Aaron_Peck

Member since 2/19/2009, last signed in awhile ago.

""Moderation in moderation""

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Interested in:Action, Adventure, Comedy, Comedy Drama, Crime, Drama, Epic, Fantasy, Film, TV & Radio, History, Music, Musical, Mystery, Nature, Romance, Science & Technology, Science Fiction, Spy Film, Theater, Thriller, Travel, Visual Arts, War, Western

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Poison Ivy 4: The Secret Society

Review: Poison Ivy 4 - Secret S ...
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"Well, we’ve come a long way from the cult Sundance hit Poison Ivy starring Drew Barrymore. What, you didn’t know that Poison Ivy actually premiered at Sundance in 1992 and was nominated for the dramatic Grand Jury Prize along side movies like Reservoir Dogs? Well, you learn something new every day, don’t you? The first Poison Ivy movie spurred a cult following, and with most movies that garner “cult” status, film studios think that is their license to churn out hack sequel after hack sequel until the audience is bled dry both of money and any feeling of good will they had toward the original film. So on down the sequel road we’ve gone, from Drew Barrymore, to Alyssa Milano in Poison Ivy II: Lily, Jamie Pressly in Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, and finally to today’s featured presentation Poison Ivy 4: The Secret Society starring Miriam McDonald (Degrassi: The Next Generation) and various other girls who like to take their shirts off. The co ... " [More]

Peter and Vandy

Review: Peter and Vandy
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"I don’t know how it happened, but Sundance picked up the same movie twice, just under a different name. Just like 500 Days of Summer, Peter and Vandy tells the story of a relationship. The movie jumps back and forth in time showing us the good, the bad, and the awful. The characters look back on their relationship with each other and try to decide if they were ever in love. I couldn’t believe how extremely similar these two movies were, but just in case you thought I was going to give Peter and Vandy a bad review think again. Peter and Vandy has a much smaller budget than 500 Days of Summer and some lesser known faces, but it is a solid little film. Peter gets the courage to walk up to Vandy while she’s sitting in a town square eating her lunch. He’s a naturally nervous person who profusely apologizes for himself even though he’s not doing anything wrong. Vandy is a beautiful strong woman who falls for Peter after he gives her a thoughtful gift. The co ... " [More]

The Winning Season

Review: The Winning Season
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"The Winning Season is a way to tell a conventional story in a fairly unconventional way. A local high school girls basketball team needs a coach. They are terrible team who never win. See what I mean about conventional? A team that needs a new coach because they are terrible? What do you think happens with the new coach? That’s right, they end up winning. But, that’s not the point of the film. The reason why this film is different from the other feel-good sports films that involve a new coach taking over a team is because here it's more about the personal lives of the players and the coach involved, rather than the winning, and the "big game." The new coach, Bill (Sam Rockwell), is a drunk who is currently busy busing tables at the local restaurant. He’s divorced and barely gets to see his teenage girl once a week. He takes the coaching job mostly because he doesn’t have anything else going on in his life. The new team only has five healthy players and one w ... " [More]

The Informers

Review: The Informers
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"Star-studded casts are lures at Sundance. They draw the people into the theaters, but sometimes the audience ends up leaving empty-handed. In the case of The Informers, the audience leaves empty-headed. The film is a 98-minute journey into narcissistic nothingness. Set in the '80s in the middle of L.A., The Informers follows around a plethora of characters all of whom, surprise, have problems. Big ones. Kidnapping, sexually transmitted diseases, cheating partners, underage infatuations, and confusion over sexuality just to name a few. There are so many characters and so many story lines, packed into such a short movie that none of them approach anything considered coherence or resolution. The characters are thinly connected to one another, but there’s nothing that truly brings them all together. There’s even a completely superfluous plot line that involves a young kid and his father in Hawaii. This movie wants so bad to be a quirky character romp in the vein of Pulp Fic ... " [More]

Five Minutes of Heaven

Review: Five Minutes of Heaven
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"It’s pretty hard to start watching movies at 8:30 in the morning. It’s a good thing that Five Minutes of Heaven was 90 minutes of genius filmmaking. It did get screwed with its timeslot in the press screenings though -- early in the morning and on Inauguration Day. Needless to say the theater was nearly empty. Five Minutes of Heaven tells the story of two men caught up in the conflict in Ireland in the 1960s. As a youth, Alistair (Liam Neeson) killed a man. That man was the brother of Joe (James Nesbitt), who witnessed the shooting as a young boy. Years later Alistair and Joe are grown men. Alistair served twelve years in prison for shooting Joe’s brother. They are about for the first time on an Irish television show that wants to film the meeting between the two. For the past 33 years Joe has had to live with the guilt thrust upon him by his mother. She blamed Joe for his brother being killed. Even though Joe wasn’t older than 10, she still continued to bla ... " [More]

The Cove

Review: The Cove
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"This is the first documentary that I’ve seen at Sundance thus far, and it was worth it. If you have any heart or feeling in your soul you will connect with this film…that is unless you live in Taiji, Japan. The Cove focuses on one tiny secluded piece of water in the town of Taiji, Japan where every year fisherman with large boats channel thousands of dolphins into a secluded bay. Here in the bay dolphins are sold to trainers from dolphin shows around the world. The dolphins who aren’t picked are then led to the cove in question where they are slaughtered, 23,000 every year. The man behind the film is Ric O’Barry. He feels personally responsible for the plight of these dolphins and captive dolphins everywhere, because he’s the guy who made dolphins famous. He’s the brain behind TV show Flipper. After one of the five dolphins who played Flipper died, or as O’Barry says it “committed suicide” he has vowed that his life work will b ... " [More]

Big Fan

Review: Big Fan
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"The first film I saw today was a screening of Big Fan starring Patton Oswalt and written/directed by Robert D. Siegel of The Wrestler fame. You know that saying “There’s always someone worse off than you?” Well, Paul Aufiero (Oswalt) is that guy. Paul works in a parking garage booth, lives with his nagging mother, and his only happiness in life depends solely on the success of the New York Giants football team. Paul is the saddest and most pathetic character ever created for the big screen. He spends his nights writing personal scripts to use when he calls into the local sports talk show. Like two immature geeks on an online video game message board, Paul and a man named “Philadelphia Phil” exchange heated football discussions back and forth. His Sundays are spent, not actually in the stadium, but with his buddy in the parking lot of the Giants’ stadium watching the game on a tiny TV hooked up to the car battery. Paul tells everyone he’s ha ... " [More]

Good Hair

Review: Good Hair
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"Now here is the most interesting documentary I’ve seen since King of Kong. Just like King of Kong, Good Hair takes a topic I formally knew nothing about and sheds some light on it in the most fascinating way. Good Hair is narrated by comedian Chris Rock. One day one of Chris’ daughters walked into him and said “Daddy, why don’t I have good hair?” This started a quest where Chris delves into the culture of the hair of black women. Straight flowing hair is apparently the envy of the black female community. It’s a highly sought after commodity. The straighter the better. Some women achieve this look by using a highly concentrated substance called relaxer. This relaxer, Chris finds out, contains sodium hydroxide as the main ingredient. Sodium hydroxide is highly toxic and can cause scalp burns. The other way to get straight “beautiful” hair is with the weave. Weaves can cost women anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000. The weave hair, we find ou ... " [More]

(500) Days of Summer

Review: 500 Days of Summer
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel star in this quirky story about boy meets girl, boy becomes infatuated, but girl wants to be “just friends.” Being friends with the girl of your dreams is possibly the most dreaded thing that could happen to a single man. Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, a sappy young guy who believes in fate and “the one.” He writes and designs greeting cards for a living, but secretly wants to be an architect. Deschanel plays Summer. She’s perfect for this role; she seems cute and quirky enough to be one of those girls that could make a guy fall madly in love with her without really realizing it. The movie jumps around in the chronology with a little counter that pops up every so often to tell us what day within the 500 days it is. At first we see them sitting on a park bench and she’s got a ring on, they’re holding hands, and everything looks like it worked out perfectly. Cut to another scene where Tom is in the kitchen b ... " [More]

Taking Chance

Review: Taking Chance
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"First up is already the front-runner for my festival favorite. It’s called Taking Chance and stars Kevin Bacon as Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl. Based on the real journals of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, this film follows the transport of a fallen soldier, named Chance Phelps, back to his home to be buried. Strobl volunteers for the duty of transportation escort. It turns out that this is an extremely serious duty and honor within the military. Strict guidelines are to be followed. The escort must witness each time the body is taken on and off any type of transport. The escort must also transfer the fallen soldier’s personal items, with the utmost respect, to give them to the family. At the beginning we’re not sure why such a high ranking officer like Strobl has volunteered for a duty that is mostly given to lower ranking personnel. As Strobl traverses the country from the east coast to the Midwest he meets all different kinds of people along the way &md ... " [More]

Moon

Review: Moon
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"The future is an energy efficient place. Rocks on the moon are being harvested for “Helium 3” a clean burning fuel that is trapped inside of the rocks when the sun hits them. There is one station on the moon that we know of, with the population of one. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell. He’s the lone engineer manning the station. Most everything is automated, and he’s helped with his tasks by a personal computer named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Sam spends most of his time working on a wooden model of a small town. He carves buildings out of wood. He has a contract to work on the moon for three years, and then he can go home. When we join him, he’s got two weeks left on his contract, but the isolation and loneliness has taken its toll. Soon Sam starts to hallucinate. He sees a women sitting in his chair. Then while driving out to fix one of the rock harvesters he sees something in the distance coming toward him. He can’t make it out. Straining to s ... " [More]

Taken

Review: Taken
By Aaron_Peck in Aaron_Peck Blog
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"Ah! It’s good to get back to the basics, with Liam Neeson’s (“Batman Begins”) new thriller “Taken.” Sure we’ve heard the story before. Ex-military father’s daughter is kidnapped and sold into some kind of human trafficking ring, which then triggers those hidden “talents” the father acquired in his military days. “Taken” is a perfect example of taking a simple story, sticking to the basics of what makes a good action movie, and going with that. First and foremost, they keep the camera still! Gee, what a novel concept. Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is an overprotective father. He’s ex-military who still does side security jobs with some of his military buddies. Right out of the gate we see that Bryan really knows how to handle himself when there’s an altercation at the concert he’s working security for. Bryan is trying to connect with his precocious teenage daughter named Kim (Maggie Grace “L ... " [More]