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“Pompe II” is falling ash and rocks
By Jenny Alvarez
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Pompe II has passion for history and was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, an adept handler of eye-popping 3D spectacle now is available in Blu-ray, DVD including a talented cast and characters and “The Volcanic Eruption-Special Effects.” The film travels back in time to 79 AD. It revolves around Pompeii, an outlying Roman metropolis that is found at the bottom of Mt Vesuvius — a volcanic mountain.
A young boy called Milo (Kit Harington of Game of Thrones) witnesses the slaughter of his tribe at the hands of Roman soldiers, led by Roman commander Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland). Thus, Milo becomes the sole survivor of a Celtic horse tribe. He is then raised as a slave, and 17 years later, becomes a gladiator who is taken to Pompeii to battle Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), an African gladiator who is one fight away from earning his freedom.
A movie full of violence and tragedy bit this makes it more realistic and highly entertaining, never boring. Milo and Atticus take on a battalion of Roman soldiers and both are involved in destruction of the place. Interaction between the characters was fine given the length of time between the start of the movie and the eruption of Pompeii. The acting of the cast was well done. The 3-D effect had you brushing volcanic ash out of your hair and the film, it is definitely worth the watch.
The Eternal Bachelor George Clooney is engaged
By GalaTView Staff
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George Clooney is engaged to Arab lawyer Amal Alamuddin after just months of dating. The 52-year-old actor and the 36-year-old humanitarian lawyer are going to be together forever.
The rails involve an outlandish thriller for “Last Passenger”
By Jenny Alvarez
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Lewis Shaler (Dougray Scott) is an overworked doctor and devoted single dad heading home with his young son Max on the last train from London. When he strikes up a conversation with a beautiful and flirtatious stranger (Kara Tointon), Lewis believes life is finally looking up. But events then take a dark turn when Lewis discovers the guard has mysteriously vanished and the brakes have been sabotaged. Unknown to the handful of remaining passengers, a vengeful sociopath has taken control of the train and is hell-bent on crashing it, taking his passengers with him to the grave.
As the speeding locomotive ploughs through stations and level crossings, the body count rises and panic turns to terror. Lewis realizes that the police are powerless to stop the diesel-powered ‘slammer’ train, and the desperate passengers must find their own way out of this nightmare. Lewis takes the lead in a series of increasingly perilous missions to stop the train before the driver can realize his dark plan.
Last Passenger is a kinetic thriller with melding suspense, action with great performances with great credibility of the situation. It has a well structured dialogues and a well-worn plot with some scenes full of tense and explosive action. Besides in one hour, 36 minutes your predictions will fail when Scott and Tointon make for a decent lead couple, and the film does eventually give some depth to Goldberg’s Jan and David Schofield’s Peter, although for the bulk of the running time they are relegated to annoying cardboard cutouts. Definitely this film is more focus on survival, not the mechanics of villainy but makes it an exciting thriller anyways.
"The Other Woman" Los Angeles Premiere - Arrivals
Photos by Alfonso De Elías
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The innocence contrast with the racism and homophobia in “Pelo Malo”
By Jenny Alvarez
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From the Director, screenwriter, visual artist Mariana Rondón was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela “Pelo Malo” is one of her master piece that comes with Junior who is a nine-year-old boy who has stubbornly curly hair, or “bad hair.” He wants to have it straightened for his yearbook picture, like a fashionable pop singer with long, ironed hair. This puts him at odds with his mother Marta, a young, unemployed widow.
Junior, Marta, and his baby brother live in a large multi-family building. Overwhelmed by what it takes to survive in the chaotic city of Caracas, Marta finds it increasingly difficult to tolerate Junior’s fixation with his looks. The more Junior tries to look sharp and make his mother love him, the more she rejects him. His paternal grandmother, a witness to this rejection, asks Marta to give her the boy so that he can look after her. Marta refuses and tries to correct her son’s obsession by “setting an example,” a cruel moment which was meant to be a lesson. Junior finds himself as imaginative and resilient mind-boy and his drama is really realistic with children like him. The relationships among adults are the toughest, but is more tense and bitter movements with his mother, in part of his grandmother to the self-discovery of dancing alone – to watching him mess with his hair we see a child try to live while his mother only survives. Is something that contrast with the formidable world they are planted in. Especially when Junior sings to with his grandma a late-’60s Venezuelan rock ‘n’ roll song and as a specter you can see the real social drama that lives this boy for the complex and confusing feelings against the raw background of Venezuela.
Tasting Menu has all the love ingredients
By Jenny Alvarez
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Directed by Roger Gual (who co-wrote and co-directed SMOKING ROOM) from a script by Gual and Javier Calvo. The film stars Jan Cornet, Claudia Bassols, Fionnula Flanagan, Stephen Rea, Timothy Gibbs, Marta Torné, Vicenta N’Dongo, Andrew Tarbet, Andrea Ros, Togo Igawa and Akihiko Serikawa. An Irish/Spanish co-production, Tasting Menu like all great ensemble dramedies centered on culinary delights, is a crowd-pleasing mishmash of relationships, feuds and broken dreams that are mended through the simple act of “breaking bread” and the universal appreciation of great food. According to some investigations this movie is based on the famed Catalonia elBulli restaurant, once run by chef Ferran Adrià. Various and assorted characters come to experience the last dinner being served at an illustrious and critically acclaimed seaside restaurant run by Chef Mar’s (Vicenta N’Dongo) and her partner Max (Andrew Tarbet). This film takes place on the last night of “the world’s best restaurant,” which is closing, but not before serving a final elaborate meal to a group of guests that includes a couple (Claudia Bassols and Jan Cornet) who booked a reservation a year in advance and who in the time since have split up. The script makes its thudding metaphorical point that sipping cocktails when someone’s drowning is simply not good especially for some of the characters whose indulgences have been not only culinary even emotional in which the food is fetishist’s delight and the night into this restaurant.
A especial day At Middleton in DVD
By Jenny Alvarez
Photo courtesy
Academy Award® nominees Andy Garcia (Ocean’s 11, City Island) and Vera Farmiga (A&E’s “Bates Motel”, Up in the Air) star as straight-laced George and eccentric Edith, two strangers who meet on their children’s campus tour at the idyllic Middleton College. Failing comically to connect with their kids, George and Edith play hooky together, ditching the official tour for a carefree adventure reminiscent of their own college years. But what begins as an afternoon of fun soon becomes a revealing and enlightening experience that will change their lives forever. Taissa Farmiga (“American Horror Story”), Spencer Lofranco (Jamesy Boy), Peter Riegert (“Dads”), and Tom Skerritt (“Picket Fences”) also star in this story about what can happen on your first day of college.
Definitely this movie has a good eye for visual composition. Both characters make the fictive Middleton in a very pleasant place in which timelessness of youth is a great element in this story. George and Edith, together are perfectly counterbalanced with humor and heart, with good feelings and celebrate all the different life stages full of hope and new phases. This incredible DVD has special features as an audio commentary with Writer/Director Adam Rodgers, Writer/Producer Glenn German and Producer/Actor Andy Garcia in English subtitles for the Deaf & Hearing impaired and Spanish.
Captivating, hypnotic and deeply disturbing in “Under The Skin”
By Jenny Alvarez
Photos By Alfonso De Elias
From visionary director Jonathan Glazer comes a stunning career transformation, a masterpiece of existential science fiction that journeys to the heart of what it means to be human, extraterrestrial — or something in between. A voluptuous woman of unknown origin (Scarlett Johansson) combs the highways in search of isolated or forsaken men, luring this succession of lost souls into an otherworldly lair. They are seduced, stripped of their humanity, and never heard from again. Based on the novel by Michel Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White), Under The Skin is a bizarre movie with a character who examines the human beings with her borrowed skin, until she is abducted into humanity with devastating results. Definitely is very provocative, intense, and intriguing hypnotically without any special effects. Scarlett Johansson performs a pattern full of female sexuality or empowerment which lures to a completely dark location, tempts her victims to strip naked with the promise of sex, and then the man sinks into a dark abyss. At the end of the story as a reviewer, this is a character full of obstacles and painful journey because this woman set her eyes on our chaotic planet or culture, crowd noise and as humanity is shown as creatures in a wild habitat. Eventually her tragic end doesn’t have a clear goal or a mission in a borrowed skin with a gorgeous but false surface. Definitely is a great movie with transformation and transfiguration.
A spectacular overkill in The Raid 2
By Jenny Alvarez
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Written & Directed by: Gareth Evans, The Raid 2 with a great cast Iko Uwais, Arifin Putra, Tio Pakusadewo, Oka Antara, Julie Estelle, Ryuhei Matsuda, Kenichi Endo, Kazuki Kitamura involves a fury fighting with Rama and his way out of a building filled with gangsters and madmen – a fight that left the bodies of police and gangsters alike piled in the halls – rookie Jakarta cop Rama thought it was done and he could resume a normal life. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Rama’s opponents in that fateful building were nothing more than small fish swimming in a pond much larger than he ever dreamed possible. And his triumph over the small fry has attracted the attention of the predators farther up the food chain. His family at risk, Rama has only one choice to protect his infant son and wife: He must go undercover to enter the criminal underworld himself and climb through the hierarchy of competing forces until it leads him to the corrupt politicians and police pulling the strings at the top of the heap.
A great sequel of action and a new odyssey of violence, bone-crunching force him to set aside his own life and history and take on a new identity as the violent offender “Yuda.” In prison he must gain the confidence of Uco – the son of a prominent gang kingpin – to join the gang himself, laying his own life on the line in a desperate all-or-nothing gambit to bring the whole rotten enterprise to an end. For all fight fans should brace themselves for a bruising, blistering ride even the plot is not the best the main characters show their best fighting skills faster, and more lethal than ever. The most curious characters were the Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man deserve a spin-off especially with their fights that are full of dynamite but at the end this movie has to contrasts: a beauty in a modern martial-arts epic and brutality, capturing the art of violence with a great style in all the characters involved. Definitely is an awesome movie full of entertainment and fun which suffers from too much potential.
A forbidden love becomes “Breath In” a seductive melodrama
By Jenny Alvarez
Photos Courtesy
From the Writer/director Drake Doremus works with Felicity Jones a soulful and musical British exchange student Sophie Williams (Jones) comes to New York in search of inspiration. On the surface, Sophie’s host family seems happy enough, but with her arrival to the Reynolds’ Upstate New York home, the private struggles of each family member begin to bubble. In particular, frustrated musician-turned-piano- teacher Keith Reynolds (Guy Pearce) finds long suppressed dreams and desires reignited by Sophie’s talent and inquisitive nature. While Keith’s wife, Megan (Amy Ryan) and daughter, Lauren (breakout talent, Mackenzie Davis) focus on Lauren’s final year of high school, Sophie and Keith are drawn ever closer by their mutual longing for creative expression. Ultimately, Sophie and Keith must confront how much they are willing to sacrifice and what they truly want out of life. The main characters were improvising their dialogue and many times are halting verbal exchanges, half-smiles creating a seductive atmosphere. Innocence, maturity makes a relationship a love affair completely without fireworks due is a prohibited love when Pearce and Jones (both brilliant) when they start to get too close but the big dilemma is if both recognize the dangers ahead. Meanwhile, Jones plays a young woman who seems both fragile and incredibly poised beyond her years, a lethal combination that’s been the downfall of many a married man. Director is at building up the intensity of a scene until the air becomes charged with all the words not being said and the romantic impulses not being acted on. Definitely is a reflect of the lack of sincerity in a fake and unhappy marriage in which both lovers are desperate to believe that neither space, time nor the interferences of others will rupture their bottled passion.
It was a very controlled, well-executed picture in which the flash of passion with great music background which keeps any spectator on the seat without breath.
