Embrace the bitter and post your own reviews!

Moon

Finally, after years of memorable secondary performances and quirky leads in indies, underrated journeyman actor Sam Rockwell gets a film all to himself. Of course, he has to be sent to outer space to get it. In Moon, Rockwell follows the footsteps of former co-stars Tom Hanks(from Green Mile) and Nicolas Cage(from Matchstick Men) by attempting to do one better, carry a film with a solo performance like Hanks did in Castaway while playing two characters like Cage did in Adaptation. This off the radar sci-fi from Duncan Jones has the charismatic Rockwell play Sam Bell, an engineer/Astronaut sent to the moon to run the power plant and harvesters that use the Sun to generate energy for the whole world all by himself(this Energy Corporation apparently runs on a low payroll).

Spawn (1997)

Lets start off nice. This movie is bad. Whoops! I slipped.

The screenplay for this film (adapted from the comic by Alan B. McElroy) is a horrible mess. Spawn didn’t have the deepest of storylines, but it was effective in the comic. Adapting this comic should have been a cinch, but it was slaughtered in the attempt to make it commercially viable and entertaining. There are nonsensical changes, too much of Clown, too little of Violator, no dramatic elements to Spawn and don’t get me started on Malebolgia.

Thundercats fan film (and Hollywood remake news)

The though of a live action movie did always sound a little silly to me. I just figured it would get too distorted by the Hollywood machine or just plain bad because they hand it off to a half-assed team that cares nothing for the source material.Well, at least for this old school Thundercats fan I can say I no longer feel like it would be a silly idea. Why? Because WormyTV has made the fan trailer to end all fan trailers. At least in regards to Thundercats it is! We at Bitter Balcony are not easily impressed, but this trailer is fantastic!

[Hollywood remake news inside, too!]

Stitch Wars

Here at Bitter Balcony, we are open to different venues of expression, as long as the source of inspiration are movies. Hey, we're not called Bitter Metronome, after all. Anyways, my local community rag The New Times had an article on an all handmade art exhibit called Stitch Wars, inspired by the beloved series of indies films by esoteric filmmaker George Lucas (whatever happened to that guy?). It was a pretty cool installation on the second floor of a comic book shop. It was a heartfelt and humorous rendition of the film's iconic characters in the form of couch pillows, wigs, and clocks.

[REC]

Is it a stretch to say that after a bit over 10 years the most influential horror film could be The Blair Witch Project? That camera shaking, out of focus spooker dreaded by epileptics everywhere might be at this point the father of digital first person documentary style terror movie, with is like admitting that Vanilla Ice is the father of white-boy hip hop, sad but true. In all fairness, I did enjoy the concept of the Blair Witch, an experiment in realism in a genre that had become full of cliched "hey, don't have sex or you'll end up split in two by a masked psycho with an axe" antics. In Rec, the directing duo of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza give us a furious, full gore glory flick that feels like Lenny Nero from Strange Days sold you a squid that looped Night Of the Living Dead into your cerebral cortex.

The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

I’ll be serious then I’ll be bitter…

The movie is a strong effort from the late 90’s that feels like an almost independent, but not quite, drama. Well casted and decently executed.

The plot according to IMDB is “An employee of a corporation with a lucrative secret process is tempted to betray it. But there's more to it than that.”

Transformers II

So I recently saw a Michael Bay snippet in Robot Chicken regarding a trailer for an upcoming movie called, “Michael Bay Explosions!” or for short, BAY ‘SPLOSIONS! Genius (as Seth Green and Robot Chicken always is) and right to the heart of the matter. Thus, that is my review. Go if you love BAY ‘SPLOSIONS and can’t get enough of non-stop BAY ‘SPLOSIONS coming at you left and right to the extent that it’s more of a suspension of disbelief that anyone on planet Earth survived all those explosions more than it is to believe in the existence of Autobots…