Is it possible to make a low budget biopic? "My Dinner with Jimi" tries its darnedest. At times, it looks like the scrappiness of it all is sure to pull the rug out from under the whole thing: the photography is rushed, with a cheap look comparable to those dreaded VH-1 movies about the Monkees and "Diff'rent Strokes," while a few of the celebrity imitators look buffoonish, like sketch show caricatures instead of honest portrayals. (The guys playing the Beatles sound like they took lessons from Dana Carvey.) The worst offender is the crummy hair-and-makeup department, who appear to have used their local Halloween shop for all their needs, dumping ill-fitting wigs and chintzy stick-on facial hair on the stars.

There are times when "Jimi" looks downright terrible, as if setting out to answer my initial question with a firm no. Surely all the work that goes into recreating a bygone era and iconic f...Read the entire review

April 1994: As the fever from the Winter Olympics was finally cooling down, most media outlets were too busy shoving Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan down our throats to bother mentioning the small African country of Rwanda. Yet in the two months that followed, nearly a million Rwandans would lie dead in the streets from violence between the native Hutu and Tutsi people---leaving behind roughly 100,000 children without parents. During this time, Canadian Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire (above) was placed in charge of a UN-backed peacekeeping force that would hopefully put an end to this genocide. He asked for 5,000 troops to promote order and establish elections to replace assassinated Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana. Among other things, he needed manpower and money. Unfortunately, he got very...Read the entire review

When I look back at 2004, it seems that it was the year of the low budgetdocumentary. Michael Moore's much publicized Fahrenheit 911seemed to open the flood gates, and there was a virtual tidal wave of directto DVD low quality documentaries released. To cash in on this craze,the owner of Trailervision.com, a sight that makes fake movie trailers,have released their 2003 documentary Stuidity. This made-on-the-cheapmovie attempts to look at what stupidity is, and how prevelent it is inour society. In the end though it doesn't reveal anything new, itjust states what we all seem to know: there are a lot of stupid peopleout there.

This documentary is told in a rather conventional, if irritating style. It consists of a few talking heads spouting off their theories of intelligence,mixed with copious amounts of movie and news ...Read the entire review

Noted philosopher Beth (from NewsRadio) once said, "Sarcasm…the last refuge of the son-of-a-bitch!" But for the filmmaker, I believe said refuge can actually be found in parody.

In many ways, parody is the easiest of all forms to make. A filmmaker does not have to come up with an original story, plot or characters. Just rip off someone else, exaggerate the bad qualities and you're in.

Because of that, though, the market is absolutely flooded. Not Another Teen Movie, every Zucker film starting with Airplane!, Scary Movie, Scary Movie 2, Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 27 are but just a handful of examples.

The only form of comedy as prevalent as parody might be industry satire. When you get a town filled with pompous, self-righteous jackasses like Hollywood, it's easy to take shots at its inflated self-worth.

So, enter Trai...Read the entire review

Themovie

What do you call a movie that's about a man whose passion in life isto create a grizzly-bear-proof suit of armor (and test it in thefield)? "Odd" would probably be what comes to mind;certainly Project Grizzly isn't your typicaltakes-itself-seriously documentary. To begin with, the focus of thefilm isn't on the grizzly bear project, but on the man behind it:Troy Hurtubise, a Canadian scrap-metal dealer with a Quixotic dream.

The 72-minute film introduces us to Hurtubise as he explains theorigins of his fascination with grizzlies: in a "near death"experience, he came into the clutches of a grizzly bear but wasunharmed. Drawn by the thrill of the experience, and hungry for theadrenaline rush, Hurtubise became det...Read the entire review

The Movie:

About a year before George W. Bush became president, J. H. Hatfield wrote a biography of the then governor of Texas in which he claimed, in the afterward, that Bush had used cocaine in the seventies. This book was called Fortunate Son: George W. Bush And The Making Of An American President and it was originally published by St. Martin's Press until supposed legal pressure from the Bush family lawyers caused a complete recall and a subsequent burning of the book.

Shortly after, independent underground publisher, Soft Skull Press, headed up by a punk named Sander Hicks, picked up the rights to the book and got it back in print. It has since gone back to press for a third edition and the author, J. H. Hatfield, has committed suicide.

Horns And Halos takes a look at the controversy surrounding the book, and in particular, the controversy surrounding its eni...Read the entire review

Themovie

If the mere idea of someone searching for his roots, for family thathe has never met, touches a powerful chord in your heart, then Familymay have some chance at achieving the effect it's looking for. But ifyou don't come to the film predisposed to find the materialcompelling, this is a film that will leave you completely cold.

Family is an autobiographical documentary about filmmaker SamiSaif's quest to find his father, who abandoned him and disappearedwhen Sami was still quite young. Family certainly has thepotential to be an interesting documentary, as it touches on issueslike the nature of family, the existence or non-existence of aconnection between family members who have never met each othe...Read the entire review

Themovie

Santa Claus: we all know him. He's the pudgy, jolly fellow with theample white beard, dressed (of course!) in his bright red suit withthe white trimmings. He's wholesome, he's all-American, he'straditional... and this image of him is largely an invention of Coca-Cola. Pre-Coke, "Santa"was St. Nick, who was sometimes depicted as slim, sometimes as fat;sometimes wearing red but more often dressed in yellow or blue. ButCoca-Cola's ad men wanted a Santa dressed in their brand's trademarkcolors of red and white, so that's what their illustrators gave them, and that's the image that took root in popular culture.Jolly old Santa, seller of Coca-Cola!

Ifthis shocks you, be prepared to be amazed by The Cola Conq...Read the entire review