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SOUL SURFER: Charlie Don’t Surf

Posted April 7, 2011 by Mitch Salem

> Not Even For Free. There’s a key scene in the new SOUL SURFER where the one-armed teen surfer Bethany Hamilton, who’s had her other arm chewed off by a shark and who despairs of her career in competition, is in Thailand on a Christian mission to tend to tsunami survivors.  And these survivors, having […]

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THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “Puncture”

Posted September 26, 2011 by Mitch Salem

  PUNCTURE:  Worth A Ticket – A Bracingly Dark Ride   No one is going to see PUNCTURE in theaters, and that’s a shame, because unaccountably, it’s one of the best pictures around.  “Unaccountably,” because this is a film that doesn’t even seem to know there’s a radar to fly below:  although it contains an […]

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THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “Real Steel”

Posted October 6, 2011 by Mitch Salem

REAL STEEL:  Watch It At Home – The Word is “Clunky”   REAL STEEL wants to be loved so much, it practically walks the audience members to their cars and offers to give them all a lift home.  And yet, the packed house I saw it with could only offer the movie a smattering of […]

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SOURCE CODE: If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Posted March 31, 2011 by Mitch Salem

> Worth a ticket. They say that the definition of madness is repeating the same action with the expectation of a different result.  But that diagnosis doesn’t allow for this:  a man (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up and finds himself on a train, where his reflection in the mirror doesn’t look like himself, and the woman […]

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THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “War Horse”

Posted December 23, 2011 by Mitch Salem

  WAR HORSE:  Watch It At Home –  Spielberg’s Beautiful Muzak   Earlier this year, audiences were presented with Super 8, J. J. Abrams’s pastiche of Steven Spielberg’s classic sci-fi adventures from the 1970s and 80s (Spielberg was a producer on the project).  Now with WAR HORSE, we have Spielberg’s own pastiche:  of John Ford, […]

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THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “One Day”

Posted August 19, 2011 by Mitch Salem

  ONE DAY – Watch It At Home:  An Off-Day   What went wrong with ONE DAY?  It’s been clear for a while that its studio, Focus Features, didn’t have great confidence in the film:  first  they postponed the opening from its original midsummer date to late August (which has turned out to be an […]

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Articles

THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “Mirror Mirror”

Posted March 30, 2012 by Mitch Salem

    MIRROR MIRROR:  Not Even For Free – 7 Years Bad Luck     When it was announced that 2012 would bring two big-budget movie versions of the Snow White story, not to mention TV’s Once Upon A Time, in which Snow (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a central character (and that’s not counting Grimm, another […]

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Science Fiction

THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “The Phantom Menace 3D”

Posted February 12, 2012 by Mitch Salem

> STAR WARS EPISODE I:  THE PHANTOM MENACE 3D, to give it its fully identifying title, has the distinction of being the most successful movie ever made that is generally agreed to be terrible.  Over $900M in tickets have been sold for Phantom Menace since its opening in 1999 (that number will go over $1B […]

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