Author: Damien Belliveau

So I did a triple feature this weekend. Sunday I went to the Grove, and saw three movies for the price of two. They got better as the day progressed, thank god. I went from Street Kings to Harold & Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay to Baby Mama. In the first I almost fell asleep. In [...]

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is yet another successful example of the Judd Apatow formula. Which is not to discredit the film’s star and writer, Jason Segel, or it’s director, Nicholas Stoller. In fact, it is Apatow’s commitment to providing those faithful members of his long-gestating troupe with an opportunity to put their own personal stories up [...]

What do John Woo and Wong Kar-Wai have in common? Perhaps the question telegraphs the answer, but that’s not going to stop me from taking a dump all over My Bluberry Nights. Snoozeville, this picture is.

There Will Be Blood is, unarguably, a film that should primarily be experienced in a cinema. It is a big movie and was meant to be seen on a big screen. But at home, on a television, the experience loses no power. I imagine one could watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest opus on an iPod [...]

Martin Scorsese has just gotten better with age. It is safe to say most folks out there consider Marty’s best work to be behind him, way behind him. Twenty or thirty years behind him. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas. A lot of people want to know where that Marty went. Well, those people must have [...]

The war in Iraq has inspired numerous films over the past year or two. None have been able to match the sort of power of the Vietnam films they can’t help but be compared to. Nothing has matched Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket or Cimino’s Deer Hunter or Ashby’s Coming Home or Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or [...]

Among the many great and frustrating benefits of living in Los Angeles is the absolute plethora of film screenings. Great, for obvious reasons, but frustrating because it is practically impossible to see everything. This past weekend nothing was opening worth seeing – I’ve yet to see a Tyler Perry film, and I’m okay with that [...]

God bless David Gordon Green, and his new picture Snow Angels. Since his first feature, George Washington, and on through his subsequent works (All The Real Girls and Undertow) Green has been doing his best to give working class folk a place in the cinematic landscape that is free of judgment, condescension or romanticism. Snow [...]

Okay, okay, okay, Doomsday is almost, almost beyond comprehension. So absurd is every frame of this film that I don’t think I closed my mouth, or even blinked, more than a handful of times during the entire movie. Multiple times I was holding my head in my hands in disbelief. On a few occasions I [...]

Last year sometime, a friend of mine suggested I watch Funny Games. I put it on my Netflix cue, with some reluctance and very low expectations. All I’d seen of Michael Haneke’s work at that point was Cache (Hidden), a movie I found interesting when it came out in the theater, but didn’t totally appreciate [...]

Roger Donaldson is one of these guys that makes sturdy movies. Not the kind of pictures that anyone is likely to remember in 30 years, but may pop up in the occasional genre revival series or film class. You know, Species as part of a sci-fi fest; Cocktail in a 80s retrospective or a Tom [...]

From the moment the theater goes dark, and Will Ferrell’s silly, sultry R&B song begins playing over the opening credits of Semi-Pro, I am smiling. Not for a single moment in the movie’s 90 minute runtime do I stop smiling. Unless, of course, I start laughing out loud – which I do frequently. And so [...]

With Jumper, director Doug Liman has practically completed the transformation from indie-sensation to mainstream-pulp-dealer. It is a common and enviable trajectory that many young directors fight tooth and nail for (whether they admit it or not). What’s not to like? Spielberg did it. Jackson did it. Raimi did it. Hell, auteur du jour David Gordon [...]

I’m really, really sorry I missed seeing Beowulf in the theater. I don’t give Robert Zemeckis enough credit. This is the guy who made Romancing The Stone and Back To the Future. He directed Forrest Gump and Cast Away, two of the most effective mainstream films of all time. But before we start giving him [...]

Ben Affleck’s directorial debut suffers from what most actor-turned-director films suffer from: it’s a parade of actors. Yet it prides itself on its commitment to the real people of the Boston neighborhood in which it is shot. In that sense, it is not so much a parade of actors as it is a parade of [...]

Jerry Lamothe’s Blackout relates the story of a Brooklyn neighborhood caught off guard when, in 2003, the power goes out all over New York City for a period of 24 hours. TVgasm is giving away 5 copies of the DVD. To enter simply shoot me an email to madeyoulaugh@tvgasm.com subject BLACKOUT. Winners will be chosen [...]

This is the time of year studios dump pictures that don’t really fit anywhere else. It’s the reason why something like Hannah Montana can be number one at the box office two weeks running. However, it is also the time of year that modern moviegoers get to enjoy the closest thing we have to a [...]