“He looks determined… without being ruthless. There’s something heroic
about him. He doesn’t look like a killer. He comes across so calm…
acts like he has a dream… eyes full of passion.” – The Killer (1989)

Assassin movies are a guaranteed hit with moviegoers. And for some reason, we too often cheer on this ‘bad guy.’ Why?

Hitmen are the inevitable descendants of our Western gunslingers like Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter (1950) or Alan Ladd in Shane(1953). Even when those films were made, there was acknowledgement that such killers had already outlived their usefulness and had no place in civilized society. But modern cinema isn’t so “civilized,” because professional killers are thriving in it. The reason is most likely that hitmen are ‘cool’ because, like rebels, vampires, psychopaths, and Lords of the Sith, they operate totally outside of societal norms and do whatever they want. Such freedom is enviable, but naturally not the sort of behavior most people would think of emulating. That’s sort of the basic pleasure of cinema: escapism.

In the vein of celebrating these anti-heroes, Movie Trailer Talk has compiled the “Top 10 Badass Hitmen Movies” (summaries added from IMDb):

1. Léon aka The Professional (1994) – Leon is a first-class hit man, but is also a sensitive guy who loves his potted plants. He is moral: “No women, no children” is his professional motto. He is sympathetic to his neighbor, Mathilda, a typically rebellious twelve-year-old who has trouble with her family. But when her father runs afoul of drug kingpin Norman Stansfield, Mathilda turns to Leon for assistance.
2. Pulp Fiction (1994) – Jules and Vincent work as hitmen for crime boss Marcellus Wallace. Wallace is currently dealing with Butch Collidge, a boxer who failed to throw a fight after taking Wallace’s money and is now planning to flee the city, but can’t leave his father’s watch behind. Vincent faces some problems of his own when Wallace asks him to show his wife Mia a good time while he’s away. Some of these people redeem themselves and some don’t, and all meet an end appropriate to their choices.
3. El Mariachi (1992), Desperado (1995), Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) – El Mariachi just wants to play his guitar and carry on the family tradition. Unfortunately, the town he tries to find work in has another visitor…a killer who carries his guns in a guitar case. The drug lord and his henchmen mistake El Mariachi for the killer, Azul, and chase him around town trying to kill him and get his guitar case.
4. Dip huet seung hung aka The Killer (1989) – A violent Hong Kong action film, this is the story of an assassin,
   Jeffrey Chow (aka Mickey Mouse) who takes one last job so he can retire
   and care for his girlfriend Jenny. When his employers betray him, he
   reluctantly joins forces with Inspector Lee (aka Dumbo), the cop who is
   pursuing him. Together, the new friends face the final confrontation of
   the gangsters out to kill them.
5. Kill Bill Vol. I, II (2003, 2004) – The lead character, called ‘The Bride,’ was a member of the Deadly
   Viper Assassination Squad, lead by her lover ‘Bill.’ Upon realizing she
   was pregnant with Bill’s child, ‘The Bride’ decided to escape her life
   as a killer. She fled to Texas, met a young man, and on the day of
   their wedding was gunned down by an angry and jealous Bill (with the
   assistance of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad). Four years later,
   ‘The Bride’ wakes from a coma, and discovers her baby is gone. She,
   then, decides to seek revenge upon the five people who destroyed her
   life and killed her baby. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 20%

“For me it’s always been the strangeness of zombies, in that they are very slow and almost inept and shambolic – without motive, without moral rage or agenda. They’re just us: motorised instinct,” he says. “There’s something really eerie about that. They don’t mean any harm; they’re just doing their thing.”
– Shaun of the Dead’s co-creator Simon Pegg

OMG Horror has posted their list of the Top 26 Best Zombies of All Time. We added synopsises (from IMDb) and a few we felt were overlooked.

1. Bub, Day of the Dead (1985): Zombies rule the USA, except for a small group of scientists and military personnel who reside in an underground bunker in Florida. The scientists are using the undead in gruesome experiments; much to the chagrin of the military. Finally the military finds that their men have been used in the scientists’ experiments, and banish the scientists to the caves that house the Living Dead. Unfortunately, the zombies from above ground have made their way into the bunker.
2. Tarman, Return of the Living Dead (1985): When a bumbling pair of employees at a medical supply warehouse accidentally release a deadly gas into the air, the vapors cause the dead to re-animate as they go on a rampage through Louisville, Kentucky seeking their favorite food, brains.
3. Conquistador Zombie, Zombie/Zombi 2 (1979): A young woman wants to search for her father who is missing since he made an expidition to the antilles. She starts the search together with her friends and a reporter. They arrive at an island where they get confronted with zombies. The zombies long eagerly for human flesh. In spite of desperate defence the situation becomes hopeless. More and more undead corpses crawl up and walk arround looking for flesh.

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Popularity: 96%

“Tales of typically normal excitable youngsters going on epic adventures that lifted the heart stirred the soul and haunted our dreams. But it was the palpable sense of adventure that really convinced, giving us youngsters an achievable sense of daydream adventure” — Oliver Pfeiffer
For those who were young in the 1980s, the decade’s movies hold a special place in their hearts. CGI was just coming into its own on the silver screen and fantasy adventures were a staple for children and teenagers alike.

Oliver Pfeiffer takes us back to those halcyon days with his list of the “Top 10 Cult Classic 80s Fantasy Adventure Flicks.” We’ve added IMDb plot summaries as well as a bonus list of movies we thought deserved recognition as well.

1. The Goonies (1985): A young teenager named Mikey Walsh finds an old treasure map in his father’s attic. Hoping to save their homes from demolition, Mikey and his friends Data Wang, Chunk Cohen, and Mouth Devereaux runs off on a big quest to find the secret stash One-Eyed Willie.
2. Return to Oz (1985): Dorothy Gale has recently come back to Kansas from the land of Oz is now almost back to perfect health since the incident of the tornado, only she cannot get that wonderful place out of her head. She talks frequently about it and cannot get any sleep at night. Her Aunt Em worries about her health/well-being. Thinking that her niece is suffering delusional depression and acute insomnia, she decides to take Dorothy to see a special doctor in another town. While the doctor tries to treat little Dorothy with electro-shock treatment and take away those nasty dreams from her head, Dorothy is rescued by a mysterious girl who leads her back to the land of oz for a new adventure.
3. Labyrinth (1986): Grown angry about the fact that she must watch over her little brother Toby, Sarah (Jennifer Connely) wishes the child to the goblins. They translate this careless statement into action: The Goblin-King Jareth (David Bowie) announces that soon Toby will mutate into a goblin. There is only one hope: Sarah has to find the way to Jareth’s castle – through a dangerous labyrinth – where she will find strange creatures.Young Sherlock Holmes (1985): Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson meet as boys in an English Boarding school. Holmes is known for his deductive ability even as a youth, amazing his classmates with his abilities. When they discover a plot to murder a series of British business men by an Egyptian cult, they move to stop it.
4. Explorers (1985): Ben Crandall, an alien-obsessed kid, dreams one night of a circuit board. Drawing out the circuit, he and his friends Wolfgang and Darren set it up, and discover they have been given the basis for a starship. Setting off in the ThunderRoad, as they name their ship, they find the aliens Ben hopes they would find… but are they what they seem?
5. The Lost Boys (1987): Financial troubles force a recent divorcee and her teenage sons Mike and Sam to settle down with her father in the California town of Santa Carla. At first, Sam laughs off rumours he hears about vampires who inhabit the small town. But after Mike meets a beautiful girl at the local amusement park, he begins to exhibit the classic signs of vampirism. Fearing for his own safety, Sam recruits two young vampire hunters to save his brother by finding and destroying the head vampire. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 100%

I went to a party once, and there was a palm reader there and when she looked at my hand, she just froze. And I said to her “I know. My lifeline is broken. I know I won’t live past thirty.”

Release: 2006
Runtime: 1 hour, 39 min
Genre: Biography, Drama
Language: English
MPAA Rating: R
Starring: Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Hayden Christensen, Jimmy Fallon, Jack Huston, Armin Amiri, Tara Summers, Mena Suvari

Amazon Link: Factory Girl

SYNOPSIS: “Factory Girl” retells the meteoric rise and fall of the 1960′s “That Girl” Edie Sedgwick, a celebrity who came to define both the faux glamour and the tragedy of the chaotic, drug-addled 1960s. Initially on film, Sedgwick appears to be the stereotypical (read as vapid) American princess, but when she meets up with anti-hero Andy Warhol, everything changes. Suddenly, Edie find herself at the center of a vortex brimming with sex, illicit drugs, errant style and rock ‘n’ roll — and desperately groping for fame and fabulousness that was destined to end her life in ruin. The film records the Poor Little Rich Girl‘s downward spiral from Cambridge art student to Andy Warhol’s disposable model/actress/muse and finally to institutionalized drug addict.

Factory Girl has a number of problems. The script is incredibly weak. In fact, it’s so scattered and borderline incoherent that you’d think that Sedgwick herself, hopped up on crank, made it herself. The high points all get a moment in the limelight: child of mentally ill and abusive parents, involved with freaky artist types and hangers-on, attention and love-starved, high all the time and doomed to the inevitable downward spiral. You just never know exactly the who or why of what happened. The film heavy-handedly drives home its interpretation of Edie as the abused and abandoned target of a series of childish, manipulative men, with the ultimate blame saved for her family. But in fact, Edie was not a victim. She was already a wild child by the time she left for New York City. What made Edie Sedgwick so tragic is that she was the Poor Little Rich Girl by her own mistakes. She was terribly self-destructive and yet so beautiful and promising, and that creates the interest surrounding her life. Unfortunately the film never capitalizes on this dichotomy.

The acting is atrocious. Sienna Miller’s crying hardly seems real. Scrunching up your face does not make the audience think you’re crying. Hayden Christensen is absolutely ridiculous. He tries to channel Bob Dylan’s persona, called Quinn (after his musical tribute to Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents) but inevitably just comes off as such a douchebag. Christensen even tries to imitate the same speech patterns and tone of voice as the famous singer, but ends up botching the character much like did Vader/Anakin in the Star Wars trilogy. Simply put, Hayden is painful to watch: And don’t even get me start on the uncomfortably awkward sex scene between Hayden and Sienna. Guy Pearce’s Andy Warhol, as idiot savant, is flawed from the moment he appears on screen. Pearce delves into Andy’s strangeness to postulate that Andy compensated for ugliness by leeching on to pretty people. That might well be valid, but neither the film nor Pearce fully explore the validity of such a premise.

The film depicts The Factory as high school with more flamboyant clothes and hair and stronger drugs. Petty jealousies and backbiting create a pernicious environment in which sycophants vie for Warhol’s attention and bask in his reflected ‘brilliance.’

Unfortunately, Factory Girl’s flaccid visuals do not make the movie worthwhile. What could have been a decadent experience in terms of the fashion, music and surroundings of 60′s counter culture turned out to be mundane, unfocused, and very contrived. Simply put: A complete and utter disappointment.

Goozlepipe Rating: Hated It

Popularity: 4%

Popsci.com takes a look at a few of cinema’s most mind-boggling moments of scientific inaccuracy—plus a few rare films that manage to get things (mostly) right.

All ten examples are collected here for those who don’t want to flip through ten separate pages:

Mission Impossible II (2000):
In a critical scene in John Woo’s motorcycle-heavy second installment of the Mission Impossible series, Tom Cruise and evil Dougray Scott have a head-on showdown on their respective high-powered bikes, which ends in a midair collision after each is somehow able to leap off his bike. Neither seems particularly fazed, as the two continue to grapple apparently unhurt on the ground and for the rest of the movie.

Assuming speeds of 50 mph, a collision time of 0.015 second, and masses of 80 and 90 kilograms for Cruise and Scott, respectively, the force generated by the impact is an incredibly large 124,000 newtons, all exerted on the upper-right halves of the combatants bodies. Estimating the area of impact to be around .35 square-meters, we can solve for the amount of pressure exerted on their bodies at the point of impact: 350,000 N/m2. Putting these numbers in real-life terms (what, you don’t know what one newton of force feels like?): In car-crash studies, any pressure of that magnitude on the human body results in a 50-50 chance of surviving, with those who do survive coming away with massive internal trauma. Not only do Cruise and Scott survive the initial impact, they don’t appear to have even a broken bone between them, when in reality, Tom would need a whole lot of nontraditional healing to recover from this one.
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Popularity: 22%