Movie Junction

At one point in “The Devil’s Double,” Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday (Dominic Cooper), utters loudly in a local market, “I love cunts more than I love God.”   This pretty much sums up the entire texture of the film; Hollywood loves sex, and it sells. After the movie ended, there was very little I could remember about the characters. The only thing that stuck with me was how well I was able to define Uday’s character. Uday was a pedophile, a sex addict, and a rapist who used his erections more than his brain. From one segment to the next, we are taken into Uday’s dark world, in which his deadly obsession for sex would make him the most-feared man in the Hussein’s regime. He would pick up schoolgirls, rape soon-to-be-married women, and sleep with girls in nightclubs.   Somehow Uday, through his power and money, managed to find girls to satisfy his sexual lust. But all this was done forcefully and brutally. In one scene, out of sheer frustration and anger, Saddam ...

Whose side are you, anyway? The characters in “Infernal Affairs” (2002) are left to find an answer in this identity-switching-cop drama. After the opening minutes, the film propels forward with a hair-raising thrilling sequence, showing a local mobster and drug dealer, Sam (Eric Tsang), striking a deal with another drug dealer. The scene has everything: a voice-over narration, an introduction of the main characters, a heightened tension in the drug deal, and the cops closing in on the drug dealers. Within the opening sequence, the narrative switches between the past and present, as we learn about the identities of the two primary characters, Chan (Tony Leung) and Lau (Andy Lau), involved in the story line. By the time the scene ends, we know there is a mole on both the sides: in the police department and in the gangster’s team. Taken as a whole, the first thirty minutes are fast paced, although at times it was hard for me to figure out what was going on. But once things settle in,...

I have vivid memories of my first viewing of “Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn,” which I watched twenty-four-some years ago.   It was also for the first time I watched a horror movie from Hollywood. At that time, I hadn’t even experienced the original “Evil Dead” (1981). Nonetheless, after watching the film, I was shocked, terrified, and repulsed by the whole experience. After all, pools of green blood, possessed dead bodies, blood-spewing walls, and mutilated limbs don’t exactly make for an entertaining experience. But then, how can you expect a fourteen-year old to understand what the filmmakers were trying to achieve with “Evil Dead II.” Years passed and my feelings for the film changed a bit when I saw “Evil Dead” a few years back. Having said this, I still hadn’t seen “Evil Dead II” since my initial viewing; however, this new twenty-fifth anniversary edition Blu-ray release, which is probably the film’s fifth home-video release, has given me another chance to rea...

“Being right is not a bulletproof vest, Freddy.” – Gary Figgis, “Cop Land” By the mid Eighties, Sylvester Stallone was a household name, riding on the success of the highly popular “Rocky” and “Rambo” series. The “Rocky” series spawned five movies, with the last “Rocky” movie, “Rocky Balboa” (2006), directed and written by Stallone, generating positive reviews and redeeming the Rocky’s character after a series of bad “Rocky” sequels. Stallone also re-launched Rambo’s character in “Rambo” (2008), and that was also successful at the box-office and with the critics. But despite these two compelling additions to the “Rocky” and “Rambo” series, the two series for the most part failed to live up expectations when compared to the original films in the series. By the early Nineties, Stallone’s success as an action hero was rapidly waning. He tried to resurrect his career by doing comedy, “Oscar” (1991) and “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot” (1992), but they failed to reignite hi...