Shameless Self Expression

Alternate take on WWII has three major story strands that ultimately come together: Melanie Laurent is Shoshanna, a Jew who has a girl fled the capture of cordial but thoroughly evil SS Colonel Landa (an Oscar-winning Christoph Waltz), the so-called ‘Jew Hunter’, who murders the rest of her family. We catch up with her years later in Paris, France where she is running a movie theatre under a different name. She is courted by Nazi war hero and rising Nazi propaganda movie star Daniel Bruhl, whose new movie “Nation’s Pride” (an obvious reference to the controversial Leni Riefenstahl propaganda flick “Triumph of the Will” ). Meanwhile, we meet Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the swaggering, good ‘ol boy leader of the title band of Jewish soldiers on a mission to scalp and/or kill Nazis. Diane Kruger plays a German actress who is really a double agent working for the British in a plot to assassinate Hitler (Martin Wuttke), which will involve both Shoshanna and the Basterds. Mike Myers play...

Scientific personnel at an American base in Antarctica come across a Norwegian helicopter, but before they can rescue the crew (including D-grade veteran Norbert Weisser), the chopper blows up, leaving only a half-wolf/half-dog behind, which the crew take back to base. Bad idea. This is no ordinary dog, but a shape-shifting alien that digests then imitates any creature it comes into contact with. It doesn’t take long for the alien to infiltrate the small crew, and soon paranoia sets in as everyone wonders just who is really themselves anymore? Kurt Russell is our gruff, level-headed protagonist MacReady, with Wilford Brimley as scientist Blair, a hero of a different kind, who nonetheless starts to flip out under the claustrophobic pressure. Other assorted crew members are played by respectable character actors like Keith David, Donald Moffat, Richard Dysart, Richard Masur, Charles Hallahan, David Clennon, and T.K. Carter. I really don’t go out of my way to write contrary ...

In the beginning, there was darkness. An explosion caused the creation of the universe and the Gods. The smashing of Pandora’s Jar formed the planets from its fragments, including Earth. Oh, and Mount Olympus? Apparently it’s on the moon. No effing joke. We begin there with Hercules (Lou Ferrigno), created by the god Zeus (Claudio Cassinelli) to live as the son of King Augius (Brad Harris). However, whilst still a baby, Hercules’ father is usurped by King Minos (William Berger) and his seductress daughter Princess Arianna (Exploitation favourite Sybil Danning). Left floating down the river, he is eventually found and adopted by a couple where he grows into the muscular bodyguard of Princess Cassiopeia (Ingrid Anderson). When Cassiopeia is kidnapped, Hercules sees it as his mission to rescue her and defeat Minos and Arianna. Along the way he must carry out several tasks, most of which tend to be wrestling with mechanical creatures. This 1983 flick from writer-director Luig...

Brad Pitt plays a former ‘coulda been a contender’ baseball player turned GM of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, who in addition to having the worst name for a baseball team I’ve heard, are much lower-budgeted than their more well-known counterparts like the New York Yankees. They have also just lost three of their star players to better and richer teams. Pitt, determined to make a success as a GM that never quite materialised for him as a rather mediocre player, refuses to lose. The film argues that the teams with the most money can obviously afford the best players, and the system is clearly flawed and uneven. But Pitt may just have found a solution to the problem; he hires nerdy economics expert Jonah Hill to revolutionise the process by which a team is put together and managed. According to Hill, most teams have a bunch of players whose talents are undervalued because they’re looking at things the wrong way (Much like when we first meet Hill, he’s himself being overlooked b...