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Taylor brandon burns a conflicted 12 year old tv star fron the u.S. runs away from the set & his problems while shooting a big-budget film in canada. His reluctant limo driver rick schiller a down-on-his-luck undie filmmaker is enlisted to find taylor before the childstar destroys himself. Studio: Arts Alliance America Release Date: 02/26/2008 Starring: Jennifer Jason Leigh Mark Rendall Run time: 98 minutes
Billed as an eccentric, funny film, this award-winning Canadian import from director/actor Don McKellar (eXistanZ, The Red Violin) is more drama than comedy; a multi-layered, provocative satire of the movie industry and its self-serving exploitation of child celebrities. Childstar is the story of Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall), a spoiled 12-year-old American megastar and his self-absorbed mother, Suzanne (Jennifer Jason Leigh), together in Canada while Taylor films a big budget movie. Shockingly insolent on the exterior, Taylor struggles with conflicting emotions of anger and apathy and, at the point of despair, runs away with a prostitute. Enter Rick Schiller (Don McKellar), a hapless indie filmmaker picking up a paycheck as Taylor's limo-driver who is now enlisted to find the boy before he destroys himself. With camera in hand, Rick can't help but see Taylor's life as a movie while he attempts to engage Taylor as a friend. Perhaps intentionally, this movie-about-a-movie-about-a-movie eschews a single raison d'être in favor of many. At times wry, it is also a sobering statement on America's celebrity culture. Most notable is the film's cinematography--artsy, innovative, and, at times, disturbing. With standout performances by McKellar and Leigh, viewers can't miss the message on child stars explicit in the script: "When they hit puberty, we chew them up and spit them out; they spend the rest of their lives entertaining us in the tabloids." Rated R for extreme language and sexual content. --Lynn Gibson
Publisher: Sundance Channel Home Entertainment
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Publisher: Upper Deck
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Author: Howard F Fehr
Publisher: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
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2002's popular video-game-derived hit Resident Evil didn't inspire confidence in a sequel, but Resident Evil: Apocalypse defies odds and surpasses expectations. It's a bigger, better, action-packed zombie thriller, and this time Milla Jovovich (as the first film's no-nonsense heroine) is joined by more characters from the popular Capcom video games, including Jill Valentine (played by British hottie Sienna Guillory) and Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr, from 1999's The Mummy). They're armed and ready for a high-caliber encounter with devil dogs, mutant "Lickers," lurching zombies, and the leather-clad monster known only as Nemesis, unleashed by the nefarious Umbrella Corporation responsible for creating the cannibalistic undead horde. Having gained valuable experience as a respected second-unit director on high-profile films like Gladiator and The Bourne Identity, director Alexander Witt elevates this junky material to the level of slick, schlocky entertainment. --Jeff Shannon
Publisher: Sony Pictures
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Film adaptation of Lillian Hellman's World War II play about a German man and his wife being pursued by Nazi agents in Washington, D.C.
Publisher: Warner Home Video
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Great Britain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD:it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital Stereo ),SPECIAL FEATURES: Biographies, Interactive Menu, Making Of, Scene Access, Trailer(s),SYNOPSIS: A group of celebrated high-school athletes are prosecuted for the gang rape of a retarded girl in this TV movie, which was adapted from the nonfiction book Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb, by Bernie Lefkowitz. When big-city cop Kelly Brooks (Ally Sheedy) moves back to cushy suburb Glen Ridge, NJ, she quickly learns the town's rituals: Jocks are at the top of the social heap, and football is a civic obsession. Soon, though, Brooks becomes the chief investigator in the alleged rape of Leslie Farber (Heather Matarazzo), a mildly retarded teen, by a group of football players. Although accounts differ and Leslie herself changes her story several times, it seems that the boys took turns with Leslie in one boy's basement and even penetrated the girl with a baseball bat. However, Leslie's excitement at being included in the activities of the popular crowd and her own budding sexual impulses make it hard to discern whether or not the sex was voluntary. Given the inconclusive evidence, the case almost hits a dead end, but Brooks digs deeper. Soon, she discovers one boy who is willing to talk and who claims to have been a witness rather than a participant. Unfortunately for Brooks' popularity at work, the kid turns out to be the son of a fellow police officer -- and one of the boys he implicates is his own brother. Based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1989, Our Guys: Outrage at Glen Ridge also stars Eric Stoltz as the prosecutor who assists in Brooks' investigation. The titular suburb is the real-life hometown of actor Tom Cruise.
Publisher: Fremantle Media
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While hardly a spiritual upgrade of the slasher film, this high-concept teen body-count thriller drops hints of The Sixth Sense into the smart-aleck sensibility of Scream. Helmed by X-Files veteran James Wong, who cowrote the screenplay with longtime creative partner Glen Morgan, Final Destination is an often entertaining thriller marked by an unsettling sense of unease and scenes of eerie imagery. It suffers, however, from a schizophrenic tone and a frankly ludicrous premise. A high school Cassandra, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa of Idle Hands), wakes from a preflight nightmare and panics when he's convinced the plane is doomed. His ruckus bumps seven passengers from the Paris-bound plane, which immediately explodes into a fireball on takeoff, but fate hasn't finished with these lucky few and, one by one, death claims them. Wong brings such a funereal tone to these early scenes of survivor's guilt and inevitable doom that the already far-fetched film threatens to veer into unplanned absurdity. Thankfully, the tale loosens up with a playful morgue humor: one of the victims winds up the splattered punch line to a grim joke and elaborate Rube Goldbergesque chains of cause and effect become inspired spectacles of destruction. Final Destination is a pretty silly thriller when it takes itself seriously, and the filmmakers play fast and loose with their own rules of fate, but once they stick their tongues firmly in cheek, the film takes off with a screwy interpretation of the domino effect of doom. --Sean Axmaker
Final Destination 2 begins with a well-orchestrated multicar pileup on a freeway--a horrifying accident that turns out to be a premonition, as seen by a young woman (A.J. Cook) who saves herself and several other people by blocking a freeway on-ramp. Thus, as in the first Final Destination, a prescient vision disrupts the destined plans of death, and death goes to extreme lengths to correct matters. What makes Final Destination 2 entertaining is that the characters can only survive by learning to recognize the signs of impending doom--and the signs are basically the cinematic foreshadowing that moviemakers use to invoke suspense. This, combined with some elaborately complicated and gruesome deaths, fosters a ghoulish humor that's more entertaining than the smirky self-referentiality of Scream. Final Destination 2 doesn't aspire to be a great movie, but trash has its pleasures. --Bret Fetzer Publisher: New Line Home Video
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Publisher: Autograph-Sports
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