'All The Boys Love Mandy Lane' Movie Review

There is a tendency among hardcore horror hounds to equate obscurity with quality, and to use what you've seen as a measuring stick of your own devotion and fandom. Sometimes, when you spend months, or even longer, hunting down a particularly hard to find movie you've been dying to see your efforts pays off, other times not so much. Thus is the case with “All the Boys Love Mandy Lane,” and after years, it is finally available for widespread public consumption so you can see what you’ve been missing.

'Jump' Movie Review

 

“Jump,” the latest film from Irish director Kieron J. Walsh, is garnering comparisons to the likes of  Doug Liman’s “Go,” and “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barels” and “Snatch” from Guy Ritchie. Those are apt comparisons given that “Jump” is a fast paced crime story comprised of multiple threads and numerous narrative layers. However, the puzzle of the plot is more complex, as Walsh’s script zips you back and forth in time. Watching “Jump” is like playing an engaging game, full of twists and turns, and the action keeps you barreling through the spare 81-minute run time. In a post “Pulp Fiction,” post “Sixth Sense” world, you’ll see some of these shifts and curves coming, but that shouldn’t dampen your enjoyment of the film.

'Byzantium' Movie Review

Neil Jordan’s moody new film “Byzantium” is a sprawling, novelistic take on a familiar genre. Not his first horror rodeo, the “Crying Game” director offers up a revisionist approach to a vampire story. His film contains many of the hallmarks you expect—eternal life, themes of undying love, an epic scope that spans historical epochs. While this strategy has enough twists and tweaks so that it fit doesn’t feel like a story you’ve witnessed a thousand times before, the meandering nature is also its biggest drawback. Occasionally bloody and violent, “Byzantium” is primarily a somber tale of a woeful, savage life.

SIFF Shorts: 'Nightmare Mystery Theatre'

 

Every year, in addition to more than 400 features, the Seattle International Film Festival also presents an extensive series of short. While fests like this may be your only chance to see many of the full-length films, the odds are even worse that you’re going to stumble across most of these smaller offerings. There aren’t a lot of mainstream distribution avenues for short films, they don’t get released into theaters, so if you miss them now, you’re probably shit out of luck. Digging into the darker side of things, the films in the “Nightmare Mystery Theatre” program offer you quick glimpses into the twisted, violent, and horrific.

SIFF '13 Review: 'The Last Ocean'

Director Peter Young’s new documentary, The LastOcean, is one of those films seeks to make you angry. Not punch throwing angry, necessarily, but it would certainly like to be a call to arms, or a rallying cry. And for the most part, it succeeds. Young manages to accomplish his goal at the same time he presents both sides of the issue at hand, and, most importantly, without ever being preachy or sanctimonious.

SIFF '13 Review: 'Last I Heard'

Here’s the beginning of what could have been an awkward story. Seated for the world premiere of “Last I Heard” at the Seattle International Film Festival, I chatted with a guy in my row before the lights went down. I had my notebook out, and the pen I stole from work at the ready as a few more people filled out the row. Others occupied the seats around us, and as I started jotting down the few facts I knew about the movie—gangsters, Paul Sorvino, prison, to be honest, I didn’t know much going in—to remind myself of later, it dawned on me, I was sitting next to stars Renee Props and Andrea Navedo, and had been talking to writer/director David Rodriguez.

SIFF '13 Review: 'Cockneys Vs Zombies'

Haven’t you always wanted to see a bunch of cranky, foul-mouthed octogenarians have it out with swarming hordes of the undead? If so, you’re in luck, because the world now has Matthias Hoene’s “Cockneys vs. Zombies” to play with. Not the most technically proficient horror movie you’ll ever see—the story is predictable every step of the way, for one thing—but what the movie is, is a goddamned blast. Sure, it’s cheap and hokey, but there is gore, guns, and screaming senior citizens, all of which infuses the movie with a giddiness that makes you want to clap your hands and squeal like an imbecile. This isn’t looking to balance horror and comedy. The intent here is definitely skewed toward laughs, though laughs soaked in blood and viscera.

SIFF '13 Review: 'Much Ado About Nothing'

Though they may seem unlikely bedfellows, when you throw William Shakespeare and Joss Whedon together, you wind up with one hell of a popcorn movie. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, that’s what Whedon does. He has a fantastic pop sensibility, and turns out great, whip-smart movies that are equally entertaining. And even given his pantheonic placement in academia, that’s precisely what the Shakespeare did in his day, deliver populist entertainment that was never watered down. And when you put the Bard in the hand of the man who directed “The Avengers,” what you get is the latest adaptation of “Much AdoAbout Nothing.”

'The Kings Of Summer' Movie Review

You’ll be hard pressed to find a film this year—maybe ever—that captures both the burning desire and the abject terror at the prospect of growing up as “The Kings of Summer.” Certainly a generic title, it’s better than “Toy’s House,” the name on the tag the movie wore to the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Don’t be swayed by the moniker, however, this is a fantastic, bittersweet coming of age movie that manages to be wildly funny, deathly serious, and, most of all, engaging, all at the same time.

SIFF '13 Review: 'The Punk Singer'

Good god, watching “The Punk Singer,” Sini Anderson’s new documentary about Kathleen Hanna, makes me feel like I’m 16. This movie brings back vivid memories of mail ordering seven-inches I read about in crappy photocopied zines that I picked up at basement shows, sending a few carefully concealed bills, hoping I’d actually get one of those records that changed my life every couple of months. There were more than a few times where a random package arrived in the mailbox and it was a record I sent for six or eight months earlier and completely forgot about. Groups of us sat for hours in one or another of our bedrooms, annoying the shit out of anyone else in the house, making endless mix tapes of each other’s records.

SIFF '13 Review: 'Fatal'

 

Lee Sung-gong (Nam Yeon-woo) is a wiener. That’s the long and the short of it. As the protagonist of South Korean director Lee Don-ku’s new revenge drama “Fatal” (“Ga-si-kkot”), he is the kind of character that the entire world takes a giant crap on. Everyone, including his so-called friends, pushes him around; he has a glum, dead end, demeaning job; buses don’t even stop for this guy when he stands there waiting to get on. Even little dogs pick on this man. As you can imagine, “Fatal” is a story of him gaining a spine for the first time in his miserable life, and exerting a modicum of power upon the world around him. But it is also a mediation of guilt, compliance, and the lasting effects our actions have on each other.

SIFF '13 Review: 'Yesterday Never Ends'

One of the key components in speculative fiction is imagining various potential futures based on the current state of the world. In her new film, Yesterday Never Ends, Spanish writer-director Isabel Coixet’s (Map of the Sounds of Tokyo) takes the current economic crisis in her native country and extends it by a decade, out into the year 2017. In this iteration, the crisis worsens, taking the entire country down with it. Unemployment is at seven million, civil unrest runs rampant in the streets, fiscal cut backs hamstring every social service, and the government is powerless to do a damn thing about any of it.

SIFF '13 Review: 'A Band Called Death'

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Playing music is tough, and something you better damn well have a passion for, because it’s almost impossible to make a living at. Even if you do love it, you’re in for some long nights and rude awakenings. I spent a fair amount of my life driving six, eight, ten hours from one show to the next, playing for a handful of people (once in Columbus, Ohio, out audience consisted of three people, all of them in another band) who couldn’t care less, and walking away with twenty-five bucks and no place to crash aside from the van. And five grumpy dudes that have been on the road for a month all trying to sleep in a weighted-down half-ton Chevy is not nearly as romantic as it sounds.

SIFF '13 Review: 'Pieta'

After a sojourn into other realms, and a self-imposed year-long hiatus from the industry—sort of, he did release the documentary “Arirang” in the interim—controversial director Kim Ki-duk is back to doing what he does best, making grim, tough to watch movies about a bad man doing terrible things to people. While his latest film, “Pieta,” never reaches he highs of other recent South Korean revenge films, never truly delivering that strong emotional connection, it is a gritty, visceral ride nonetheless.

SIFF '13 Review: 'Frances Ha'

Watching his films, you might get the impression that director Noah Baumbach is a dyed in the wool pessimist. While movies like “Greenberg,” “The Squid and the Whale,” and my personal favorite, the underrated “Kicking and Screaming,” have sharp bitter edges, his latest, “Frances Ha,” is his most hopeful, least combative work to date. The fact that this is collaboration with star Greta Gerwig might have something to do with that, and the events are largely autobiographical on her side of the equation.

DVD/Blu-Ray Review: 'Nightfall'

Chow Hin Yeung’s thriller Nightfall, now available on Blu-ray and DVD, begins with a moment of extreme violence, so brutal as to be legitimately uncomfortable to watch. This highly stylized pre-credits scene informs the rest of the film, imbuing the remainder with a sinister undertone, with the potential for fierce explosions of violence.

SIFF '13 Review: 'Furever'

Our pets are full-fledged members of the family. For many of us, they’re as close to children as we ever plan to have. We watch them do all manner of stupidly cute things, occasionally dress them up in demeaning holiday costumes, and share our entire lives with them. We know going in that, odds are, we’re going to outlive any domesticated animal we bring into our home, but we push this to the periphery and ignore it like we ignore death as whole.