Now, out of these productions come two jewels. My favorite from the Bruce Lee series “Fist of Fury” and a cult favorite and when I mean cult favorite every young black male growing up in “Urban Areas,” what political pundits use for “HOOD,” wanted to be like this guy when they grew up and that is Leroy Green AKA Bruce Leroy from “The Last Dragon.” Even though I’m pretty sure that Bruce Leroy would give his left testicle to smell Bruce Lee’s famous musty yellow jumpsuit, Leroy mastered one move that Bruce Lee didn’t that is” The Glow. “A mystical energy that can only be attained by a true martial arts master. When a fighter’s hands glow, he is one of the best in the world and when his entire body glows, he is the greatest fighter alive.” I couldn’t have defined “The Glow” any better. Thank you Wikipedia.

Lets take a look at the list of other feats that Bruce Leroy had over Bruce Lee. Bruce Leroy had Vanity. Bruce Lee had, well? I don’t think he ever had a love interest in a movie. Advantage Bruce Leroy.

What straight male wouldn’t want to fornicate with Vanity or come with her to her own little nasty world as she states in her hit single “Nasty Girl.” Bruce Leroy had Sho Nuff “The Shogun of Harlem” as his main antagonist. Bruce Lee had a Russian thug named Suzuki.

Advantage Bruce Leroy.

I would rather be known for whooping the ass of “The Shogun of Harlem” over a laughable goon who is named after an automotive manufacturer who should cease making jeeps all together. Toyota FJ Cruisers rule!!!!!!

Bruce Leroy was catching bullets with his teeth before Neo from “The matrix” was dodging them or suspending them in mid air. Bruce Lee cannot lay claim to ever doing so.

Advantage Bruce Leroy.

Well OK, being realistic Bruce Lee and I mean the real Bruce Lee “RIP,” would probably open a can off Chop Suey on Bruce Leroy whose government issue is Taimak Guarriello. But, if u place Bruce Lee or “Chen” “as he was affectionately known as in “Fist of Fury,” in the “Last Dragon,” without a shadow of a doubt, “The Glow” would prevail over Bruce Lee’s “Fist of Fury”. If you don’t believe me, rent “The Last Dragon” for yourself. Or, you can wait for Hollywood to remake it, “since Hollywood is running out of originality and remaking every 70’s and 80’s movie and sitcom”, but there will be nothing like the original. If you are reading this article, you can disagree with me if you want you have that right, for I’m taking Bruce Leroy in this epic dual for who will rule as “Hollywood’s Kung Fu Master.”

Words by Dynast Amir (@dynastamirmahdi)

This charming short is either a letter of scorn for the critically slain M. Night Shyamalan, or an open plea for him to get back to the essentials that made him. Writers, Steven Haas and Ross Raventos have captured the essence of what it might be like to be regular people sharing a home with an eccentric like M. Night.

Fall Of Night Trailer from Ross Raventos on Vimeo.

While of course the roommates, played by Will Bowles, Kelly Keaton and Matt Newell, could always just move out. They, like the rest of us, are trying to stick around for the second coming of the genius that was The Sixth Sense. Patience and humor have to see the house through the weirdness that occurs.

The short is well acted and directed. On a shoe string budget this little gem has a lot of promise, as do both the writers. If you have a chance to catch it at a film festival next year, you should.

As for M. Night Shyamalan, if the world would just stop supporting the mediocre films he’s put into it, maybe he could get back to good. I’d love to hear his thoughts on this clever short? If you know someone who knows someone, pass it along.

Words by Barbie Brady

“Margin Call” chronicles a 24-hour period during which the key players at an American investment firm confront the impending collapse of its national market. The film is an all-out attack on corporate ethics (or lack thereof) and basic human morality. However, whether you’re an economics geek or not, this film was brilliantly done and definitely worth the ticket.

Writer/Director J.C. Chandor’s screenplay was incredibly thoughtful. The script included solid character development. It was meticulously crafted down to the way a character ate breakfast, shaved, held a cigarette, or obsessively chewed Nicorette gum. Even more impressive, this detailed treatment was extended to all characters, even those with superfluous roles like random office staff. The direction and incredible cinematography further aided in the depth of character development. There are so many film stills worthy of framed space on your wall and as many scenes possessing the profound subtlety of live theater.

The casting choices were excellent as well, especially that of Simon Baker, Demi Moore and Jeremy Irons as ruthless firm executives. The way they inhabited their characters was Oscar-worthy (especially Baker). Although more subtle actors like Ryan Gosling (“Drive”) and relatively unknown actor Jon Foster (“The Door in the Floor”) may have better suited the roles filled by Quinto and Penn Badgley, the overall performances were still impressive.

After the brilliant film “Drive” broke through boundaries confining indie drama, we were certain we should just count our blessings and not bank on another good film for a while. And then all of a sudden we got “Margin Call” and “Martha Marcy May Marlene” (starring Elizabeth Olsen) both released this past Friday. Could it be that film is on its way up again? Are we really ready for a world not dominated by a slew of “Transformers” films? Please, pretty please, be so.

Words by Ariel Maccarone (@ArielMacc)

Today’s lesson: the relationship between violence and women as illustrated by upcoming horror film, “Julia X.” We touched upon “Julia X” in our recent article “Ladies Fight Back (and Win)” but the film is so dynamic that it warrants its own story. To refresh your memory, “Julia X” tells the story of a man and a woman who meet on an online dating site, which leads to an in-person encounter filled with an unexpected slew of macabre acts. In order to get the bottom of this film’s importance, we kidnapped its lead actor, Valerie Azlynn, and took our minds for a drive (no rope or duck tape required).

The violent nature not just the film but of your character in particular is uncommon. What drew you to this role?

Azlynn: I was very excited to be the lead in “Julia X.” When I first read the script I fell in love with it. [My character] comes from an extremely abusive family, which was absolutely influential in her development as an adult. She tries to take the power into her own hands as an adult since it was never in her hands as a child.

What do you feel sets this film apart from other horror films?

Azlynn: The interesting journey of Julia’s psychology in the movie is how thoughtful and calculated she is at the beginning with her actions, but how in the end she loses all control and is living totally moment to moment; that’s her default survival mode because of everything she has been through.

We also found it interesting that for having such a horrifying childhood, Julia is not depicted as a victim.

Azlynn: I am always drawn to strong female characters. My favorite is The Bride (played by Uma Thurman) in “Kill Bill.” I love watching her metamorphosis into the ultimate bad ass.

So, should we add you to this list of bad asses?

Azlynn: I’d like to think I’m a pretty tough chick. I mean, I had open-heart surgery when I was 13, but this movie really wore me down. I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I came back to LA and slept for three days straight.

Did the experience discourage you from exploring more roles in horror films?

Azlynn: [The film] turned out to be a monumental learning experience… I’m proud of the way I dealt with whatever was in front of me, and grateful that the film helped me overcome some childhood fears.

“Julia X” also exemplifies how Horror has become a relatively untapped genre. We haven’t seen genuinely dynamic horror films since Alfred Hitchcock; horror films that are more than just adrenalin roller coasters and instead actually say something about humanity. Azlynn discloses that the especially graphic nature of the film’s violence was a medium through which to address the absence of many physically strong—and violent—-female characters in film and other media outlets. This absence of female visibility in the media inspired her gravitation toward the role.

“Julia X” really confronts how Western culture does not to associate violence with women (especially violence perpetrated BY women). There is also a tendency to not associate much independence and personal power with women. Their identities are almost always attached to men (as is illustrated by “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” starring Angelina Jolie). “Julia X” is one film that strays from this pattern. Julia is strong—-emotionally, intellectually and physically. She is a strong human being, not just strong “for a girl.” More roles like this would help us challenge the four mental walls we rarely escape. The goal is not to escape the influences of society, but really look at what manufactures our brand of reality.

Words and interview Ariel Maccarone

There are definitely some badass women portrayed in film. They throw gnarly punches and high kicks, but in the end, any power they have is a function of their sexuality. Recently released “Colombiana” stars Zoe Saldana as a young woman who grows up to be a stone-cold assassin after witnessing her parents’ murder. Now think about the dynamic of female power in “X-Men,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “G.I. Jane” and the “Tomb Raider” series. There are definitely strong female roles (female protagonists even), but the nature of their power is significantly different from their male counterparts. Their power is a function of their provocative, thinly clad bodies and their ability to manipulate men. Rarely do films portray brawls between men and women as equally matched. However, we will concede that there are exceptions to the rule.

“Enough” (starring Jennifer Lopez), “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” (starring Noomi Rapace) and “Kill Bill 1 and 2” (starring Uma Thurman) are three such films in which female protagonists perpetrate violence with the same aggression as that of a man. Their strength is not just a function of wit; it is a function of their actual physical strength. The fights between these female protagonists and their attackers are legitimate, no-holds-barred brawls. The women are punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, thrown through walls… but thing is… you’ve got to see the other guys. Their opponents got their come-up’in’s good and well.

Soon to be released film, “Julia X” (starring Valerie Azlynn) portrays a similar sort of violence. “Julia X” starts off as a stereotypical romantic-thriller: boy meets girl; girl falls for boy; boy sets out to murder girl just for kicks; girl spends the rest of the film running around half-naked while being chased by her clever male attacker. The kicker is that eventually the woman reveals herself to be just as psychotic and violent as her attacker. The violence depicted is the graphic sort that mainstream films tend to shy away from. I mean, who wants to see their sister, daughter or mother punched in the face and kicked in the stomach? Furthermore, who can imagine their mom giving a smooth uppercut to the mechanic? In our heads, violence (legit violence) perpetrated by women is very difficult to imagine.

We’re stoked on “Julia X” (yet to be released widespread) because we want to see if the film approaches female violence with anything new to say. Admit it, aren’t you a little tired of seeing women evade their captors by running upstairs versus out the damn front door; or just running away in general versus taking the offensive? Don’t you even wonder what the world might look like if the person you wanted by your side at the end of the world was “Alien’s” Sigourney Weaver? We’d pay good money to see Bruce Willis take on Weaver. Talk about an equally matched fight! So, mull it over and ask yourself, “Who YOUR money would be on?”

Words by Ariel Maccarone

We are a nation of voyeurs. Ingrained in us is a deep-seeded obsession with celebrity, the hero and the underdog. We love to watch individuals rise. We love to taste their fall even more. And so is born the genre of sport-dramas.

“Moneyball” starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman opened last weekend. We’ve given it a week in theaters. And? What have the People to say?

As a filmmaker, if you’ve got a subject that’s been done a hundred times over (as with most sport-dramas), you’ve got a challenge on your hands. If you take that on, you better deliver. There are some films, however, that have hit it spot on. In order to illustrate, we offer a comparison of three films: “He Got Game,” “Moneyball,” and “The Damned United.”

1998 delivered Spike Lee’s “He Got Game” starring Denzel Washington and NBA’s Ray Allen. The film delivered a candid, insightful glimpse into the world of college and professional sports. The story revolves around the rise of a young basketball prodigy (Allen). “What will he do? What will he choose? College or the NBA?” Okay, we’ve done this plot before. What warrants the film’s mention is its artful treatment of the protagonist’s worldview. The script is gritty, unromantic and honest. We don’t want to see what someone is like when the world is looking; we want to see who they are when they’re alone. The acting is authentic and visceral. The cinematography and music are characters in themselves, and actually engage the action. So… votes in… the film gets an A.

About ten years later, the U.K. produced “The Damned United.” Not since Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Truman Capote in 2005’s “Capote” have we seen an actor do such justice to a character. “United” tells the real-life story of Brian Clough (played by Michael Sheen) who took over the managing U.K. football (“soccer”) team “Leeds United” in 1974 and failed miserably for forty-four days. If you dig biographies or “soccer,” the film is enlightening. If you don’t, the film’s stellar acting (especially by Sheen) is enough to warrant a viewing. Sheen channels Clough’s personality down to voice intonation, subtle mannerisms and even the way he inhabits his body. The film is not about sport; it’s about the choices we make and the color of their fall out. “United” gets an A from us because its acting set a new bar for actors.

Finally, to “Moneyball.” Brad Pitt stars as the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane whose innovative management changed the way baseball was played. Beane was able to put together a successful team by relying on computer-generated analysis to draft players. Okay, interesting idea. However, we must remember it IS a film. “You’ve got us for two hours, no more no less, so what’cha got?” Unfortunately, the film’s only unique element is its plot, and even that gets old. The underdog team pulls itself up from the bootstraps, defies expectations and then… of course… fails. It fails because if it didn’t, audiences would have asked for their money back. We needed SOME realism, or tomato-throwing would have been warranted. Our problem with the film came down to its lack of character development. The progression of scenes was too predictable and fast to allow the film to deliver a unique voice. “You’ve got us for two hours, remember? What do you have to say?” In the end, “Moneyball” didn’t say anything we haven’t already heard.

And so concludes our lesson on what makes a film worth its price of admission. It must deliver something that resonates with us, and it must do it in an innovative way. The band plays on. The genre of sport-dramas will not die, nor will our need for underdogs or a hero’s rise and fall. Films will always come along that reinvigorate a seemingly worn out genre.

Words by Ariel Maccarone

Okay… so… the litmus test when judging a film as being epic or not—“epic” as in “f*cking amazing rather than lengthy like “The Ten Commandments”): 1) bloody brilliant soundtrack; so good, that the music actually becomes a character in itself; 2) character development deriving from subtleness rather than unrealistic exclamations like, “This is who I am and this is why I’m here!” 3) A plot that, regardless of whether or not it is extraordinary, the film delivers it in such a way that you feel captivated by its unfolding.

We figure those are some pretty good standards. Now lets hit them one by one, shall we? The soundtrack. A soundtrack has not been this incredible since Chemical Brothers orchestrated the soundtrack for “Hannah.” A film is exceptional when it’s able to incorporate inanimate objects such as sound or landscape and give them life. The soundtrack has this surreal 80’s vibe, as does do the rolling of credits, that is so dead on with the feeling of each scene. The film doesn’t reach back into the 80’s and throw it in our faces to make a point. It makes the sounds resonate just as much today as they did when the music first ran rampant among kids wearing neon clothes and Zinka on their noses.

The direction, offered by relatively unknown director Nicolas Winding Refn, and the ability of his actors to respond was remarkable. Gosling especially gave his character (known only as “The Driver,” a choice we think was AWESOME) an undeniable authenticity. His performance was so consistently captivating, even when he did nothing more than stare at another person or an empty room.

The plot. (Oh my god, can’t believe we forgot the plot!). Gosling stars as a Hollywood stuntman who also moonlights as a getaway driver. He then hesitantly gets involved with his neighbor, a single mother whose husband returns from prison. Of course things get dirty and the mess must be cleaned up; hence the general thick of the story.

All in all, the film is an extraordinary testament to the lost art of filmmaking. If tickets these days are about twenty bucks a pop, not even including the necessary cola and over-buttered popcorn, “Drive” is DEFINITELY worth cracking your piggy bank open and hitting the movies.

Words by Ariel Maccarone

Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh’s thriller “Contagion” plays on this idea by suggesting how the present day world might react were we ever confronted with a disease as horrific as the Bubonic Plague.

The film opens with Gwyenth Paltrow’s character, a Minnesota woman (an excellent choice to ram the idea close to home for audiences) traveling overseas for business and, upon returning, becomes violently ill from a mysterious disease. Suddenly, worldwide, various people start coming down with the same symptoms and dying. There seems to be no cure, and this thing starts spreading into the tens of millions faster than you can say, “We’re f*cked.”

Okay, so we’re not shocked by the plot; we’ve done this before. What IS exceptional is Soderbergh’s choice to use the literal fast pacing of scenes to illustrate the disease’s actual growth and its indiscriminant nature. We didn’t have an opportunity to get significantly attached enough to any of the characters, allowing each of them to become the proverbial Everyman.

However, the fast pacing was a double-edged sword. Soberbergh got an incredible cast of actors (Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Gwenyth Paltrow, Kate Winslet and others), but the script ran through the scenes too quickly to give the actors enough time to… well… act and really deliver their characters. We were never able to connect with how each of their characters’ reactions were unique (not only behaviorally but also mentally).

Regardless, the best scene, hands down, is when Damon’s character is told by doctors that his wife (played by Paltrow) has died in surgery. He remains composed, nods as though he understands, and then immediately after says, “Right, so can I go talk to her?” Films—good films—are supposed to tell us how we live; they are supposed to be a mirror. However, too often films tell us how we SHOULD live; how we SHOULD react to life. It was refreshing to experience a film that chose instead to illuminate those states of mind unable to be adequately communicated to us, no matter how good a film is.

The film is a great dissection of the extent of human selfishness, crowd psychology, and the unconsidered consequences technology boom (ie. social distancing). Soderbergh forces us to wonder, “If it came down to it… if it meant your life and the lives of your loved ones… what boundaries would you really cross… what professed values would you sacrifice?”

Words by Ariel Maccarone

Keshavarz mercilessly explores the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the resulting hostile crackdown on all things secular (music, sexuality, art, literature, romance, etc. as viewed from a Western perspective). “With any family in Iran there is this duality, their true face and what’s under the surface, and so a kind of schizophrenia is created. There’s a whole underground world that happens in Iranian society, and that’s what I wanted to explore,” said Keshavarz to the “New York Times.”

The rare authenticity of the film makes it worthy of a trip to the theater.

Made on a budget of less than $1 million, the film was ultimately filmed in Beirut rather than Iran due to Iran’s current hostile political environment. The sex scenes between the two protagonists, Shireen (played by Sarah Kazemy) and Atafeh (played by Nikohl Boosheri) lack the unbelievable eroticism common to Western mainstream media. The party scenes were also drawn from Keshavarz’s personal experiences while spending time in Iran as a teenager. How she crafted the personalities of her young protagonists and their escape into an underground youth community similar to the West allowed the audience to react more viscerally to a repressive life not many of us in the West could otherwise imagine, such as run-ins with the infamous Iranian morality police.

You need not be gay, Muslim, or a teenager in order to enjoy this film. It is shocking that an indie foreign film of this nature even got such wide distribution across the U.S. The film also does not sacrifice entertainment in order to communicate its authenticity. It was a genuinely enjoyable film; it being thought provoking was the cherry on top.

Words by Ariel Maccarone

The film is interspersed with unusually candid and extremely eloquent interviews with girls and boys, ages twelve to eighteen, in order to ram home the personal side of Feminist philosophy and media’s role in it. Adding a solid degree of objectivity are multiple jaw-dropping statistics and interviews with prominent social figures, including former U.S. Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice, news anchor Katie Couric, and actor Rosario Dawson.

What kept me entertained was that Newsom’s film does not become a deluge of facts or an attempt to indoctrinate us. Filled with numerous contemporary media images, her ideas resonate; they are not pulled from our parent’s high school textbooks. The film communicates a reasonable demand for sincere, even uncomfortable, self-reflection on our part as an audience; this vibe of: “Decide whatever you want about the issue, just have the guts to genuinely consider it.”

The film debuted to rave reviews at Sundance as well as many smaller film festivals. Currently, you can find a public showing near you or hold private screenings by contacting the filmmakers at www.missrepresentation.org.

“[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” (Pat Robertson at 1992 Republican National Convention). Time to take out your proverbial baseball bats and step up to the plate. What kind of world do you want your daughter, your wife, your sister to live in? You decide… just have the guts to consider it.

Words by Ariel Maccarone