JK Simmons

This Week in DVD: 8/28/12

Another busy week at the video store as Battleship blasts its way onto home video, alongside Starship Troopers: Invasion, some Can-con with Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster and A Beginner's Guide to Endings, the documentary sequel Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, the genuinely funny horror comedy A Little Bit Zombie, and the God awful "horror comedy" Jersey Shore Shark Attack.

A Beginner’s Guide to Endings Review

Feeling a bit like an unholy cross between The Royal Tenenbaums and Snatch, first time Canadian filmmaker Jonathan Sobol's A Beginner's Guide to Endings can pummel viewers with its style, and not all the jokes hit, but it establishes the director as one to watch in the future.

Interview: Jonathan Sobol

We talked to the director Jonathan Sobol about the Canadian indie A Beginner's Guide to Endings about the film's conception, it's stacked cast (including JK Simmons and Harvey Keitel), and his plans for the future.

Contraband Review

While there’s much to praise and little to deride about Contraband, there are only so many ways to say that the movie holds very few surprises and everything happens in exactly the way one expects it would happen. This smuggling thriller does pretty much everything right, not a heck of a lot wrong, and viewers will be engaged enough to keep from checking their watches every few minutes. It’s a very competently made piece of Hollywood machinery, but it’s also the kind of a movie one would watch with a laptop open or while doing chores because of how little an impression it leaves.