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Florida Film Festival 2014 review: ‘The Front Man’

I don’t know if this is the type of person that we all know or have met before, but I have a feeling it is. I think we can all relate to the universal truth of coming across a person who cares about one thing above all others, and that is the attainment of worldwide fame and adulation, with all the perks and fortune that comes with such popularity. In other words, we all know someone who just wants to be a rock star. The music is secondary. It’s all about the fame.

That’s “The Front Man,” a documentary, getting it’s East Coast premiere, about the lead singer of a New Jersey band called Loaded Poets, a band that has stuck together for decades, playing local establishments and recording material and plugging away at it since 1980, which is a damned long time for a band to be spinning their wheels in the mud (professionally speaking, anyway). And according the to the press notes for this documentary, “The Front Man” covers 27 years in the life of lead singer Jim Wood, and while part of the fun of this movie for me was the realization that it was covering a very large expanse of time in this person’s like, I have to say that it did not seem like we were documenting 27 years worth of this guy’s life. Maybe 27 years when you throw in some old home videos, but this definitely seemed like it documents at least 12 to 15 years of Jim Wood’s existence as a musician and as a average joe who wishes so badly to no longer be average.Continue Reading …

Florida Film Festival 2014 review: ‘Strike: The Greatest Bowling Story Ever Told’

The great thing about documentary short films? You can make one about just about any subject and for even just a few minutes, the most mundane person or subject can be the most interesting thing in the world. For example, for thirteen minutes, I was enthralled by the journey of one man as he goes after one of the hardest things to accomplish in any organized sport – bowling three perfect games in a row.Continue Reading …

Florida Film Festival 2014 review: ‘Mission Congo’

Man, I swear to the heavens and every single deity listening right now, if there ends up being more of an uproar and activist approach to save the damn orcas because of “Blackfish” then there ends up being in the aftermath of “Mission Congo,” then there truly is no justice in this world and we might as well all just give up. SeaWorld may be abusing whales and everyone freaks the fuck out but The 700 Club mastermind and former Presidential candidate Pat Robertson uses money donated for humanitarian purposes to fund his own personal diamond mine and everyone is just as likely to shrug their shoulders and say “oh well what can we do about it?“Continue Reading …

Florida Film Festival 2014 review: ‘Not Anymore: A Story of Revolution’

“Not Anymore: A Story of Revolution” is a documentary short film that should be seen by everyone, and by everyone I mean people in the Western world and those who really don’t give a place like Syria a second thought because this is the type of experience that really drives home the full impact of what has happened over there and what their current state of living is now. Why is this not on the news regularly? Why are our televisions saturated with faux-reality shows and meaningless drivel? Why are we being encouraged to look away from the horrors happening in the our own world?Continue Reading …

2014 Florida Film Festival preview

It is that most special time of year, that annual 10-day feast of film and food that is the Florida Film Festival. Always with great programming as well as cool events and parties, the FFF is something I have been looking forward to each year for a while now, and this year’s schedule looks as promising as always.

And who knows, there is a good chance a bunch of these movies will end up on Netflix for instant viewing, as I have seen a NUMBER of films at the FFF, only to see that pop up on Netflix within about a year or so. And they are just about always great movies, whether they be little indie coming of age comedies, documentaries or foreign films, they just have that knack for picking some winners.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 3/31/14 – ‘Reservoir Dogs’

Here is another one for the kids. You know, all you folks born in 1990 or after, far too young to even realize back in 1992 that a new hot young director had just exploded on to the scene with “Reservoir Dogs,” his first movie which just peeled back faces and made a lot of people sit up and take notice. Now that you folks are older, you may think of Quentin Tarantino as this dude who has been making crazy movies for the last twenty years. But once upon a time, he was the new kid on the block with a fresh new movie and if you haven’t seen this directorial debut from one of our finest filmmakers, then you need to do yourself a favor and rectify that quickly!Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Sabotage’

“Sabotage” is a particularly brutal and bleak movie from David Ayers, who is coming off his very well liked “End of Watch” and decided the best way to follow up that success would be with a morally murky, ultra violent tale of a questionable DEA agent and his run in with a Mexican DTO (drug trafficking organization, because apparently the DEA does not like the world cartel anymore). A fun action movie? Nope. A good time at the movies? Un-uh. Escapist entertainment? Only if you want to escape to a land of cruel murder and betrayal and moral ambiguity.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is Breacher, a DEA agent and leader of a small elite task force of the best undercover drug agents out there, and of course this a rogue group of agents, all of them just a little insane, partying hard in their off time, being total dicks to everyone, and just pretty much living the lifestyle they promote, that of the hard living, dangerous, over the top, gung ho alpha males (and single alpha female), and of course they blur the lines between the good guys and the bad guys, using their authority to do some questionable things, and even when they are taking out bad guys, it is in a brutal, hard way that is hard to look past.Continue Reading …

#64 – The Action Champions

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In episode 64, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn are joined by Matt from The SBK LIVE Show and they talk about action movie stars, new movies like Sabotage and Noah, there’s a new Netflix Pick of the Week, a round of Drewster Cogburn vs The World and so much more!

Review: ‘Noah’

Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” is here after a couple years of anticipation, and this is just about the weirdest, most off-kilter, non-mainstream mainstream movie to come out in theaters since “Watchmen” in 2009. I can only imagine what some people were thinking when less than ten minutes into this very short but well known biblical tale the idea of fallen, multi-limbed angels encased in rock gets introduced and then relied upon heavily throughout the film. Definitely don’t remember giant rock ex-angels in Sunday School. Yet here they are. Okay, let’s back up a bit.

So this Aronofsky fella, he makes a bunch of incredible low budget movies, one of em finally hits and makes some coin, and he finally finds himself able to get his apparent dream project off the ground, which is a big screen version of the Noah story, one that takes up very a couple of pages in the Bible, yet is pretty well known by everyone: God made the world and he made Man. Man got all corrupt and evil, so God was like “time to shake this etch-a-sketch” and he told Noah to make a boat, put two of each animal on it, and ride out the flood that will destroy everyone else. Which Noah did. And then his family somehow repopulated the Earth. Pretty straightforward, not really much there, so why are we even going here with this movie? Didn’t we already get “Evan Almighty?” Isn’t that enough?Continue Reading …