Colin Fitz Lives!

OPENING: 08/13/2010

STUDIO: Baby Shark, Inc

RUN TIME:91 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
A comedy about love, death and rock ‘n roll.

Opening Statement
In July of 1996, Robert Bella decided he wanted to direct Tom Morrissey’s script, then called simply, Colin Fitz. For two weeks, he and his small cast and crew, working mostly on deferred salaries and in the rain, completed production on this, Bella’s directorial debut. The universe lined up many times for this film, from being able to grab a treasure trove of stars on the rise such as John C. McGinley, William H. Macy, Mary McCormack, and Matt McGrath, to being accepted into Sundance in 1997 – a high honor, indeed. There was much praise being heaped upon its head, from Roger Ebert to Harry Knowles. Everything seemed to be going very well for this independent feature but when time came to bring out the wallets to buy it, no one did. For 13 years, it sat in Robert Bella’s closet and for 13 years he tried desperately to sell it, if for nothing else to pay back all the investors he owed over $150,000 to. It finally made it to the big screen, but was it worth the wait?
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Lebanon

OPENING: 08/13/2010

STUDIO: Sony Pictures Classics

RUN TIME:93 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
A look at war from the inside of a tank

Opening Statement
“Man is steel. The tank is only iron.” On July 12, 2006, conflict began between Israel and Lebanon. It began when Hezbollah soldiers fired rockets into Israel and blew up two armored Humvees patrolling the Israeli side of the border. Three soldiers died. Two other soldiers were taken by Hezbollah into Lebanon. Israel responded and for 34 days they carried out air strikes and rolled into Lebanon with tanks and foot soldiers. The writer/director of Lebanon, Samuel Maoz, was himself a gunner in one of those tanks, so this is a sort-of autobiography of his experiences. You can feel that placing this story on paper and on celluloid was a form therapy for Samuel. He places us, as the audience, in the dark, dank, cold, putrid, unwelcoming pit of a monster that he knows all too well. And because the camera never leaves the inside of that tank, save for two small book-ending scenes, he shows us what it felt like to be sequestered in those claustrophobic spaces only understanding the outside world what we see through the gunner’s scope.
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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

OPENING: 08/13/2010

STUDIO: Universal Pictures

RUN TIME: 112 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
An epic of epic epicness.

Opening Statement
Until now, Edgar Wright’s career has been almost exclusively dedicated to collaborations with his pals Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. After a string of successful efforts including Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Wright is finally digging into new territory with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a Pegg-n-Frost-free adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s delightful comic book series. While the film isn’t quite on the level of the books, it’s yet another entertaining outing from Wright that’s stuffed to the brim with nifty moments.
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The Other Guys

OPENING: 08/06/2010

STUDIO: Columbia Pictures

RUN TIME: 107 min

ACCOMPLICES:

Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
They’re not heroes — they’re The Other Guys.

Opening Statement
The buddy-cop subgenre is firmly in the sights of director Adam McKay and frequent collaborator Will Ferrell in their new movie, The Other Guys, and while it might not match the heights of absurdity achieved in Anchorman, the pair’s first and perhaps finest cinematic effort, it still stands tall as one of this summer’s funniest entertainments.
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Dinner for Schmucks

OPENING: 07/30/2010

STUDIO: Paramount Pictures

RUN TIME: 114 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Takes One to Know One.

Opening Statement
My reaction upon seeing the Dinner for Schmucks trailer was a blend of pain and pleasure. I like Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, but the premise seemed awfully flimsy. I also experienced a blend of pain and pleasure watching the film itself. To my surprise, the premise actually works, but other elements of the script do a lot of damage to a film boasting a wide variety of entertaining performances.
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Salt

OPENING: 07/23/2010

STUDIO: Sony

RUN TIME: 100 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Who is Salt?

Opening Statement
I have to admit, the trailers for Salt didn’t exactly inspire much excitement in yours truly. It looked like a fairly typical action film rooted in a typical “innocent person wrongly accused” plot; a bit of generic noise to fill a gap in the summer movie season. I’m glad to have been proven wrong. Salt is one of the loopiest films of the summer, but also a tremendously well-crafted thriller and a grandly entertaining experience.
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Countdown to Zero

OPENING: 06/23/2010

STUDIO: Magnolia Pictures

RUN TIME:91 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
No nukes is good nukes

Opening Statement
Atomic apocalypse may still be upon us. That is what the filmmakers behind Countdown to Zero want us to remember. As President Kennedy said, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.” This quote is used as the thesis behind this film. They used this idea to scare the guano out of me. Seeing images of nuclear bombs going off while being told how your internal organs may explode if you’re close enough to the epicenter, really makes one ponder how to not have that happen. And that is exactly what they are going for. Getting that response is their way to get the audience to act and do what they want them to; whether that be writing their government, texting to a specific number, donating to a charity or reducing carbon emissions. It is emotional manipulation, and it works. However, the direction they are trying to get us to move in is not only naïve, it is futile.

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Winter’s Bone

OPENING: 07/11/2010

STUDIO: Anonymous Content

RUN TIME: 100 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Bred and buttered.

Opening Statement
Winter’s Bone is a chilling tale set in rural Missouri which couldn’t have been cast any better. Jennifer Lawrence brilliantly leads the ensemble as a seventeen year old looking for her miscreant father in a small community of people, many of which are blood related. With a budget of only $2 million dollars, director Debra Granik has assembled a film more powerful than anything I have seen this year.

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Inception

OPENING: 07/16/2010

STUDIO: Warner Bros.

RUN TIME: 148 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
Your Mind is the Scene of the Crime

Opening Statement
After achieving remarkable success both critically and financially with The Dark Knight, Director Christopher Nolan has taken a break from Batman to pursue his own original idea: Inception, based on a script that Nolan developed for over a decade. The result is a film that sees Nolan reaching dizzying heights as an artist; an intelligent, original serving of thunderous elegance that towers over the rest of the summer movie crop like a giant in Lilluput.
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Solitary Man

OPENING: 06/02/2010

STUDIO: Anchor Bay Films

RUN TIME: 90m

ACCOMPLICES:

Trailer, IMDb

The Charge
Ben Loves His Family Almost as Much as He Loves Himself

Opening Statement
Solitary Man is the story of Ben Kalman, a character that Michael Douglas plays almost by second nature. Douglas shines in the role and his performance makes the film worth seeing, even if it is stronger than the film itself.

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