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| BITCHSLAP STATS |
| Movies Listed: |
32393 |
| Total Ratings: |
249189 |
| Total Reviews: |
28312 |
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| PAIN AND GLORY |
"Ocho y medio"
Peter Sobczynski says... "It is always a bit disconcerting to come to the realization that the filmmakers who first burst onto the scene as iconoclasts determined to break free of established cinematic conventions and forge their own distinct paths have become the established voices whose newer works now take on a classical feel. Take the career of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, for example. When he first emerged in the early 80s with such brash and provocative hybrids of comedy and melodrama as “Matador,” “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” and the international breakthrough “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” he forged a unique and audacious personal vision and even if one did not necessarily respond to it (and I confess that I was one of those people for a long time), it nevertheless could not be denied. As time went on and his reputation grew, his films took on a new and more decidedly mature tone as each one was increasingly looked upon as an event. At one point, he even set out to make a film that deliberately evoked his wilder early works but the end result, “I’m So Excited,” was so dire that it almost served to prove that you can’t go home again after all, at least cinematically. With his latest work, the elegiacal “Pain and Glory,” he has turned his camera inward for a deeply, almost painfully, personal work that mines themes that he has explored in the past but in a more disarmingly direct and undeniably effective and moving manner than he has ever deployed before" (more)
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| RIOT GIRLS |
"A teen movie out of time."
Rob Gonsalves says... "Jovanka Vuckovic’s lively feature debut 'Riot Girls' is set in 1995 and seems to be a war between the ‘90s aesthetic and the ‘80s ethos. The heroes dress like the grunge army and listen to bands like L7; the villains wear varsity jackets and blare a hair-metal anthem called “Danger in the Air.” The mohawks versus the mullets. The Southside Serpents against Cobra Kai." (more)
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| CRAWL |
"I love fun junk, but this isn't fun junk."
Rob Gonsalves says... "Acting in the roving-alligator thriller 'Crawl' could not have been remotely fun. The poor leads — Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper as a daughter/father pair trapped in a flooded house along with several king-size gators — spend most of their screen time in a filthy, rusty, submerged crawlspace, and the atmosphere looks like a petri dish for tetanus, triple-E, you name it." (more)
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| WALLFLOWER |
"No joke."
Rob Gonsalves says... "This past weekend, a film opened. You may have heard about it." (more)
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| PARTS YOU LOSE, THE |
"Dull, standard stuff."
Jay Seaver says... ""The Parts You Lose" is a dreary movie about a boy finding a new father figure in a violent fugitive who seems like a minor improvement from his actual dad, with lots of nothing happening under the sort of grey sky that makes things feel more serious and as such does a much better job of making the film memorable just by being above Manitoba-subbing-for-North-Dakota in February than anything that actually happens. It's the sort of blandly generic movie whose very name starts to vanish even while one is watching it, becoming "The Pieces We Lost" or the like when a person tries to recall something about it." (more)
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| DILILI IN PARIS |
"Some good bits in the middle of this animated mess."
Jay Seaver says... "I'm not sure how completely an atrocious dub torpedoes "Dilili in Paris" in its American release, because it's got a lot of other problems, and it's entirely possible that the film's original soundtrack sounds just as flat and repetitive, only in French. Even if that's the case, this is the version that English-speaking kids will see, and while they've probably seen worse on YouTube, the way it's presented makes this film feels far more lazy than it likely is." (more)
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| FIRST LOVE |
"A meet-cute in a Takashi Miike movie is dangerous!"
Jay Seaver says... "It's not just that director Takashi Miike has been incredibly prolific over the course of his career - this year's Fantasia International Film Festival was unusual not just in that he didn't have a film on the program, but that he usually has at least two - but in that he's done a bit of everything, from art-house experiments to family adventures to blockbuster comic-book adaptations, even if he's best known for offbeat crime and horror. "First Love" may not be the gob-smacking experience that his breakout films were, but is some good, old-school Miike, a throwback to when he was cranking out yakuza films on deadline and neither self-consciously weird nor surprisingly mainstream, even if it's also aware that those days are past." (more)
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| DOLEMITE IS MY NAME |
"Can You Dig It?"
Peter Sobczynski says... "Even after watching films inspired by the cinematic exploits of such decidedly non-Hollywood types as Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau, the idea of a similar work revolving around the work of Rudy Ray Moore sounds like absolute lunacy—the kind of thing that a group of exploitation film fanatics might conjure towards the end of a long, alcohol-fueled evening. After all, the guy’s most notable screen achievement was a film that asked the question “What would a cut-rate “Shaft” knockoff look like with someone closer to Redd Foxx than Richard Roundtree in the role?” and its success can be attributed more to the crazy energy emanating from the screen and the fact that, for all of its sleaziness and rock-bottom production values, it clearly struck a nerve with a vastly underserved audience that was growing disenchanted with the offerings from both the major studios and the more established B-movie producers of the day. And yet, not only is “Dolemite is My Name” just that, it proves to be one of the most endearingly entertaining films of the year, despite containing enough deployments of the word “motherfucker” to land it on the list of the most foul-mouthed movies ever made. If that weren’t enough, it does another thing that most moviegoers probably assumed they would never see—it gives Eddie Murphy the chance to shake off the topor of too many bad films over the years and deliver what is by far the best performance of his entire career." (more)
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'ONLY THE MEEK GET PINCHED. THE BOLD SURVIVE.'
- Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller's Day Off
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