Jay Leno Meets a Baby Cheetah From Tampa

Posted May 11, 2011 by Walt Belcher

Updated May 11, 2011 at 11:46 AM

The little critter wants to get away from Leno.  That big chin scares him.

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Lady Gaga Kicks Off ‘Good Morning America’ Summer Concerts

Posted May 11, 2011 by Walt Belcher

Updated May 11, 2011 at 12:14 PM

If Lady Gaga doesn’t wake you up, you’re pretty much out of it.
 
ABC announced this morning that the “Good Morning America Summer Concert Series”  will kick off on May 27 with Lady Gaga performing songs from her new album “Born This Way.”  She’ll be live that morning on the streets of New York City.

Other performers this summer include Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Jennifer Hudson, Selena Gomez, Nicki Minaj, thel top 11 American Idol contestants, Taio Cruz, Florence and The Machine, The Goo Goo Dolls, Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert, The GO-GO’s final television performance and Debbie Gibson and Tiffany on stage together for the first time.

The 2011 Summer Concert Series returns for the third year to the Rumsey Playfield in Central Park, where music’s biggest names will perform live every Friday. The Summer Concert Series is sponsored by Burger King Corp.

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Mother’s Day show benefits The Spring

Posted May 7, 2011 by Clarisa Gerlach

Updated May 7, 2011 at 08:19 PM

A Mother’s Day tradition, “Take Back the Night” presents local music to raise awareness about domestic violence and funds for The Spring of Tampa Bay.

Volunteers from The Spring will be present to talk about its mission of preventing domestic violence and providing shelter and assistance to victims.

This year’s musical lineup features some new faces - Next of Kin, a blues-rock outfit featuring father and daughter on guitar and vocals, respectively; The Applebutter Express, pictured above, a ukulele and vocals duo; and singer-songwriter Wendy Barmore.

The show starts at 5 p.m. Sunday at Skipper’s Smokehouse, 910 Skipper Road, Tampa. Admission is by donation ($10 is suggested). Call (813) 971-0666. 

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New Releases for Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Posted May 6, 2011 by John Allman

Updated May 6, 2011 at 07:19 PM

What’s new in stores and on video shelves this week:

The Green Hornet
Genre: Comic Book/Action
Directed by: Michael Gondry
Run time: 119 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: Watching “The Green Hornet” is kind of like experiencing the highest and lowest moments of a particularly wacky day.

There is one unbelievably ridiculous action sequence that takes up nearly 25 minutes or more near the end of the film, which is actually pretty enjoyable.

There are some cool gadgets.

There’s a low-key, Harold and Kumar chemistry between leads Seth Rogen and Jay Chou as billionaire playboy Britt Reid and Kato, respectively.

And that’s the highs.

Then there are the lows, which amount to anything after the first 15-20 minutes on through the beginning of the climatic action sequence.

“Green Hornet” is a movie filled with little moments that excite, but a dreadfully, painfully dull middle act and a wildly uneven performance from Rogen who veers too far into D-bag mode on too many occasions to ultimately be even remotely likable. 

Yet, the movie, for all its flaws and outrageous budget, isn’t a total waste. There are those moments. Few, yes. But they do provide some measure of redemption.

For starters, who knew that Michael Gondry would be a logical choice for a big-budget action/superhero film? Not that everything works – Gondry experiments too much during key fighting sequences, extending backgrounds to enhance the 3D effect, but too often that only succeeds in creating the big-screen equivalent of a 24/7 cable news ticker.

For seconds, Chou as Kato is an absolute riot. He is impressive with the kung fu, he makes for a wholly likable supporting character and he knows when to dial it back with just the right tone of exasperation on some of his more memorable quips.

If only Rogen had received the same memo.

Too much of “Hornet” is wasted trying to nail/ram/drive/bludgeon home the notion that Rogen’s Reid is a shallow shell of a man, content to fry his brain and flush his liver and unable to learn any measure of maturity, even after his father dies. His scenes with Cameron Diaz are a prime example of this. Diaz, for the record, is completely wasted in a thankless role that actually, probably needed a lesser known actress with some genuine spunk and spitfire (I’m thinking an Ellen Page wannabe) to spar with Rogen and Chou. But few actresses could truly compete against and overcome the played out and groan-worthy chauvinism that the script forces Rogen to word vomit in his staccato stoner manboy monotone.

But, much like “Pineapple Express,” a movie where Rogen’s crackwise smarmigan of a character didn’t irritate nearly as much, he and co-writer Evan Goldberg know how to capture those rare, genuinely funny moments of observation that produce big laughs, particularly during gun battles and car chases where Rogen becomes an everyman town crier announcing the obvious to the viewer.

And, also like “Pineapple Express,” Rogen and Goldberg allow their imaginations to run wild when it comes to the action sequences. “Hornet” takes the kitchen sink approach and then sticks a hypodermic full of pure cocaine into its neck just to see whether the film’s heart will explode.

It isn’t enough to have a car chase. Why not drive the car onto a newspaper printing press conveyor belt? Then somehow bounce the car off and have it drive through walls and onto an elevator. Then why not have half the car fall off, the rear half, which is OK because the car has “front wheel drive,” get it, and then our heroes keep firing missles and machine guns and racing around the upper floor of a building in half a car. Maybe, just maybe, that half of a car should eventually go speeding out a plate glass window, with a bad guy attached to the hood, and our heroes in the front seat. How would they survive? Ejector seats, of course.

Sometimes, so much action is too much action. Sometimes, it’s exhausting because it’s so thoroughly, undeniably surreal. But sometimes, as with at least a few stylized moments in “Hornet,” that kind of over-the-top, go-for-broke enthusiasm is exactly what a mediocre movie needs to leave a lingering impression that it didn’t completely suck.

The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – Cameron Diaz, hot or not? Discuss.
Nudity – No.
Gore – No.
Drug use – Surprisingly, no.
Bad Guys/Killers – The dude from “Inglorious Basterds.”
Buy/Rent – Rent it.
Blu-Ray Bonus Features – Special features include audio commentary; multiple BD exclusive featurettes, including “Trust Me – Director Michael Gondry,” “Finding Kato,” “The Art of Destruction” and “The Stunt Family Armstrong”; gag reel; Jay Chou audition footage; movieIQ; and more.
On the Web – http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/thegreenhornet/

Ninjas VS Vampires (Vicious Circle/Breaking Glass, 89 minutes, Unrated, DVD): I have to admit, you go into a low-budget, direct-to-DVD sequel like “Ninjas VS Vampires” with incredibly low expectations.

Especially considering that it’s coming out less than a year after writer-director Justin Timpane’s first film, “Ninjas VS Zombies.”

But on a night spent watching “Ninjas VS Vampires” and “The Green Hornet” back to back, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that “Ninjas” is superior in every way to “Hornet,” not in the high-dollar special effects, but in story, characters and enjoyment.

“Ninjas” wears its low-budget leanings like a badge of honor. Timpane makes the most of his effects, utilizing an old-school style (vampires disintegrate into digitized dust after being staked or having their heads cut off) and relying more on actual character development (gasp!) than trying to stage huge set pieces that would have challenged even experienced filmmakers.

That’s not to say that “Ninjas” scrimps on the action. This is a movie about butt-kicking ninjas, after all, and the fight choreography is surprisingly well done.

Here’s the basic story: Geeky Aaron (Jay Saunders) has been in love with his best friend for most of his life. On the night that he finally decides to tell her, and ask that she be his girlfriend, they are attacked by a gang of vampires. A group of mysterious fighters suddenly appear and kill the vampires before disappearing with his girl, who has no recollection of what happened because one of the ninjas happens to be a powerful witch and another is a vampiress trying to stop evil vampire king Seth and his brother Manson from taking over the world.

Aaron tries to seek the ninjas out and eventually finds them. He convinces the warriors to allow him to join their ranks, which leads to some funny fight training exercises after Aaron is imbued with the knowledge and abilities of a ninja by the witch.

Meanwhile, Seth is rallying his vampire minions, and hiring a motley assortment of assassins to kill the ninjas, particularly the witch so she can’t use her powers to defeat them.

The gang is provided with a failsafe plan to stop Seth – a powerful crystal that can open a portal to another dimension from which no vampire can escape – and they converge on Seth to try to thwart his plan.

Lives are lost, heroes are born and “Ninjas” ends with a ready-made threequel – here’s a hint, Ninjas VS Monsters! – that you actually are excited to watch. Here’s hoping Timpane decides to continue the franchise.

All in all, “Ninjas” is incredibly entertaining. The script is surprisingly strong with elements of classic 1980s horror films and action-comedies. There are some refreshingly poignant scenes between key characters and a number of big laughs.

One of the best lines comes during the training montage when Aaron is learning to use his newly bestowed fighting skills. Ninja Kyle tries to explain to Aaron what he and the other warriors do and why they decided to give up normal lives to battle the undead.

Aaron, without missing a beat, responds, “Oh, like Buffy.”

If you’re cruising through the local video store and you happen across “Ninjas VS Vampires,” do yourself a favor and grab it. Sure, it might look like so many other groan-worthy independent films that try, and fail, to incorporate similar themes – “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter,” anyone? – but this is the real deal.

Timpane is a director to watch, and if given a big enough budget and a more experienced cast, he could very well turn out to be a huge mainstream success.

The Dilemma (Universal, 112 minutes, PG-13, Blu-Ray): Ron Howard returns to comedy and finds that his glory days of “Night Shift” and “Gung Ho” and “Splash” are well behind him. “The Dilemma” could very well use the writing chops of Howard’s former comedic collaborators, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. The screenwriting duo had a knack for taking everyday situations and injecting a subversive, often hysterical, edge that helped establish Howard as a serious director and distanced him from his defining role of Opie from “The Andy Griffith Show.”

But “The Dilemma,” written by Allan Loeb, relies too often on mean-spirited and predictable humor and, when all else fails, throws a hail mary to Vince Vaughn to mug and preen and do his best Vince Vaughn shtick from other, better films.

The set-up is overly simple: Best buddies Ronny (Vaughn) and Nick (Kevin James) want to design an electric car that sounds like the classic Ford muscle cars of the 1970s. Ronny is the commitment-phobe with a prior gambling addiction and a hot girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly). Nick is the tubby good guy with the brains (he is a mechanical genius) and hot, loving wife (Winona Ryder, looking not so good).

Ronny and Nick get the chance of a lifetime to design a prototype engine for a major car manufacturer. Ronny decides to propose to his girl and while scouting out a location, he sees Nick’s wife kissing another man.

From there, all manner of predictable misadventures ensue. Ronny doesn’t want to jeopardize the deal by crushing Nick’s spirit, so he decides to confront Geneva (Ryder), then stalk her. There are the typical twists – Ronny and Geneva hooked up one night in college before she met Nick, and Geneva threatens to tell Nick and say they have been having an affair all along.

But the pacing, the laughs and, most of all, the surprise that is expected in a movie directed by Howard just never materializes. It looks like a big-budget summer comedy, but it lacks heart. And am I the only person who just does not find James funny in the slightest?

Also Available:

Being Human Season 3 – BBC America releases the third season of this wonderfully dark show about three young adults trying to make their way living a normal life. The catch is that they also happen to be a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost. Full review coming soon.

Megan Is Missing – Imagine an Amber Alert turned into a movie.

Melrose Place: Sixth Season, Volume 1 – Soapy hijinks from the season that very few people watched.

From Prada to Nada – No, it’s not a film about traveling between two foreign countries. If only.

Penn & Teller B. S.!: The Complete Eighth Season – Showtime staple returns with all episodes from Season 8.

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New Releases for Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Posted May 6, 2011 by John Allman

Updated May 6, 2011 at 07:09 PM

What’s new in stores and on video shelves this week:

El Topo/The Holy Mountain
Genre: Cult Classics
Directed by: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Run time: 125 minutes
Rating: Unrated
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: “El Topo” is a movie unlike any you’ve ever seen.

And given the obscure 1970 film’s deserved cult classic status, unless you live in New York or Los Angeles, or are friends with obscure-cinema loving celebrities like Marilyn Manson or the late John Lennon, chances are you’re in the majority of people who have never had a chance to experience Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mind-blowing mash-up of spaghetti western and epic spiritual quest.

Wisely dusted off by Anchor Bay and given a proper high-definition, mass market release, the legend of “El Topo” show grow considerably upon its release.

This is an incredibly difficult film to describe properly. It’s as if Harmony Korine suddenly woke up and found himself possession Stanley Kubrick’s detached, emotionless perspective, David Lynch’s appreciation for sideshow oddities and Sergio Leone’s ability to veer wildly from high camp to bloody high noon.

The film opens with a lone gunman, dressed all in black, riding across the desert holding an umbrella to shade him and the naked 6-year-old boy holding onto his back.

That’s right, naked boy! Where are his clothes?!? Don’t ask.

They stop so the boy can bury his favorite toy and a photo of his mother, thus signifying the boy’s progression from child to man.

They come across a village that has been decimated by violence. Farm animals have been gutted, their entrails steaming in the unforgiving sun. Bodies litter the ground. Small pools of water are stained blood red. They find a church filled with the hanging bodies of the local clergy. One survivor is left crawling through the sand, begging to be killed.

El Topo (Jodorowsky) asks him who committed such heinous crimes. The man begs to be killed. El Topo hands his gun to the naked boy who shoots him. El Topo nods, proud.

They continue riding through the desert, only to be attacked by three bandits. El Topo kills two of the bandits and then demands answers from the third. Before the bandit can answer, El Topo savagely shoots him four or five times, THEN demands answers. The bandit chokes out the name of the man responsible and dies. Yes, the scene is as hysterical and ludicrous as it sounds.

El Topo and Naked Boy next arrive at a desert fort. They sneak up to the stone perimeter wall, the boy perched on El Topo’s shoulders like a naked, prepubescent periscope. From there, they take in the scene.

A gaggle of bisexual cowboy outlaws is rounding up the local monks, stripping them. The bandits put on women’s clothing to participate in a bizarre rendition of a Sadie Hawkins dance. They hoist the naked monks over their shoulders and take them off.

Another outlaw is busy gunning down random, innocent villagers.

A women gathers water, fends off the bandits with the threat of death from their leader, and enters a small hut that opens into an expansive stone pyramid filled with religious artifacts and a gigantic interior wall, even though from the outside, the hut looks shorter than a one-story hovel.

She strips and bathes the bandit leader who languishes inside surrounded by a host of conflicting imagery, paying particular attention to the man’s feet. Jodorowsky has a major foot fetish and “El Topo” is filled with scenes of people longingly, lovingly, sexually obsessing over feet and shoes.

El Topo confronts the leader and his bandits and defeats them all in a bloody gun battle. Then he abandons the boy, who we now have figured out is his son, and tells him to destroy his memory of El Topo and to live with the monks. The boy immediately is swathed in a friar’s cloak and swarmed by a gaggle of pretty boy monks who have just been molested by the bisexual cowboy outlaws. They envelop the boy in a darkening shadow of robes and El Topo rides off with the woman.

El Topo and the woman fight, have sex and comb the desert looking for water and shelter. They bury themselves naked in sand. They pluck eggs from the sand and crack them open, sprouting trees.

The woman tells El Topo that he must defeat the four great Masters, each a gunfighter representing a different religious philosophy. She encourages, then goads, El Topo to win at any cost, even to cheat. El Topo slowly descends into madness.

He has an extended gunfight with a thong-wearing Jesus-lookalike who absorbes bullets into his skin. The Jesus-lookalike is protected by a dwarf with no legs who gets carried piggyback everywhere by a mute giant with no arms.

El Topo keeps winning through trickery. He and the woman are joined by a sexy female Zorro-like bandit who inexplicably speaks with a man’s voice.

Each time he defeats and kills a Master, their body is laid in a shallow grave that suddenly begins swarming with bees.

And that’s just the first 50 minutes.

“El Topo” is a work of staggering visual chutzpah.

It has scenes that are so perfectly staged, full of lyrical beauty, spliced with moments of extreme madness. Jodorowsky’s gift, his ability to jettison all logic and reason in a quest for that one brilliant, soul-shaking image that captivates his audience, is to walk a high-wire in a billowing hail storm.

It’s fearless filmmaking that might not make much sense when taken in a whole, but absorbed incrementally, frame by bizarrely beautiful frame, elevates his vision to that of Kubrick or Fellini.

No wonder celebrities have rallied behind this and Jodorowsky’s only other film, “The Holy Mountain,” which also gets the Blu-Ray release treatment this week from Anchor Bay.

If you love movies, particularly dense, symbolism-heavy fringe films that will never appeal to mainstream viewers, then Jodorowsky is a director you need to discover.

The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – Yes.
Nudity – Male, female, everyone gets naked eventually.
Gore – Considerable.
Drug use – No.
Bad Guys/Killers – Tough one to answer.
Buy/Rent – Definitely a rental, cult aficionados will want to buy.

Blood Out (Lionsgate, 89 minutes, R, Blu-Ray): By my count, this is the third or fourth direct-to-DVD collaboration between Val Kilmer and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who seemingly has moved on from gangster rap to bad B movies. I’m at a loss, really. Jackson is barely in the film, but his few scenes with Luke Goss, a third-tier action star who recently toplined “Death Race 2,” are like an Intro to Acting 101 class in how not to convey any emotion and recite your lines as woodenly as possible. “Blood Out” is a standard cop seek revenge for the murder of a family member genre flick that happens to have corralled one big name (Kilmer, looking more and more like a bloated Marlon Brando, whose career choices of late deserve a master’s thesis or a clinical study on his descent into madness) and several B-list veterans (Vinnie Jones, Goss, Jackson, etc.). This is the kind of movie where Goss, a patrol cop who also leads a SWAT team (?!?) visits the police headquarters in the city where his low-level criminal brother was killed and is immediately assaulted and handcuffed to a bathroom sink by Jackson and some other detectives – and there are no, absolutely zero repercussions. This is the kind of movie where Goss decides to take matters into his own hands and infiltrate the gang that killed his brother so he goes to a local tattoo parlor and demands to have his entire body tattooed in gang symbols and prison images and – miraculously – the tattoos have all healed within a day without him applying any ointment and they look weathered enough to not be immediately noticed as being brand new! This is the kind of movie where the hot, blonde dominatrix henchwoman of the drug gang leader, who likes to handcuff female submissives to the ceiling and whip them for her sexual pleasure, inexplicably is revealed to be an undercover federal agent who immediately has sex with Goss and agrees to help him take the gang boss. It’s an utterly ridiculous low-budget drive-in movie that actually manages to embarrass other well-made, ridiculous low-budget drive-in movies with its complete lack of attention to things like continuity, intelligent dialogue and common sense. The best part of the whole fiasco is an advance trailer for 50 Cent’s next movie milestone, another action extravaganza that features both Ryan Phillipe AND Bruce Willis! Come on John McClane, you’re still relevant brother. You don’t need a paycheck that bad.

Chawz (Magnet/Magnolia, 122 minutes, R, Blu-Ray): This South Korean horror-comedy hybrid import from director Jeong-won Shin tells the tale of a wild killer boar menacing a village. It’s essentially a remake of “Jaws” on land with many scenes of hunters and villagers being silently stalked through waist-high reeds by a giant boar that somehow manages to keep quiet until just before it attacks and rips them to pieces, leaving a few bloody body parts lying around to be discovered and freak everyone out. There are three main problems with “Chawz.” First, if you’re going to try to redo one of the greatest movies ever made, you need to be up to that formidable challenge. You have to recognize that “Jaws” was so successful on so many levels because it wasn’t just a story about a killer shark. It had depth, human emotion, a script that transcended the horror genre to become something new, a modern-day fable about redemption and self-discovery and the will to live against all odds. “Chawz” is basically a movie about a bunch of bumbling village locals and law enforcement who are outwitted at every step by a giant boar. Second and third, if you’re going to make a horror comedy hybrid, you kind of are required, and expected, to make it scary and funny. “Chawz” is neither. The humor is decidedly regional, which might explain its poor translation for American audiences, but horror is universal and scary is scary, regardless of where a movie is made. This one just isn’t scary at all. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement.

Also Available:

Stan Lee’s Super Humans: The Complete First Season – Is there anybody better at milking the use of his name other than Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee? First, ‘Who Wants to be a Superhero?” Now this, real-life, everyday people imbued with unique gifts and abilities.

Muay Thai Giant – Fish out of water kung fu with a twist.

Jolene – Femme Fatale flicks. They don’t make enough of them these days.

Bunny and the Bull – Offbeat import about a day trip that takes place entirely in the minds of friends sitting in a living room.

The Lucy Show: Season 4 – Not nearly as good of a show as “I Love Lucy,” but still a television classic.

Roger Corman Presents: Dinoshark – Two words, Eric Balfour. Think “Skyline,” but worse.

Mongolian Death Worm – Oddly, this one isn’t produced by Roger Corman. But it has a great title. Too bad the film isn’t as good.

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