Best PSP movies
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PSP Movies More than a few critics hailed Spider-Man 2 as “the best superhero movie ever,” and there’s no compelling reason to argue–thanks to a bigger budget, better special effects, and a dynamic, character-driven plot, it’s a notch above Spider-Man in terms of emotional depth and rich comic-book sensibility. Ordinary People Oscar®-winner Alvin Sargent received screenplay credit, and celebrated author and comic-book expert Michael Chabon worked on the story, but it’s director Sam Raimi’s affinity for the material that brings Spidey 2 to vivid life. When a fusion experiment goes terribly wrong, a brilliant physicist (Alfred Molina) is turned into Spidey’s newest nemesis, the deranged, mechanically tentacled “Doctor Octopus,” obsessed with completing his experiment and killing Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) in the process. Even more compelling is Peter Parker’s urgent dilemma: continue his burdensome, lonely life of crime-fighting as Spider-Man, or pursue love and happiness with Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst)? Molina’s outstanding as a tragic villain controlled by his own invention, and the action sequences are nothing less than breathtaking, but the real success of Spider-Man 2 is its sense of priorities. With all of Hollywood’s biggest and best toys at his disposal, Raimi and his writers stay true to the Marvel mythology, honoring Spider-Man creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and setting the bar impressively high for the challenge of Spider-Man 3. |
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Not Another Teen Movie hits all the easy targets until it finally becomes one of the movies it’s attempting to spoof. But it’s a painless diversion if you enjoy taking the low road for a few good laughs. With the exception of hailing John Hughes’s 1980s teen-flick monopoly (including a cameo by Pretty in Pink’s Molly Ringwald), the film spoofs subjects of a later vintage. References to She’s All That, Can’t Hardly Wait, Bring It On, and several others are whipped into a tasteless gumbo of gags concerning sex, diarrhea, Tourette’s Syndrome, brain concussions, desperate male virgins, and token black guys. Ostensibly Not Another Teen Movie is about a jock (Chris Evans) betting that he can turn the cute-ugly duckling (Chyler Leigh) into a prom queen, but plot hardly matters when a firm-breasted exchange student appears regularly in her birthday suit. Five writers came up with this stuff; it’s a safe bet they’re still stuck in detention.
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He said he’d be back. This time experience T2 like never before! Go EXTREME with the best picture and sound ever! ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER returns as the Terminator in this explosive action-adventure spectacle. Now he’s one of the good guys, sent back in time to protect John Connor, the boy destined to lead the freedom fighters of the future. LINDA HAMILTON reprises her role as Sarah Connor, John’s mother, a quintessential survivor who has been institutionalized for her warning of the nuclear holocaust she knows is inevitable. Together, the threesome must find a way to stop the ultimate enemy – the T-1000, the most lethal Terminator ever created. Co-written, produced and directed by James Cameron (”The Terminator,” “Aliens,” “Titanic), this visual tour de force is also a touching story of survival.
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Will Smith’s easygoing charm makes Hitch the kind of pleasant, uplifting romantic comedy that you could recommend to almost anyone–especially if there’s romance in the air. As suave Manhattan dating consultant Alex “Hitch” Hitchens, Smith plays up the smoother, sophisticated side of his established screen persona as he mentors a pudgy accountant (Kevin James) on the lessons of love. The joke, of course, is that Hitch’s own love life is a mess, and as he coaches James toward romance with a rich, powerful, and seemingly inaccessible beauty named Allegra (Amber Valetta), he’s trying too hard to impress a savvy gossip columnist (Eva Mendes) with whom he’s fallen in love. Through mistaken identities and mismatched couples, director Andy Tennant brings the same light touch that made Drew Barrymore’s Ever After so effortlessly engaging. As romantic comedies go, Hitch doesn’t offer any big surprises, but as a date movie it gets the job done with amiable ease and style.
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You won’t need a bottle of rum to enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, especially if you’ve experienced the Disneyland theme-park ride that inspired it. There’s a galleon’s worth of fun in watching Johnny Depp’s androgynous performance as Captain Jack Sparrow, a roguish pirate who could pass for the illegitimate spawn of rockers Keith Richards and Chrissie Hynde. Depp gets all the good lines and steals the show, recruiting Orlando Bloom (a blacksmith and expert swordsman) and Keira Knightley (a lovely governor’s daughter) on an adventurous quest to recapture the notorious Black Pearl, a ghost ship commandeered by Jack’s nemesis Capt. Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), a mutineer desperate to reverse the curse that left him and his (literally) skeleton crew in a state of eternal, undead damnation. Director Gore Verbinski (The Ring) repeats the redundant mayhem that marred his debut film Mouse Hunt, but with the writers of Shrek he’s made Pirates into a special-effects thrill-ride that plays like a Halloween party on the open seas. Aye, matey, we’ve come a long way since Jason and the Argonauts!
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Like a Hardy Boys mystery on steroids, National Treasure offers popcorn thrills and enough boyish charm to overcome its rampant silliness. Although it was roundly criticized as a poor man’s rip-off of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Da Vinci Code, it’s entertaining on its own ludicrous terms, and Nicolas Cage proves once again that one actor’s infectious enthusiasm can compensate for a multitude of movie sins. The contrived plot involves Cage’s present-day quest for the ancient treasure of the Knights Templar, kept secret through the ages by Freemasons past and present. Finding the treasure requires the theft of the Declaration of Independence (there are crucial treasure clues on the back, of course!), so you can add “caper comedy” to this Jerry Bruckheimer production’s multi-genre appeal. Nobody will ever accuse director Jon Turtletaub of artistic ambition, but you’ve got to admit he serves up an enjoyable dose of PG-rated entertainment, full of musty clues, skeletons, deep tunnels, and harmless adventure in the old-school tradition. It’s a load of hokum, but it’s fun hokum, and that makes all the difference.
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In a futile but ambitiously decadent attempt to revive the loony legacy of National Lampoon comedies, Van Wilder will make you laugh out loud, or vomit, or both. It’s that kind of movie, in which the title character (played by sitcom survivor Ryan Reynolds) is the resident slacker of Coolidge College for seven years and running. Enjoying his party-animal supremacy and reluctant to fulfill his potential, he’s got an idolizing assistant from India (Kal Penn, the movie’s ethnic stereotype, desperate virgin, and comedic highlight), and a journalism major (Tara Reid) assigned to uncover the secret of Van’s controlled anarchy. Unfortunately, the movie’s more Down to You than Animal House, opting for familiar teen romance over campus shenanigans, despite an abundance of flatulence, diarrhea, sicko sex jokes, gratuitous nudity, and one gag (involving a bulldog) that’s disgusting by any standard. Keg-fueled frat-rats will surely elevate Van Wilder to semiclassic status; all others are urged to proceed with caution.
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Ice Cube has turned his frown upside down with the family-friendly screwball road movie Are We There Yet? We know the actor/rapper can use his trademark scowl to be funny (the Friday and Barbershop series), or to be mean (Boyz in the Hood)–but can he use it to melt kids’ hearts? That’s the question Are We There Yet? answers with a resounding yes for youngsters in the audience (which will be the lions’ share), but it’ll probably be an emphatic shrug for the grownups. The contrived plot has Cube playing a wannabe-player (as in ladies’ man) and ex-player (as in washed-up minor league baseball star) who now owns a sports memorabilia business. His partner, played by Jay Mohr is just a throwaway, as is the talented Nia Long, the single mom that Cube sets his blinged-out sights on. To try to get in her good graces, he offers to transport her two bratty kids in his pride-and-joy Lincoln Navigator for a joy ride to a distant city where she’s attending an emergency business meeting so they can have a New Year’s Eve celebration together. This kiddies version of Road Trip and Planes, Trains and Automobiles has its cute moments, but plenty more gross-out moments which will please the kids no end, especially as the Navigator gets more and more trashed. Suffice it to say they all learn about each others’ good sides and hearts are suitably melted all around–until after the credits roll, then you’ll probably forget about the whole thing.
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Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is trash for connoisseurs. From his opening gambit (including a “Shaw-Scope” logo and gaudy ’70s-vintage “Our Feature Presentation” title card) to his cliffhanger finale (a teasing lead-in to 2004’s Vol. 2), Tarantino pays loving tribute to grindhouse cinema, specifically the Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti Westerns that fill his fervent brain–and this frequently breathtaking movie–with enough cinematic references and cleverly pilfered soundtrack cues to send cinephiles running for their reference books. Everything old is new again in Tarantino’s humor-laced vision: he steals from the best while injecting his own oft-copied, never-duplicated style into what is, quite simply, a revenge flick, beginning with the near-murder of the Bride (Uma Thurman), pregnant on her wedding day and left for dead by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS)–including Lucy Liu and the unseen David Carradine (as Bill)–who become targets for the Bride’s lethal vengeance. Culminating in an ultraviolent, ultra-stylized tour-de-force showdown, Tarantino’s fourth film is either brilliantly (and brutally) innovative or one of the most blatant acts of plagiarism ever conceived. Either way, it’s hyperkinetic eye-candy from a passionate film-lover who clearly knows what he’s doing.
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Vin Diesel is no James Bond, and he doesn’t want to be. That’s why XXX announced Diesel as the adrenalin-junkie Bond of the PlayStation generation, copying the Bond formula so shamelessly that this action-packed silliness would be a Bond movie if it starred Pierce Brosnan. Reuniting Diesel with his Fast and the Furious director Rob Cohen, XXX has an attitude (if not a brain) all its own, plucking Diesel’s Xander Cage from his celebrity as an extreme sports renegade, recruited by a National Security Agency big shot (Samuel L. Jackson) to foil a nasty Czech villain (Marton Csokas) who’s eager to depopulate Prague with remote-controlled biological weaponry. Toss in a sulky, sultry Russian agent (Asia Argento) and you’ve got extreme Bond-age for anyone who thinks tuxedos are passé. With a handful of eye-popping action sequences, XXX launched a movie franchise with a cool guy, another cool muscle car, and plenty of box-office sizzle.
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The impressively muscular chest of Tom Jane is the focal point of The Punisher, a movie based on a Marvel Comics superhero. Frank Castle (Jane, Deep Blue Sea) retires from the FBI, which means–as any moviegoer expects–that his family is toast. Howard Saint (John Travolta, Face/Off), a shady Florida businessman whose son was killed in Castle’s last mission, orders a hit not only on Castle’s wife and child, but also on his parents and a whole bunch of aunts, uncles, cousins, and so forth. The killers shoot Castle himself in the chest, but he inexplicably survives and–as any moviegoer expects–sets out to even the score. Implausibly, given his sometimes curious and roundabout methods, he succeeds. Also featuring Will Patton (Armageddon) as an oily thug, Laura Harring (Mulholland Drive) as Saint’s fleshpot wife, and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (X-Men) as a waitress with bad taste in men.
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As deadpan comedies go, Napoleon Dynamite stands in a class all its own. Played by John Heder, the title character is (in the words of critic Roger Ebert) “the kind of nerd other nerds avoid,” a mouth-breathing dweeb with a mangy nest of orange hair, and ungainly features that suggest a perpetual state of half-conscious depression. He lives in Preston, Idaho (former home of 24-year-old director Jared Hess) with his thrill-seeking grandma and 32-year-old brother, and his days at high school consist mostly of being abused or ignored by indifferent classmates. Napoleon’s sad-sack story doesn’t offer the scathing, impassioned humor of Welcome to the Dollhouse because Hess (who cowrote the nearly plotless screenplay with his wife, Jerusha) doesn’t have an angst-ridden axe to grind. Instead, the comedy (which exists in a tacky universe of worn-out rural suburbia) is so low-key that some will find it difficult to laugh, while others (i.e., those who feel superior to Napoleon) will have plenty of fun at Napoleon’s expense. The result is a curiously uneven film, hilarious at times, but hampered by its own sense of affectionate mockery. An audience favorite at the Sundance film festival, Napoleon Dynamite may not be entirely lovable, but it’s definitely unique.
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Get your Gat shined and polished for the PSP season’s biggest event, the World Cup. Held once again in O-town.Features:-Watch hardcore action from Division one X-Ball as the Russian Legion take Infamous and Dynasty. It’s an all out brawl, KGB style!-Bonus features include footage of the only time a European team has taken first place on American soil…The history Dynasty vs. Russian Legion match at Nemacolin-PRO-FILE – an interview with the Bushwackers captain, Ron Kilbourne |
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