Shameless Self Expression

Nic Cage plays a mild-mannered (ish) teacher who doesn’t quite know what to do when his wife (January Jones) is beaten and raped travelling home one night. He feels helpless. At the hospital he is approached by a mysterious man (Guy Pearce) who seems to know what happened and offers Cage a solution. He works for an organisation that ‘deals’ with thugs like the one who hurt Cage’s wife, carrying out their own brand of justice, whilst the law seem to sit on their arses. He claims he can take care of the ‘situation’ without payment, only asking that Cage do him an undisclosed favour at some point in the future. Cage agrees (letting Pearce know by selecting two specific candy bars from a particular vending machine in the hospital- why? Beats me), and soon regrets it when he finds out what Pearce wants him to do in return. And Pearce’s group don’t much like being refused, either. In fact, they may just be more trouble than the criminal scumbags they promise to exterminate. Harold Perrin...

Diamond broker Nic Cage (!), wife Nicole Kidman, and rebellious teen daughter Liana Liberato find themselves the victim of a home invasion. Four masked robbers (Ben Mendelsohn, Cam Gigandet, Dash Mihok, and Jordana Spiro) gain access to the house by pretending to be cops. They want money or anything of value...like diamonds, perhaps? And believe me, they’re not fucking around. Mendelsohn is the no-nonsense leader, Mihok is the threatening muscle (his name isn’t Raoul, but it might as well be), Spiro the token trashy moll, and Gigandet is the guy who installed the family’s alarm system, which Kidman soon realises. But is there more than this initial recognition going on between the two?   How does a film starring Nic Cage, Nicole Kidman, Cam Gigandet (ugh!) and Ben Mendelsohn, and directed by Joel Schumacher ( “The Lost Boys” , “The Client” , “Blood Creek” , “Tigerland” ), barely get a theatrical release in the US and go straight-to-DVD in Australia? There are two reasons....

The film’s tagline says ‘Enough Said’, so do I really need to provide you with a synopsis? You’re just trying to make me work, aren’t you...arseholes. A freak hurricane on the Californian coast results in hundreds of sharks somehow falling from the sky inside tornadoes. Former surfing champ turned bar owner Ian Ziering, his Tassie surfer buddy Jaason Simmons, town boozer John Heard, and pretty young bartender Cassie Cserbo attempt to reach Ziering’s estranged family (including ex-wife Tara Reid and their two kids who look far too old to belong to Tara Reid), and hopefully stay alive.   Yeah, “Sharknado” . The last movie the guy from “Glee” tweeted about before his death (Moral? Be careful what you tweet, because it might be the last thing you ever do). The butt of seemingly a thousand jokes from TV’s “The Soup” . The 2013 movie that combines the acting ‘talents’ of Ian Ziering from “Beverly Hills 90210” , the dad from “Home Alone” (how did John Heard end up in this? Payi...

Set in Texas in the 1850s, Christoph Waltz plays a Germanic dentist turned bounty hunter named Schultz who manages to buy a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx, the second x is silent, I believe). Django, you see, is the only person who can point out a gang of murderous stagecoach robbers (M.C. Gainey among them) Schultz is on the hunt for. Along the way, the good doctor (who doesn’t believe in slavery) comes to see merit in Django, frees him and even makes him his deputy and business partner. After a rather profitable partnership, their intentions turn to tracking down Django’s wife Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington), getting onto the plantation she is currently at. Hildy’s owner, the vile racist ‘gentleman’ and Francophile, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio- potentially scarring young female fans forever) runs a Mississippi plantation called Candyland, and runs Mandingo boxing matches. The plan is to pretend to be interested in buying a Mandingo fighter from Candie and somehow whisk H...

As the title suggests, the film concerns Jeff (Jason Segel), a dope-partaking 30 year-old unemployed man who lives in the basement of the house owned by his mother (Susan Sarandon- looking bored, and not just in-character). Jeff has watched “Signs” about a billion times and has been particularly struck by the film’s ending, as a true believer in looking for signs. He gets a wrong number phone call asking for someone called Kevin, and this somehow sets him off on a quest for meaning, especially after seeing a kid wearing a basketball jersey labelled ‘Kevin’ on a bus. This, despite his mother already assigning him the simple task of taking the bus, going to Home Depot, buying some glue and fixing the damn cabinet door. Yeah, that’s probably not going to get done anytime soon. Meanwhile, Jeff and his more responsible (ish) but dickhead brother Pat (Ed Helms, who gets most of the laughs) discover that Pat’s wife (Judy Greer) may be cheating on him, and so Jeff’s quest gets momentarily ...