Watch Online Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball English Movie Review

Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball movie English Movie Review 2010

Full Cast And Crew
Release Date:January 19th, 2010Director:P.J. PesceWriter:Olatunde Osunsanmi, Olumide Odebunmi, Tom Abrams, P.J. PesceStarring:Tom Berenger, Clayne Crawford, Tommy Flanagan, Maury Sterling, Martha Higareda, Christopher Michael Holley, Ernie Hudson, Michael Parks, Autumn Reeser, Vinnie JonesGenre:Action, Comedy, CrimeOfficial Site:smokinacesdvd.com

Movie Review
Not long after the certifiably insane Smokin' Aces came and went and then sold a LOT of dvds, we started hearing all sorts of little stories about sequels, prequels, or any sort of follow-up. Clearly someone at Universal (besides Aces director/co-writer Joe Carnahan, I mean) saw the potential in keeping this franchise afloat, even if that meant remanding the subsequent sequels to the "lesser" direct-to-video market. And even those who adored Smokin' Aces would have to see the logic there: Pretty much all the characters from the first flick were dead, and even those who survived ... aren't exactly huge stars.

So off to the video shelves we go with Smokin' Aces 2: Assassin's Ball, and this time the directorial reins are in the hands of P.J. Pesce -- and if you're looking for a guy to bang out a direct-to-video sequel, Mr. Pesce is your man. His previous films include From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter, Sniper 3, and The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe. And it's with no irony whatsoever that I opine the following: Smokin' Aces 2 is better than all three of those movies. Put together. It's clearly low-budget and frequently low-minded, but there's certainly so fun to be found.

Those who hit play expecting a "true" sequel to Smokin' Aces may find themselves confused and disappointed. As far as I can tell, the sequel has nothing to do with its predecessor aside from the appearance of two minor-but-colorful assassins. (I'll leave it to the fans to discover who's back for Part 2.) But the plot is pretty much the same as the original, and one of the main characters does play with a deck of cards pretty often. Beyond that, Smokin' Aces 2: Assassin's Ball (previously known as Smokin' Aces 2: Blowback, incidentally) is a perfectly stand-alone action flick.
The plot is this: a wheelchair-bound FBI agent named Walter Weed (Tom Berenger) is spending his last boring day at work before retirement. But a fellow agent (the surprisingly excellent Clayne Crawford) catches wind of something monumental: it seems that a half-dozen of the world's toughest assassins have been hired to kill Walter within the next 12 hours. Act II is basically all of the good guys and bad guys getting into position. Act III is some truly enjoyable mayhem.

Pesce does a fine job of keeping the tone of garish anarchy that was so evident in Carnahan's flick -- at least as well as he can on about 1/3 the budget -- and much of the "shoe leather" of the first hour is actually fairly sharp and amusing. It certainly doesn't hurt that the Feds are presented in an amiably low-key fashion and that the crazy killers (Vinnie Jones, Michael Parks, Autumn Reeser, and the stunning Martha Higareda among them) are a garish and aggressive lot.

All in all, Smokin' Aces 2 is better than you'd logically expect from your average direct-to-video mostly-in-name-only kind of sequel, and it's clear that Carnahan (presently at work on the big-screen version of The A-Team) kept himself involved in the $7 million follow-up. If you had a good time with Smokin' Aces (and I'd say it's fairly hard not to), then you'll probably find just enough to enjoy with Part 2. It's broad, it's goofy, it's outrageously violent and entertainingly mindless.

Plus Berenger and Crawford deliver some unexpectedly fine work. That's like the icing on a surprisingly fun cake.

DVD note(s): The disc is well-packed with extras, including a gag reel, several deleted scenes, a fistful of behind-the-scenes featurettes, and an audio commentary between Pesce and Carnahan.

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Watch House of Numbers English Movie Review,Trailer Free Online

House of Numbers English Movie Review
Full Cast And Crew
Release Date: January 20, 2010 (Portland)
Studio: Kaleidoscope Media
Director: Brent W. Leung
Screenwriter: Not Available
Starring: Not Available
Genre: Documentary
Movie Poster: Not Available

Movie Review
Despite the tremendous advancements in the treatment of HIV/AIDS in recent years, many scientists and medical professionals continue to disagree about the specifics of the disease and its manifestations. The widespread variety of opinions has spurred countless debates about treatment and a potential cure within the medical communities.

And it has divided that world.

"House of Numbers" is Canadian filmmaker Brent Leung's first feature film and it documents how countries are all searching for a cure, even though most of them disagree on what, exactly, HIV/AIDS is. In the trailer, we see Leung willingly surrender his own beliefs about the disease and openly accept conflicting theories from scientists and specialists. In talking to one specialist after another, the back-to-back different mindsets are alarming. This proves there is accuracy in Leung's own description of the film as "the first picture to present the uncensored POVs of virtually all the major players."

"House of Numbers" does not appear to be a documentary that tracks the history and rapid spread of of HIV/AIDS, which some might think prevents it from comprehensively analyzing the disease. And while it might have helped for Leung to provide his audience with a brief rundown of the disease and its complications, the trailer suggests the director avoided doing so because he wanted to make viewers question their own knowledge of HIV/AIDS.

It's scary to think there are very few widely held truths about the HIV/AIDS pandemic. What's so intriguing about "House of Numbers" is that it doesn't appear to be a documentary that tries to separate supposition from fact. Instead, it's caught in the midst of an evolving, critical debate.

Watch Room and a Half Russian Movie Review Trailer Free Online

A Room and a Half Hollywood Movie Review

Full Cast And Crew
Venue: AFI Fest
Cast: Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy, Alisa Freindlich, Sergei Yurskiy, Artem Smola, Evgeniy Ogandzhanyan
Director: Andrey Khrzhanovsky
Screenwriters: Yuri Arabov, Andrey Khrzhanovsky
Producer: Andrey Khrzhanovsky, Artem Vassiliev
Executive producer: Lyuboc Gaidukova
Director of photography: Vladimir Brylyakov
Production designers: Marina Azyzian, V, Svetozarov, M. Gavrilov
Editor: Maria Neyman
Sales: School-studio SHAR
No rating, 130 minutes

A Room and a Half -- Film Review
This Russian film is about as different as you can get from standard-issue Hollywood biopics. Audrey Khrzhanovsky, a veteran animator in both Soviet and post-Soviet era Russia, makes a smooth feature debut with "A Room and a Half," a free-form look at the life of exiled Russian poet and Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996). Outside its native country, the film will mostly travel the festival circuit although occasional art house playdates can be expected.

The film mixes archival footage, different styles of animation and nostalgic re-enactments of Brodsky's life to render an artistic fulfilling but melancholy life of a man forced to live in exile in the U.S. after the Soviets kick him out in 1972. He never saw his aging parents again.

The movie imagines that he did travel by luxury liner back to his hometown of Leningrad -- St. Petersburg? -- for a final visit with his parents. En route, he reminiscences about his childhood and activities as a young man but the focus lands solidly on the love between this only child and his parents.

Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy, a dead ringer for Brodsky -- the real man is glimpsed in an old newsreel -- plays the writer with a gentle-sad longing for what was but what can never be reclaimed. As a young man, he seems fascinated by Western culture, as is most of his crowd. His love life consists of a series of young women introduced to his parents and then escorted behind a curtain in their claustrophobic room-and-a-half flat.

Little is done to establish Brodsky's importance as a poet. Indeed for non-Russian speakers the frustration is that the visuals tend to overwhelm the words and those words get translated into white subtitles often lost against white backgrounds. (When will subtitlists learn that you must use yellow letters if they are to be seen against all backgrounds?)

This is therefore a limited glimpse of a famous writer, showing little about his American experiences and almost nothing about his creative life. Rather it's an exile's lament, a vivid demonstration that you cannot remove Russia from the soul of a Russian no matter where he lives.

Alisa Freindlich and Sergei Yurskiy, who play the parents, grab most of the camera's attention while the whimsical animation, from cats to floating musical instruments, dominate the visual side to the movie.

Plot Summary: Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-Jewish-American poet, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987 and was made poet laureate of theU.S. in 1991. Given that he was expelled from the USSR in 1972, it's not surprising that much of his writing deals with themes of exile, loss and memory. An imagined return to the parents he never saw again and his childhood home of St. Petersburg ("a city whose color was fossilized vodka") is the essence of this wonderfully nostalgic, whimsical movie. Made by famed Russian animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky, "A Room and a Half" recalls the glory years of a much-loved child and the particular absurdities and indignities suffered by Jews under the Soviet regime in the '50s and '60s. The filmmaker's light touch – his use of animation, stills, archival footage, and scripted, dramatic material – melds the sophisticated surrealism of Magritte with the folk mysticism of Chagall.
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Latest 2010 Priyanka Chopra's Wallpapers Download Free

Priyanka Chopra Wallpaper Download

Biography
Biography Priyanka Chopra, armed with long legs and the Miss World crown, followed the precedent set by other beauty contest winners by joining the Bollywood bandwagon.

The Nomadic Mimi
Priyanka Ashok Chopra was born on 18 July 1982 in Jamshedpur and is fondly known as Mimi. Her father is Capt. Dr.Ashok Chopra and her mother is Dr.Madhu Chopra. She has a younger brother, Siddharth. Her father’s origin is a mix of Punjabi, Bengali, and Marathi while her mother’s is a mix of Tamil, Malayali, and Kannada.

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