Shameless Self Expression

Denzel Washington plays a top cop and Law school student who apprehends assassin John Lithgow. Denzel gets branded a hero, gets married, and in time becomes a media savvy Assistant DA. Meanwhile, Lithgow stews in jail, plotting an escape plan and eventual revenge on his captor. Once out of jail (after faking his own death) he sets about making Denzel’s life a living hell, tarnishing his good name with all manner of phony set-ups. And then it turns deadly. Kevin Pollak plays Denzel’s cop partner, Victoria Dillard plays Denzel’s concerned wife, Lindsay Wagner is the DA, John Amos is Denzel’s preacher dad, Ice-T is a drug dealer, John Cothran Jr. turns up as an associate of Denzel’s whom Lithgow frames as a paedophile (and making sure to have Denzel implicated too). In a strange bit of cross-promotion, Mary Ellen Trainor plays the same pushy reporter she played in “Die Hard” , and apparently still hasn’t learned her lesson yet about tact.   Flashy Aussie director Russell Mul...

Although the elaborate rouse leading to his proposal is spoiled, San Fran sous chef Tom (Jason Segel) and psychology grad student Violet (Emily Blunt) get engaged. Tom is also in line for a promotion at the restaurant he works at, under the butch Lauren Weedman. Meanwhile, Tom’s best bud (Chris Pratt) and Violet’s sister (Alison Brie, an American sporting a flawless Brit accent to me. I didn’t even know!) have hit it off, and end up going down the aisle before Tom and Violet get a chance to. And then Violet gets accepted into a Michigan university, under professor Rhys Ifans. This is the first test of their relationship, as Tom agrees to move to Michigan for the sake of her career, at the expense of his own. That’s what couples do, and he’s OK with it. However, once there, Tom finds it hard to find a suitable job given his far more upmarket culinary experience is seemingly unnecessary in San Francisco. He ends up working in a sandwich shop with stoner-ish metal head Brian Posehn (i...

Steven Seagal plays the shamefully named Marshall Lawson (Get it? Here, have a cookie!) a special forces commander whose men are massacred by some nasties hopped up on some kind of super drug that makes people uber-strong but uber-roid rage as well. Throw in some standard issue Eurotrash baddies (it’s set in France but presumably filmed in the much cheaper Romania), and a paunchy has-been star who can’t be bothered delivering his own dialogue, and you’ve got one hell of a calamity.   This lame, uber-cheap 2006 Michael Keusch (the not-awful “Shadow Man” ) atrocity joins “On Deadly Ground” , “The Foreigner” , “Ticker” , and “Out For a Kill” at the very bottom of the Seagal pile, this bizarro action-thriller makes little sense, and no one is trying very hard at all. The worst offender may be Seagal himself, who co-wrote this muddled flick (which was apparently meant to be about an alien plague- as some plot synopses suggest, but I could find no such references in the actual ...

A film dealing with the somewhat tumultuous filming of “The Prince and the Showgirl” , a 1951 pairing of director-star Lord Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and American movie star/sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. The former a classically trained, egotistical figure of British cinema royalty, the latter a ‘Method’-trained, deeply insecure, star of mostly innocuous American musicals and comedies. A witness to this meeting of two opposing movie titans is Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) a young man who wrangled his way into a Third Assistant Director’s gig on the film, and who becomes a close confidante of the troubled Monroe during the course of filming. This causes problems with his relationship with a pretty costumes department girl (Emma Watson), whilst Olivier’s wife Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond) wonders whether or not Monroe is a threat to her marriage. Dougray Scott plays Marilyn’s writer husband Arthur Miller, Zoe Wanamaker is her constant companion and acting consultant Paula Strasber...