2005’s Hard Candy turned out to be a breakout movie for debut feature film director David Slade (The Twilight Saga: Eclipse), Patrick Wilson (Little Children, Lakeview Terrace), and Ellen Page (Juno, Inception). This was a highly controversial film at the time of its release and did not garner a lot of money at the box office. It is about a 32-year-old sexual predator named Jeff (Wilson) who begins an online relationship with 14-year-old Hayley (Page) that leads to a physical encounter.
Category Archives: Genre
Hurricane Season (2009)
2009’s Hurricane Season follows the true story of a small New Orleans high school basketball team following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The movie stars Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, Panic Room) as Al Collins, a driven and resolute coach. His job is to unite eight players who went to five different schools before the hurricane and attempt to coach them through the Louisiana State High School Basketball Tournament. He must mesh the players’ unique personalities and hidden agendas and turn them into a united team with the same goal in mind. And if you already think this movie sounds like 50% of the other sports movies you have seen, I don’t blame you. However, there is one difference. For the players on the team, and many in the city, basketball was all they had to help them temporarily forget about the devastation that ravaged their city.
The Game (1997)
1997’s The Game was David Fincher’s film movie as a director, but the first following the highly successful and fan-favorite Se7en. Fincher’s first movie was Alien 3, which had many franchise fans wishing the series had ended with Aliens. With one flop and one success under his belt, Fincher needed to make a statement with his third movie to prove that Se7en was not a fluke. The Game grossed $48 million at the box office, roughly half of what Se7en brought in, but this was still considered a success. Moreover, perhaps more importantly, it was a success with the critics. Following this movie, Fincher became a household name. Still, he has picked his projects carefully. From 1993 to 2010, Fincher has directed just nine movies. However, His most recent films (The Social Network, 2010, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 2008) garnered him Academy Award nominations for Best Director.
The Rookie (2002)
I was much less impressed with my second viewing of John Lee Hancock’s 2002 The Rookie (The Blind Side, The Alamo) than when I watched it for the first time back in 2004. This is one of those movies that you only need to see once in your life. Unfortunately, much like The Express, this “inspirational” story of overcoming the odds to reach a dream movie gets lost in the masses compared to other sports dramas based on true stories.
Tenderness (2007)
“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.