Cinema Basement

A review by Brooks Rich We like to sometimes learn new things here at Cinema Basement. In fact over there in the corner of said basement we have our corner for documentaries. There's something about a good documentary. Whether it tells it's story well, teaches you something you didn't know, or hits you in the gut due to it's subject matter, a good documentary can really impact you. There are some tough and hard hitting we will get to but today I want to explore one of the best companies at making documentaries, HBO Sports. In honor of the Stanley Cup Finals let's take a look at the 2010 film, Broad Street Bullies . A good sports documentary should make you care about the story it's telling, whether or not you know the sport or like the team. I'm not into baseball all that much but the documentary Dem Bums , about the Brooklyn Dodgers, is fantastic. I'll get to that one day. I am big hockey fan though so I always watch the hockey documentaries. I'

A review by Brooks Rich We now arrive at my favorite Star Trek film of all time. I love Wrath of Khan and I love Undiscovered Country but this is the one I rewatch the most. The TNG crew's sophomore effort on screen is leagues better than Generations and sadly set a precedent the other two films they did couldn't meet. First Contact did the smart thing and had the Enterprise going against one of the biggest threats they ever faced on the show, the Borg, one of the most threatening villains in Star Trek history. It kind of does what Wrath of Khan, digging into the series to find a villain. Of course the Borg were much more well known than Khan was. The Borg have started an invasion of the Federation. The Enterprise helps fight off the initial attack but follows the surviving Borg back in time and discover they are trying to stop Earth's first contact with an alien race that occurred after humans made the first light speed trip. The Enterprise crew must  ensure this tr

A review by Brooks Rich Happy summer. Welcome to the first installment of our summer exploration of one of my personal favorites genres, shark movies. Sharks are an enduring fear for some people. Go swimming in the ocean and you might run into one of these bad boys. Yeah this is a real life monster and they have a legacy in cinema. Now there is clearly a king of these films that is so far above the rest it's not even a contest. Jaws is not just the best shark movie ever made but is one of the greatest films ever made. I am not talking about Jaws today. I'm talking about the totally awesome and unfairly maligned Deep Blue Sea from 1999, directed by Renny Harlin and starring genetically engineered sharks, Thomas Jane, LL Cool J, Safforn Burrows, and Samuel L. Jackson. Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen this film. I have to talk about something concerning Samuel L. Jackson later because it's impossible to talk about this film and not mention that. At an underwa

A review by Brooks Rich When I did my most anticipated films of 2019, this was my number one film on that list. I was so excited to see this film. I thought this was going to be my favorite film of the year. Sadly it did not live up to those expectations. There's a lot I like in Brightburn but together as a film it leaves much to be desired. Brandon Breyer  is that quiet kid who no one likes. When he turns twelve his birthday party is his parents and aunt and uncle. A trope we've seen before but it gets the idea across. We sometimes have tropes for a reason. But there's something off about Brandon. He never has been hurt. He's smarter by a wide margin than every other kid. There's also something calling to him in the basement of his parents barn. I guess that's what you would call it. A basement? Sure. Puberty is not kind to this kid and soon he regards those around him to be weak. The trailers spell it out. Evil Superman. There's a saying that less i

A review by Brooks Rich How have I not done a Kurt Russell film yet? One of the best leading men in Hollywood history. A while back I did a post about the film Joy Ride and the art of the road movie. Check that out if you haven't already. We have another road trip movie here today with the criminally underrated 1997 film, Breakdown , directed by Jonathan Mostow, a director who is pretty hit and miss. Maybe check out his film U-571 . He also directed the third Terminator film. Gross. Russell is Jeff Taylor, a married man driving from Boston to San Diego. They break down in the middle of nowhere and a friendly truck driver, played by the immortal JT Walsh, man what a loss, offers to take her to the nearest rest stop to call for help. Jeff and his wife agrees and the driver takes off with his wife. However Jeff manages to start the car and head to the rest stop. Unfortunately no one can remember meeting his wife and the truck driver acts like he's never met him before in his

A review by Brooks Rich This is the film that led to the start of Terry Gilliam month. This is one of his most successful films. It was a box office smash, not something that can often be said about Gilliam. As I said in a previous review, Gilliam has faced his share of bad luck in the film world. He always seems to be the most ill fated director. But in 1995 Gilliam struck box office gold with the science fiction thriller,  12 Monkeys . Now to be fair Bruce Willis had been close to becoming box office poison at the time. But luckily for Gilliam he had been in the powerhouse that was  Pulp Fiction  the year before and in 1995 returned as John McClaine in  Die Hard with a Vengeance . So he was back on top. Brad Pitt meanwhile become the new hot thing thanks to his roles in films such as  Thelma & Louis e,  True Romance ,  Interview with the Vampire , and  Se7en . Thanks to the box office power of Willis and Pitt  12 Monkey s grossed 168.8 million on a budget of 29.5 million. That&

A review by Brooks Rich If anyone reading this hasn't seen the first two John Wick movies, go watch those immediately. They are the best action films of the past five years. They are ballets of violence and the third installment is no different. Also small spoilers for John Wick 2. Keanu Reeves returns as John Wick, now excommunicated and being hunted by every assassin in New York who is after the fourteen million dollar bounty on his head. John's only hope is to find the head of the Table, the overseers of all assassin's and ask for leniency. Also he might have to kill a couple of people along the way. Reeves carries this film and once again makes John Wick a likable but very dangerous character. I love how he is kind of a mix between the unstoppable action hero and the everyman. He is legendary among the ranks of the assassins but Reeves brings a vulnerability to him. John Wick can be hurt. This film is gorgeous. It is the best shot film of 2019 so far and I don't

A review by Brooks Rich This is a very polarizing Star Trek film. I go back and forth on it to be honest. We're now in the TNG era and at the debut film of Picard and his crew, with Kirk showing up in the third act because of course. I have similar problems to this as I did with Motionless Picture. It's so boring and lifeless at times. How is this film the film debut of this crew? Really we have to start on the Holodeck? Do we need a side plot of Picard's family dying? This film is not awful but looking at the sum of it's parts, it doesn't work. It's just kind of there. The film is about the Nexus, a strange extra-dimensional realm that transports people to a fantasy world where they get whatever they desire. The villain is Tolian Soran, played by Malcolm McDowell, who wishes to destroy a planet so it will divert the Nexus to him. There's also Klingons trying to blow up the Enterprise after they use Geordi's visor as a way to spy on the Enterprise an

A review by Brooks Rich Let's talk about Gerard Butler. I think the guy gets a bad rap because of some choices he has made. Yes Geostorm and some of his romantic films are bad movies. But Butler has real charisma and can be a good leading man. Look at his performance as Mike Banning in Olympus Has Fallen. He's a good John McClane esque action hero. 300 might be a joke at this point but he is a total badass in that film. But today I want to talk about the film I think has his most interesting performance. This is a film that is perfectly entertaining and tells a good morality tale. It has a sympathetic villain, played by Butler, who might go a little extreme in his methods but you can see where he is coming from. Butler is Clyde Shelton, a family man who survives a brutal home invasion but witnesses the murders of his wife and daughter. He is devastated when the prosecutor Nick Rice, played by Jamie Foxx, accepts a deal from the worst of the two criminals for a conviction

A review by Brooks Rich Oh God this film. Last time I did one of these I did the incredibly stupid but fun at the same time Congo . But I can't always cover fun films that are bad but worth a watch if you have a high tolerance for shit films. No today we have a not good on any level films. A film that is one of the most famous bombs of the '90s, 1991's Hudson Hawk . This is a bad film. One of the worst most ill conceived comedies of all time. I have a high tolerance for some pretty bad films. Plus comedy is subjective. I understand that what some people find funny I myself may not. But this film is so unfunny and so poorly put together it's nearly unwatchable. Even with comedy being subjective, there's almost nothing worse than a comedy you don't find funny. The real tragedy is it's in the middle of a series of underperforming and poorly received for Willis, all coming after the release of Die Hard 2 and really only ending with the release of Pulp Fictio

A review by Brooks Rich I want to share a memory with all of you. It's 1997. I am standing at my local theater after my showing and waiting for something. I don't remember what. I think my mom was talking to a friend. They had seen something different from what we had. I don't remember what we saw. They were saying how they really liked their movie and it had just gotten out. I looked back and saw a sea of old people walking out of a theater. That theater was showing Conspiracy Theory . In 1997 this movie made 137 million dollars on a budget of 80 million dollars. That's fairly successful. It stars two of the biggest Hollywood superstars of the nineties, Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts. Roberts probably can still be considered a megastar but Gibson's star has faded since then. But at this point there's no one bigger. These two are clearly what attracted people to this movie. Yes some of the things Gibson has done and said are awful. But the man was a movie star

A review by Brooks Rich This might be the most underrated film in the whole Star Trek film series. Released in 1991 it is the bridge between Kirk's Enterprise and Picard's Enterprise. People think the next film was the passing of the torch between the two films but it's the end of Undiscovered Country that serves as that. It's also Star Trek moving beyond the disaster of Final Frontier . After a moon near the Klingons explodes, the Klingons seek to attempt peace talks with the Federation as a warlike existence is no longer profitable. Kirk and his crew are selected as the ambassadors after a recommendation from Spock, even though Kirk holds a grudge against the Klingon empire due to events from past films. No spoilers here. When he is framed for the assassination of the Klingon ambassador, Kirk and his crew, along with Sulu, now the captain of the Federation ship, Excelsior, must stop a plot to upend the peace talks. This is an epic film and a great send off for

A review by Brooks Rich I almost forgot to make the Friday post this week. Oops. It's getting a little harder to select films for Friday as I am also trying to preserve the filmographies of directors I might want to dedicate a month too. So today I am covering one of my favorite Wesley Snipes films, 2000s The Art of War . This film got buried in Snipes performance in the Blade trilogy but it's one of the slickest action thriller of the early 2000s, kind of a last gasp of the '90s, and is leagues better than Blade Trinity . Snipes is Neil Shaw, a covert operative for the United Nations. He and his team use dirty tricks to ensure peace and cooperation. When Shaw is framed for the assassination of the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, he must go on the run with a UN interpreter to clear his name and uncover a conspiracy involving a trade agreement between the US and China. Second movie covered on this blog from around this time about China US trade agreements. It&

A review by Brooks Rich Terry Gilliam is one of the most ill fated directors of all time. There's a saying where if something can go wrong in film, it will go wrong. That seems to always be the case for a majority of Gilliam's films. Whether it's extreme studio interference, weather delays, or his lead actor dying, Gilliam has faced his fair share of bad luck. One of the reasons I admire the man so much is his tenacity to tell his stories even as things go wrong. In 2009 the world of film lost a future star. Heath Ledger passed away due to an accidental overdose while on the set of Gilliam's film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus . It was a shocking death as it came before his anticipated role as the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight . When we all saw how good he was in that role, it became devastating and nearly unfathomable. We had just lost one of the finest actors of this generation. Its a stunning performance. There's no way anyone would gu

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman This one of those seminal films of the scumbums in your life. A drug film written by a madman and directed by one of the most lauded visual directors of a generation. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a film that has an audience who I am sure would fight me for what I am about to say… but I believe this is arguably one of the most overrated films ever made.         I should love this film and when I was a fifteen year old boy who found drug films to be a blend of horror and coming of age, I was deeply fascinated by the worldview of those who lost themselves in a chemical wave. I found something to root for in the images of Fear and Loathing – as a fifteen year old boy. I thought Johnny Depp’s commitment to his performance as Hunter S. Thompson was incredible. Benicio Del Toro, giving one of his classic scenery-chewing performances that he shined in so well during the 90’s, doing what still keeps getting him work today. But this movie is an abject failure

A review by Brooks Rich When I reviewed the Motionless Picture to start Star Trek Sunday, I said that was the worst Star Trek film. It took rewatching The Final Frontier to change my mind. This film is garbage. Motionless Picture might be boring but this film is incompetent on nearly every level. Shatner is at full ego trip as director here and thinks he is making some spiritual film about finding God and instead is nearly nuking the franchise. The Next Generation debuted a year after Voyage Home and this point is well on it's way to establishing itself as the next great thing in Star Trek. I'm sure Shatner took exception to this. Of course he's the one to direct the film that comes after TNG's debut. This film even opens with the TNG theme. Consider this the second entry for Cinematic Disasters as well. This film is a monumental failure. The plot concerns a rogue Vulcan who of course is Spock's half brother hijacking the Enterprise to travel to an unexplored pl

A review by Brooks Rich Oh I'm excited. This is one of my favorite films of the '90s. Most people probably think of this movie as the film where Richard Gere plays an Irish guy with a bad accent. That is wrong. This is a fantastic action thriller and one of the best performances from not only Gere but also Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis is the titular Jackal, an assassin for hire whose existence is even questioned within the FBI. Intelligence shows he might have been hired to carry out a political assassination so they enlist the help of imprisoned IRA member Declan Mulqueen, played by Richard Gere, who is said to have seen the Jackal in person and lived to tell about it. With the FBI Deputy Director and a member of the  Russian police helping him, Mulqueen plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with the nameless assassin. This film came out in 1997, at a time where Bruce Willis is one of the biggest stars in the world. He was most well known of course for John McClane in the D

A review by Brooks Rich Sometimes we have to explore films that don't work for one reason or the other. It gets a little dull constantly talking about films that are classics or generally considered “good” films. It's sometimes fun to just look at a film that fell flat on its face and bombed. This Sunday we'll take a look at the Star Trek film that nearly derailed the franchises it was so bad.  But today we have one of my favorite bad movies of the '90s. This film is a complete failure in every sense of the word. Ignore the fact that it actually had a good return at the box office  –  leave that to the power of the box office in the '90s and that it's based on a Michael Crichton novel. The story is insane and absurd and the events that happen are barely held together by the very thin plot. But at least we do know that Amy is a good gorilla. Also, Laura Linney asks another character if he's serving that ape a martini?! There's a joke about a leech being

Introduction by Brooks Rich For the month of May we will be covering the work of director and Monty Python member Terry Gilliam. Gilliam is known for a very absurdist dreamlike style to his films. He's one of those directors that has a style all his own, a style we will explore in depth. Gilliam is an acquired taste but he is a director to be admired. We will also discuss his legendary bad luck, such as his attempt to adapt Don Quixote and the death of Heath Ledger on the set of The Imaginaruim of Doctor Parnassus . If you want to watch ahead for the month, films that will be covered will definitely include, all three Python films, Time Bandits , Brothers Grimm , Doctor Parnassus , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , 12 Monkeys , and Brazil . So buckle up. We're covering an insane genius this month.