“My wife likes to say there are two kinds of people. Those who are chasing pleasure and those who are running from pain. Maybe she’s right. I don’t know. What I do know is this. Pleasure helps you forget. But pain, pain forces you to hope. You tell yourself this can’t last. Today could be different. Today, something just might change.”
This is what Russell Crowe’s (Gladiator, Cinderella Man) character (Lt. Cristofuoro) says at the end of John Polson’s 2007 drama Tenderness. It is an excellent quote that all of us can ponder and adapt to how we live our lives…Unfortunately, the quote makes you want to nap rather than consider this imaginably meaningful phrase as the movie concludes.
Swan Lake director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel – 
Watching Mel Gibson as a loving father gone raging madman in Martin Campbell’s (Casino Royale, The Mask of Zorro) 2010 Edge of Darkness doesn’t seem as much of a stretch of the imagination as it might have seemed a few years ago. In his first starring role since 2002’s Signs, Gibson plays Thomas Craven, a detective of the Boston Police Department and a single father of one. After Craven witnesses the killing of his 24-year-old daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic), murdered on the steps of his own by a drive-by shooter, he becomes obsessed with finding out who killed his daughter and, more importantly, why. This movie was a modest success with both critics and audiences. Still, it made less than $100 million, compared with the 2008 Liam Neeson movie Taken, which is similar in plot but delivers the goods and has you rooting for Neeson. This is more than you can say for Gibson’s character.
Long before he was turning heads and receiving Oscar nominations for dismantling bombs in Iraq (
There were two movies released in 2010 about a single individual trapped in a circumstance that most of us cannot even fathom, let alone endure. One of those was the Danny O’Boyle/James Franco Best Picture Academy Award nominee, 127 Hours. The other was a much lesser-known and slightly less well-received effort by first-time director Roberto Cortes and Ryan Reynolds (The Proposal, The Amityville Horror), called Buried. It’s hard to know how Buried would have done if it had been released in any other year. Unfortunately for Cortes and Reynolds, it was released just months before the true story of