Author: Gerardo Orlando

You’d be hard pressed to find a manlier movie than “The Longest Yard.” It deals with violence, convicts, corrupt cops, an even dirtier warden, and the football game that brings them together. Its secret weapon is the way it manipulates something that Bart and Lisa Simpson summed up expertly: Bart: “Inside every hardened criminal beats the heart of a ten-year-old boy.” Lisa: “And vice versa.” In this case, it makes saints out of sinners, and vice versa. Authority is something not to be trusted, which appeals to the bad boy in everyone. It’s a point they hammer home with great,…

John Travolta plays Chili Palmer, a New Jersey loan shark who travels to Vegas and then LA to collect a debt. Chili is a movie buff, and soon he decides to take advantage of a movie producer’s financial problems to get into the business. Along the way, he has to deal with a variety of oddball characters, including the cheesy movie producer, the thugs who lent him money, his own boss back in Miami and a flaky movie star that Chili is trying to cast in his new picture. Often in Hollywood all these characters and storylines would add up…

After writing for Rolling Stone as a teenager, Cameron Crowe (“Almost Famous”) returned to high school for a year to get his diploma. As any good writer would do, he jotted down his observations and wrote a book about high school kids. He then adapted the story for the screenplay for “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” one of the funniest and most authentic film portrayals of high school life. First-time director Amy Heckerling (“Clueless”) knew exactly how to bring Crowe’s screenplay to life on the screen. The characters looked and acted like real kids, unlike contemporary films like “Porky’s,” which…

Tracey Ullman plays Sylvia Stickles, a miserable convenience store owner who looks almost as bad as she feels. She has a devoted husband, Vaughn (Chris Isaak), and a daughter, Caprice (Selma Blair), whos a famous stripper with a massive fake rack (the makeup artists should get an Academy Award for their work). Sylvia gets knocked on the head and gets a concussion which awakens sexual urges that have been repressed for years. She gets a little help from Ray-Ray Perkins (Johnny Knoxville), a sexual healer who also serves as a tow-truck driver. He services her just as shes coming out…

I was disappointed with this film. I agree that the first installment was a classic, and I thoroughly enjoyed “Reloaded,” but this third installment of the trilogy just doesn’t live up to the promise of the first film. My main gripe is that the story is so difficult to understand, and so much of it just doesn’t make any sense. In the original, the story was very clean and it even made sense if you accepted the basic premise of the film. In the second installment the storyline was much more confusing, but that was easy to tolerate in the…

As I mentioned in my review of “Jeepers Creepers 2,” the horror genre is definitely a little tired. Yet every once in a while we get a new horror flick that takes advantage of an intelligent script and good directing, and the end result can be just as entertaining and scary as some of horror classics. The setting in “Cabin Fever” is pretty familiar to horror fans. Five college kids decide to rent a cabin to relax after the end of the school semester. Yet instead of having them run into a ridiculous monster or ax-wielding madman, our young victims…

Over-the-top action sequences. These scenes have been a staple in Hollywood for years, and they’re necessary ingredients for the summer action blockbusters. But with new digital technology have we reached a point where these scenes have become ridiculous and totally unbelievable? There are countless scenes in “Full Throttle” that completely defy the laws of gravity. I understand that’s the point, but many of these scenes are just silly. Watching Demi Moore’s character glide through the air like a bird just by spreading her cloth cape really isn’t that thrilling. It looks more like a bad cartoon. There were a couple…

This film should come with some prominent disclaimers. First, this is not a movie by the Farrelly brothers who directed “Dumb and Dumber,” the 1994 comedy classic starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels. Next, Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels are NOT starring in the movie. This film is a prequel, following Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne as they meet in high school, so younger actors have been tapped to play our favorite morons. The film finds Lloyd and Harry starting their senior year of high school. Lloyd’s dad is the school janitor so Lloyd lives at the school. Harry has…

A group of people find themselves stranded at a run-down motel on a rainy night. The characters start getting killed off, many in unique ways, and soon the remaining characters start to see a pattern. Even with this familiar storyline, however, “Identity” isn’t a typical slasher flick. It tries to be a little smarter in the tradition of the old Hitchcock suspense films. The real story behind the killings is very clever and unexpected, and saying any more would give away the film. The top-notch cast does a nice job with the material. John Cusak is solid and believable as…

Jake Vig (Edward Burns) is a slick con artist operating in Los Angeles. He and his crew pull a con on the wrong guy, who happens to work for the “King,” a creepy thug played by Dustin Hoffman. The guys realize their mistake and offer to pull a job for the King in order to atone for their mistake. The King picks a big fish, Morgan Price, as the mark, so Jake and the gang reluctantly try to put together the perfect con to fleece Price out of $5 million. The ensemble cast in “Confidence” is suburb. Burns drives the…