Adam starts going to a psychiatrist to help him through everything. It wasn’t his own doing, though, as his doctor suggested this. His psychiatrist, Kathrine (Anna Kendrick), is still working on her doctorate ad Adam is her third patient. She tries to help him by doing everything by the book, but Adam just gets more frustrated. Also in Adam’s life are his mother, Diane (Anjelica Huston) and his father, Richard (Serge Houde) who is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Diane wants to help take care of Adam as well, but he keeps pushing her away. He has an “at arms length” relationship with his mother. He doesn’t like to tell her things (it takes him 2 days to tell her about his cancer) and doesn’t like her helping him out. Kyle is there for his friend, but it’s seen right away that Kyle is using his friend’s sickness to hook up with women. He wants to bring Adam out to bars and clubs and have him tell women he has cancer to get sympathy for him. He doesn’t seem like a great friend, but by the end we see the truth about Kyle. Rachel, who seems great at first, has another side to her.

The marketing for this movie really failed. It made it seem like another Seth Rogen stoner comedy, when in fact it was a drama with elements of comedy within. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gave an amazing performance here and for the whole second half of the movie I was in tears. Seth Rogen played a typical Seth Rogen part, but there’s a good reason for this. The movie was based on the life of Will Reiser, the write, who is friends with Rogen and he was playing himself, while Gordon-Levitt played Reiser. Anjelica Houston was great in her role and both Dallas Howard and Kendrick were fantastic as well. Also, keep a look out for great character actors Matt Frewer and Philip Baker Hall as cancer patients that Adam meets while going through chemotherapy.

The movie really does something that most movies about cancer seem to forget. Most movies are very cold, while there is a lot of heart here. The directing, from Jonathan Levin (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, The Wackness), is superb. The scene where Adam first finds out about his cancer was shot so perfectly. The writing is wonderful and the acting is magnificent. Gordon-Levitt caries the movie and proves that he is ready for the big time and that he should be allowed to carry more movies in the future. This is one movie that is a can’t and shouldn’t miss.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Inspired by a true story, 50/50 is an original story about friendship, love, survival and finding humor in unlikely places. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen star as best friends whose lives are changed by a cancer diagnosis in this new comedy directed by Jonathan Levine from a script by Will Reiser. 50/50 is the story of a guy’s transformative and, yes, sometimes funny journey to health – drawing its emotional core from Will Reiser’s own experience with cancer and reminding us that friendship and love, no matter what bizarre turns they take, are the greatest healers.

Cast Video Roundtable Part 1:
 
Cast Video Roundtable Part 2:

 
Restricted clip “Evidence:

Source: You Tube

The Film:

Are we really ready to meet an alien?

Nerds look into their telescopes hoping for a rare sighting of an UFO. Science-fiction writers and filmmakers tell stories of close encounters. But after being bombarded with images of “aliens”, are we ready to actually meet one? Paul is the hilarious answer to that question, mixing in everything from the pop culture of what happened in Roswell to nerd knowledge. And it doesn’t play it safe. Imagine a R-rated Alf and you got Paul.

While it isn’t as flawless as Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz were, Paul is certainly clever enough to feel like a third film in a nerd-homage trilogy (minus Edgar Wright), as Simon Pegg and Nick Frost mine every bit of that nerdy Comic-Con culture for what it’s worth. Greg Mottola (Adventureland, Superbad) savors characters moments in his films, not matter how funny a scene or how big the action is, and that is what is making his films be pretty special. Paul might not be as funny as his Superbad or Pegg’s Shaun of the Dead, but it’s endlessly enjoyable, mostly for the supporting cast.

Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio as two bumbling F.B.I. agents nearly steal the show away from Seth Rogen, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost. While Bill Hader is hilarious on SNL, Joe Lo Truglio’s emerging presence as “that guy”, are two elements that swerve the film in their favor. Like Abbott and Costello, their funny man/straight man routine is pitch-perfect, and when Jason Bateman is added into the mix? Flawlessness. Kristen Wiig’s naive religious fanatic whose faith is shattered when Paul awakens her to what life really is, makes for the film’s funniest moments, especially when she tries unsuccessfully to insert cuss words into sentences.

Paul is near great. It’s just missing that spark that made Mottola’s Superbad so instantaneously special. Maybe because most of the earnest ideas have been done before in sketch routines or in stuff like DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens, but still, Paul is a foul-mouthed Alf, and that’s pretty damn cool if you ask me.

The Blu-ray:

Audio/Video: Universal Home Entertainment’s HD disc is just great. Visually, the picture is superb with fine details, bright colors, and deep blacks. The DTS track is equally as good, mixing the typical front heavy comedy with deep bass and constant rear speaker activity. Paul is a surprising HD effort.

Unrated Cut: Six minutes longer than the theatrical version, featuring scenes that were cut for the R-rating and more cussing.

Commentary: Director Greg Mottola, producer Nira Park, and actors Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Bill Hader offer up a fun track. Jokes abound, which usually derails any discussions on the production, but that’s fine. Hader does impressions, Pegg cracks a comment, Mottola laughs and brings them all back to the film. Fans should easily dig it.

Between the Lightning Strikes: The Making of Paul: This HD 40-minute documentary is split into two parts, show us the creation of this film, the digital character, and the action. It’s pretty thorough and really informative, without being boring. Good stuff.

The Evolution of Paul: This HD, 15-minute featurette shows the immense hard-work in creation of character like Paul digitally. Interviews with Mottola and all of the VFX animators offer us a detailed how-to.

BTS featurettes: Over an hour’s worth of short making-of’s that focuses on various other aspects of the film. In SD, though.

Who the Hell is Adam Shadowchild? is a short look at Jeffrey Tambor’s character; hilarious Bloopers; Galleries, Trailers, BD-Live functionality, and a DVD/Digital Copy round out the extras.

The Film: Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

The Blu-ray: Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

A comedic account of a 27-year-old guy’s cancer diagnosis, and his subsequent struggle to beat the disease.

50/50 is in theaters September 30th.

- Between the Lightning Strikes: The Making of Paul

Behind the Scenes Featurettes:

-RV Doorway: The Cast of Paul On-Location —The cast is just as funny off-screen as they are in front of the camera.

-Runway Santa Fe: An Interview with Nancy Steiner—Follow Nancy Steiner, the costume designer, as she chooses hilarious T-shirts and wardrobe for the cast.

-Smithereens—Blowing up a house on location causes excitement among the cast.

-5th Date Level Direction: The Cast on Greg Mottola—The cast talks about the fun of working with Mottola, who also directed Superbad.

-Mexico Zero: The Locations of Paul—Mexico Zero is the nickname the cast gives to New Mexico, where the majority of filming was done for Paul.

-The Many Pauls—To create Paul, the filmmakers used all the tricks of the trade, from capturing Seth Rogen’s facial expressions and movements, to using a child dressed up as an alien while on-set.

-Paul: The Musical—The cast joins together for an impromptu musical version of the film.

-The Traveler Beagle— A look at all the different RVs used on the set of Paul, from fully functioning vehicles to a mock-up on a Hollywood soundstage

Bloopers

-The Evolution of Paul—An inside look at how Paul became a living, breathing alien.

-Simon’s Silly Faces—Simon Pegg makes an assortment of wildly funny faces for the camera.

-Who the Hell is Adam Shadowchild? —Find out about the legendary sci-fi writer from the characters in Paul.

-Feature Commentary with Greg Mottola, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Bill Hader and Nira Park

-Photo Galleries, Storyboards and Posters

That’s a stacked release! While it didn’t light up the box office this past Spring, it was a pretty fun movie, that Killer Film has no issue in recommending to our readers.

Source: Arrow

Find the film on Facebook here.

The Film:

The superhero genre, like all genres, has conventions and conventions are good, because we love formula. The Green Hornet comes during the fever pitch of the genre, where all seek realism with hyper-seriousness. Since Hollywood is a copying machine, each superhero film is basically taking the hero out of the pages of the comic and treating them as real life individuals. This sells, and while it works for some adaptations. The genre has seen its heights, and like an insomniac each superhero is seen as a copy of a copy of a copy. Michel Gondry achieves what Werner Herzog did in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: using the conventions of the genre, Gondry adds irreverence – in humor, in action – and purposely uses misconception of those basic superhero conventions for a film that returns the superhero back to where he belongs: in adolescence. The Green Hornet is the anti-superhero movie.

That might be a tough task for audiences to accept, especially when they stroll into the theater for those very conventions. If you seek those, The Green Hornet disappoints. The film-noir styling of the 1940 serials are gone, but not forgotten, and those who seek the Leave it to Beaver trappings of the famous two season TV series, only made famous in hindsight for casting Bruce Lee, won’t get that from this version. It’s an odd bird of a film, but it’s important to note its themes, since the film is essentially and purely a comic book movie. Young American boys who read comic books, didn’t flip the page to grow into a self-loathing, tormented angel of vengeance, but simply for the ‘wow’ factor of the superhero; the POW! BOOM! CRACK! of the action, and that in itself is the origin of why Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) in this version of The Green Hornet becomes a hero. Because it’s cool.

As boys, we seek the mask that will hide us until we grow into a man. The mask gives us the courage and power to do something extraordinary. This child-like assessment of adulthood is the foundation of why superheroes have grow substantially in our increasing tough world, and is also the sense of wonder Gondry uses to craft his version of the superhero film. Even Kato (Jay Chou) isn’t perfect. The villain? He’s equally unsure of himself, constantly measuring his evil against someone else’s evil. The old “mine is bigger than yours” game. All of this, I’m expecting, will get lost to most under the film’s silly and often humorous boyish charm. That’s what is so refreshing about what The Green Hornet is offering.

If you never grew up reading comic books of superheroes doing something actually far more super than your own father did, I pity that you missed the American boy experience. Sure, it’s pop art manhood. Boys don’t see their fathers as anything more than a man they can never please, and it’s only until they’re older that they can appreciate their dad. Gondry knows this, and The Green Hornet stings a little nostalgia that the increasingly bloated genre has missed.

The Blu-ray:

Audio/Video: Sony offers their usual top-notch HD presentation again here. The picture is near perfect; deep blacks, strong details, eye-catching (greens) colors, with little softness. Now the DTS track is just stellar. Given the nature of the film, it’s loud, aggressive, and never allows the dialogue to get over-shadowed. It’s again, near perfect. No complaints here.

Commentary: Seth Rogan, Producer Neal Moritz, Director Michel Gondry, and Writer Evan Goldberg offer a pretty laid back and funny track, but one that’s also kind of candid. They talk about the film in the usual making-of chat, but also go into some scenes that don’t work as well as they had hoped. It’s pretty refreshing to hear on a big budgeted, studio film.

All extras are in HD.

Trust Me – Director Michel Gondry: About a 10 minute salute to Gondry from the cast and crew about his style and vision for the film.

Writing The Green Hornet: I found this to be really good. Writers Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen talk about their direction of the film, making an anti-superhero movie, which is one of the highlights of the extras, due to their interesting take on the subject.

The Black Beauty: A nice little featurette on the building of the classical looking 1965 Imperial.

Finding Kato: Here’s a quick look at how Jay Chou was found and cast in the role made famous by Bruce Lee.

The Art of Destruction: Here’s a fun 15 minute look at the love affair Hollywood has with blowing stuff up. Not as silly as it sounds.

About 25-minutes of Deleted Scenes in HD, a Gag Reel, a clip generator that allows you to share you favorite moments from the film online in The Green Hornet Cutting Room, a look at the family stunt team from the film in The Stunt Family Armstrong, and your typical Trailers and BD-Live stuff.

The Film: Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

The Blu-ray: Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Writers Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play Graham and Clive, two British nerds who travel to America to attend every geek’s Mecca – the International Comic-Con in San Diego. After the convention, they rent an RV and travel to famous UFO hot spots. They reluctantly pick up Paul, a potty-mouthed extraterrestrial voiced by Seth Rogen. They also pick up a sheltered Bible thumper (Kristen Wiig) along the way. As they travel across the desert in an attempt to get Paul home, they are tailed by rednecks and a trio of government agents (Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, and Joe Lo Truglio).

Pegg and Frost have written a love-letter to science fiction films, particularly Steven Spielberg and Star Wars. There are countless references to that holy trilogy (don’t even mention those prequels, they are dead to me and Pegg alike) and more, such as Star Trek, E.T., Aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, and Back to the Future. Because these jokes are the film’s strongest point, it tends to alienate (no pun intended) the less geeky film goers. For instance, when I saw the film, nobody so much as tittered at the mention of Mac and Me. Nor did they notice the Wilhelm Scream and “Gut-wrenching scream and fall into distance” sound effects. Pegg and Frosts’ previous works were full of obscure references but they were great even if you did not catch the inside jokes. Hot Fuzz was still hilarious even if you never noticed the nods to Wicker Man or Point Break.

Then some of the sci-fi references in Paul are so obvious, perhaps in an attempt to be more accessible to general movie-going audiences. These bits feel forced, while the more esoteric jokes fly right over the heads of the average theater audience. If you don’t laugh at the music the redneck bar band is playing, or the name of the fireworks, this film is simply not for you. To fill in the gaps, the movie uses lame pot jokes (hopping on that Pineapple Express train) to appease the younger viewers who are not in on those 1970s/1980s references.

Still, Paul does offer some nice laugh-out-loud moments and an unbeatable cast. Pegg and Frost bring their lovable bromantic chemistry to the screen once again. Rogen is rude, crude, and hilarious as usual. Wiig and Hader prove why they are the funniest people on SNL, while Bateman and Lo Truglio are great as ever, making me mourn their long-dead television shows. David Koechner and Jane Lynch also appear in funny cameos. Everyone involved is quirky and charming enough to keep the movie enjoyable despite its flaws.

Director Greg Mottola pays loving tribute to Spielberg, though his visual presence here is not nearly as strong as in his previous films. I suspect critics will be quick to blame Mottola for Paul’s missteps, considering Pegg and Frost have always found success with director Edgar Wright, but that is simply not the case here. The filmmakers achieved exactly what they wanted – to make a movie by nerds and for nerds. It cannot touch the previous films of those involved, but with a subculture of people who adore obscure references (Family Guy, anyone?), Paul should have no problem finding an adoring audience.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Special features include:

* Filmmakers’ Commentary

* Jay Chou Audition

* Double Barrel

* The Green Hornet Cutting Room (BD-exclusive)

* “Awesoom”-Gag Reel

* “Trust Me” -Director Michel Gondry (BD-exclusive)

* Writing The Green Hornet

* The Black Beauty: Rebirth of Cool

* PS3 Theme (BD-exclusive)

* The Stunt Family Armstrong (BD-exclusive)

* Finding Kato (BD-exclusive)

* The Art of Destruction (BD-exclusive)

* movieIQ (BD-exclusive)

The 3D Blu-ray will have 3D animated storyboards.

Source: Blu-ray

You can click on the poster to view the trailer.

Kung Fu Panda 2: The Kaboom of Doom opens on May 26.

Two British comic-book geeks traveling across the U.S. encounter an alien outside Area 51.

That might be a tough task for audiences to accept, especially when they stroll into the theater for those very conventions. If you seek those, The Green Hornet disappoints. The film-noir styling of the 1940 serials are gone, but not forgotten, and those who seek the Leave it to Beaver trappings of the famous two season TV series, only made famous in hindsight for casting Bruce Lee, won’t get that from this version. It’s an odd bird of a film, but it’s important to note its themes, since the film is essentially and purely a comic book movie. Young American boys who read comic books, didn’t flip the page to grow into a self-loathing, tormented angel of vengeance, but simply for the ‘wow’ factor of the superhero; the POW! BOOM! CRACK! of the action, and that in itself is the origin of why Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) in this version of The Green Hornet becomes a hero. Because it’s cool.

As boys, we seek the mask that will hide us until we grow into a man. The mask gives us the courage and power to do something extraordinary. This child-like assessment of adulthood is the foundation of why superheroes have grow substantially in our increasing tough world, and is also the sense of wonder Gondry uses to craft his version of the superhero film.  Even Kato (Jay Chou) isn’t perfect. The villain? He’s equally unsure of himself, constantly measuring his evil against someone else’s evil. The old “mine is bigger than yours” game.  All of this, I’m expecting, will get lost to most under the film’s silly and often humorous boyish charm. That’s what is so refreshing about what The Green Hornet is offering.

If you never grew up reading comic books of superheroes doing something actually far more super than your own father did, I pity that you missed the American boy experience. Sure, it’s pop art manhood. Boys don’t see their fathers as anything more than a man they can never please, and it’s only until they’re older that they can appreciate their dad. Gondry knows this, and The Green Hornet stings a little nostalgia that the increasingly bloated genre has missed.

3D Note: It’s post-conversion and while at times, it adds a little depth, it also annoying clutters the screen up, especially during action scenes. While it’s not that bad of post-conversion, it’s far from necessary.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Source: IMPAwards

A few weeks ago we saw the international trailer for Paul (here), and now Apple Trailers have a brand new trailer up for you all to check out!

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) reunite for the comedy adventure Paul as two sci-fi geeks whose pilgrimage takes them to America’s UFO heartland. While there, they accidentally meet an alien who brings them on an insane road trip that alters their universe forever. For the past 60 years, an alien named Paul (Seth Rogen) has been hanging out at a top-secret military base. For reasons unknown, the space-traveling smart ass decides to escape the compound and hop on the first vehicle out of town–a rented RV containing Earthlings Graeme Willy (Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Frost). Chased by federal agents and the fanatical father of a young woman that they accidentally kidnap, Graeme and Clive hatch a fumbling escape plan to return Paul to his mother ship. And as two nerds struggle to help, one little green man might just take his fellow outcasts from misfits to intergalactic heroes.

Source: AppleTrailers, (embed) FilmSchoolRejects

Source: LATimes