Second Chance Cinema

Outbreak received mixed reviews from critics. According to review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 59% of 63 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 5.8 out of 10. The consensus states: ”A frustratingly uneven all-star disaster drama, Outbreak ultimately proves only mildly contagious and leaves few lasting side effects.” On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on 20 critic reviews, indicating ”generally favorable reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of ”A-” on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars, calling Outbreak‘s premise ”one of the great scare stories of our time, the notion that deep in the uncharted rain forests, deadly diseases are lurking, and if they ever escape their jungle homes and enter the human bloodstream, there will be a new plague the likes of which we have never seen.” Rita Kempley of The Washington Post also enjoyed the film‘s plot: ”Outbreak is an absolute hoot thanks primarily to director Wolfgang Petersen‘s rabid pacing and the great care he brings to setting up the story and its probability.”

David Denby wrote for New York magazine that although the opening scenes were well-done, ”somewhere in the middle ... Outbreak falls off a cliff” and becomes ”lamely conventional”. Janet Maslin of The New York Times also found the film‘s subject compelling but its treatment ineffective: ”The film‘s shallowness also contributes to the impression that no problem is too thorny to be solved by movie heroics.”

The film‘s scientific liberties have been criticized, especially compared to the realism of the 2011 film Contagion. Implausibilities include the virus taking only an hour, rather than days, to reproduce itself; the synthesis of the cure taking less than a minute, rather than many months; and the injection of the cure producing immediate improvement

Death Sentence is a 2007 American vigilante action drama film loosely based on the 1975 novel of the same name by Brian Garfield.

Directed by James Wan, the film stars Kevin Bacon as Nick Hume, a man who takes the law into his own hands after his son is murdered by a gang as an initiation ritual. Hume must protect his family from the gang‘s resulting vengeance.

The film premiered on August 31, 2007, and was released on DVD on January 8, 2008.

Toy Soldiers is a 1991 American action film directed by Daniel Petrie Jr., with a screenplay by Petrie and David Koepp. It stars Sean Astin, Wil Wheaton, Louis Gossett Jr., Andrew Divoff, Mason Adams and Denholm Elliott.

The plot revolves around an all-male boarding school overtaken by terrorists. While the authorities remain helpless, a group of rebellious and mischievous students decide to put their resourcefulness to good use.

Lakeview Terrace is a 2008 American crime thriller film directed by Neil LaBute, written by David Loughery and Howard Korder, co-produced by James Lassiter and Will Smith, and starring Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington. Jackson plays a racist LAPD police officer who terrorizes his new next-door neighbors because they are an interracially married couple. The title is a reference to the ethnically-mixed middle class Los Angeles neighborhood of Lake View Terrace.

The film was released on September 19, 2008, received mixed reviews and grossed $44 million.

A Bug‘s Life (stylized as a bug‘s life) is a 1998 American computer-animated comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. It was the second film produced by Pixar. Directed by John Lasseter and co-directed and written by Andrew Stanton, the film involves a misfit ant, Flik, who is looking for ”tough warriors” to save his colony from a protection racket run by Hopper‘s gang of grasshoppers. Unfortunately, the ”warriors” he brings back turn out to be an inept troupe of Circus Bugs.

The film was initially inspired by Aesop‘s fable The Ant and the Grasshopper. Production began shortly after the release of Toy Story in 1995. The screenplay was penned by Stanton and comedy writers Donald McEnery and Bob Shaw from a story by Lasseter, Stanton, and Ranft. The ants in the film were redesigned to be more appealing, and Pixar‘s animation unit employed technical innovations in computer animation. Randy Newman composed the music for the film. During production, a controversial public feud erupted between Steve Jobs and Lasseter of Pixar and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg due to the parallel production of his similar film Antz, which was released the same year.

The film was released on November 20, 1998, received positive reviews and grossed $363 million at the box office. It was the first film to be digitally transferred frame-by-frame and released on DVD, and has been released multiple times on home video.

The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 40% of critics gave Equilibrium positive reviews and an average rating of 4.8/10, based on 90 reviews, with the site's consensus stating "Equilibrium is a reheated mishmash of other sci-fi movies." Metacritic gave the film a score of 33 out of 100, based on reviews from 22 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".

Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times dismissed Equilibrium for having heavily borrowed from Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and other science fiction classics.

Roger Ebert awarded the film 3 stars out of 4, noting that "Equilibrium would be a mindless action picture, except that it has a mind. It doesn't do a lot of deep thinking, but unlike many futuristic combos of sf and f/x, it does make a statement."

Wimmer said in a Dreamwatch magazine interview that "the paying customers seemed to get it," and said the critics "didn't seem to see that the film had a different message than" Fahrenheit 451 or 1984. Responding to the critics' views, Wimmer later said, "Why would I make a movie for someone I wouldn't want to hang out with? Have you ever met a critic who you wanted to party with? I haven't."

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Faculty received an approval rating of 55 percent based on 55 reviews, with an average rating of 5.60/10. The site's consensus reads, "Rip-off of other sci-fi thrillers." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 61 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

The Faculty was viewed on 2,365 screens its opening weekend, debuting at No. 5 in the US, making $11,633,495. Its eventual US gross was $40.3 million.

In retrospect, Jordana Brewster said:

It was sort of the inverse of Fast and Furious, right? So with The Fast and Furious, I was like, "This is a small movie about cars. It's a really fun summer project." ... With The Faculty it was like, "You guys, this is gonna be huge. Look at all these successes around us," like She's All That and Scream. ... And then it turned out it wasn't so huge. We thought it was gonna be massive ... But it was a cult classic so that’s really cool.

Clea Duvall is also very fond of the movie: "It was so much fun. It was mostly night shoots, so it was like we were in this alternate universe. Working all night long and making this fun sci-fi horror movie. I loved it."

The film has been praised for its portrayal of teenage alienation, especially within the high school environment and its system of cliques and social roles. In particular, the alien invasion through parasited bodies has been recognized as functioning as a metaphor for those concepts, reflecting the fear of losing one's nascent individuality to a crowd. The alien queen encapsulates this by offering the heroes a world without alienation or differences, in which "everything that is both wonderful and awful about being a teenager is done away in favor of blind allegiance".

Experts also noted in The Faculty a reinvention of the fear of female sexuality often found in the horror genre. The character of Marybeth, the alien queen, is "a complex imbrication of woman, alien and power" that acts beyond the role of femme fatale. She masquerades as a virginal, unassuming girl clad in floral dresses, but at the final battle she reveals her true sexual threat, becoming nude by her alien transformation and turning confident and flirtatious. Her role as a threatening, castrating agent is underlined by the sharp teeth of her species, which evoke a vagina dentata, and their association to water, the archaic, womb-like female element. As the monstrous mother of her race, she tries to seduce the heroes by offering them a symbolic return to the womb. As Sharon Packer and Jody Pennington put it:

The image on the screen is dual: we see the beautiful, young, naked Marybeth strolling around looking for Casey, and the shadow of the monstrous form in the walls. Marybeth delivers a speech which ties the elements of the movie together. It is about the "world" she came from and its promises of "paradise" for lost and lonely humans, trapped in high-school "hell".

The character of Miss Burke precedes Marybeth in the same line, revealing her hidden sexuality only after being infected and turned into a monster. The scene of her detached, tentacled head in particular echoes the Freudian Medusa head. The monstrous feminine is therefore used in the film to reflect the teenage characters entering adult world, where they are forced to "come to terms with female sexuality and overcome their fear of its 'monstrous' aspects in order to become fully functioning adults". Casey, the male character closest to his softer, feminine side, is the final hero of the film.

Before Lee Charles was Lee Charles, he recommended to Second Chance Cinema the film THE ICE HARVEST. Going back his original name, he then tried to change it. But, before he came up with anything, MC tagged him as "TURD FERGUSON" from SNL. Now, we'll let him introduce his podcast name himself as we re-introduce the episode of a Christmas movie you probably haven't seen, yet.

And despite what MC's friend says about Oliver Platt, we think he's quite hilarious in this movie...

Law Abiding Citizen took second place in its opening weekend, with $21,039,502, behind Where the Wild Things Are. It went on to gross $126.6 million in total worldwide.

Law Abiding Citizen received generally negative reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 26% score, based on 159 reviews with an average rating of 4.3/10. The website's critical consensus states that "Unnecessarily violent and unflinchingly absurd, Law Abiding Citizen is plagued by subpar acting and a story that defies reason." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 34 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".

In his review for the Chicago Sun Times, Roger Ebert said, "Law Abiding Citizen is the kind of movie you will like more at the time than in retrospect." He then went on to say, "Still, there's something to be said for a movie you like well enough at the time." Ebert rated the film 3 out of 4 stars.

The Beach is a 2000 adventure drama film directed by Danny Boyle and based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Alex Garland, which was adapted for the film by John Hodge. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton, Virginie Ledoyen, Guillaume Canet, and Robert Carlyle. It was filmed on the Thai island of Ko Phi Phi Le.

The film was a moderate box office success but received mixed-to-negative reviews from critics. DiCaprio was nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor (lost to John Travolta as Terl from Battlefield Earth and as Russ Richards in Lucky Numbers). In spite of that, All Saints's song "Pure Shores" topped the UK charts.

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 20% based on 119 reviews, and an average rating of 4.4/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The Beach is unfocused and muddled, a shallow adaptation of the novel it is based on. Points go to the gorgeous cinematography, though."

On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 43 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".

Critics suggested that DiCaprio's fame post-Titanic might have contributed to the financial success of this film, which came out less than three years after the James Cameron blockbuster. CNN's Paul Clinton said "Leonardo DiCaprio's main fan base of screaming adolescent girls won't be disappointed with The Beach. The majority of the film displays the titanic-sized young heartthrob sans his shirt in this story about the pseudo-angst and alienation of a young man from the United States escaping civilization and his computer-obsessed generation." He agreed with most others that The Beach was "nothing to write home about".

(Second Chance Cinema thinks Paul Clinton's opinion is bullshit.)