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