11:35am Thursday 12th August 2010
Whip It
(12, 107 mins, Lionsgate, DVD £17.99/Blu-ray £22.99)
Starring: Ellen Page, Kristen Wiig, Drew Barrymore, Juliette Lewis, Marcia Gay Harden, Daniel Stern, Eulala Scheel.
TEENAGER Bliss Cavendar (Page), lives in Bodeen, Texas, with her father Earl (Stern), beauty-pageant obsessed mom, Brooke (Harden), and younger sister Shania (Scheel). Bliss secretly attends the roller derby tryout in Austin for league underdogs, the Hurl Scouts. Maggie Mayhem (Wiig) and Smashley Simpson (Barrymore) help Bliss to become her alter ego, Babe Ruthless. Based on the novel Derby Girl by Shauna Cross, Whip It is an auspicious directorial debut for actor Drew Barrymore.
The Joneses
(15, 93 mins, E1 Entertainment, DVD £17.99) Stars: David Duchovny, Demi Moore, Amber Heard, Ben Hollingsworth, Gary Cole, Glenne Headly. STEVE Jones (Duchovny) and his wife Kate (Moore) move into a wealthy gated community with their good-looking teenage children, Jenn (Heard) and Mick (Hollingsworth). The measure of a man in this moneyed enclave isn’t his achievements but the price of his car or the jewellery draped around his wife’s surgically lifted neck. To that end, the Joneses fit in perfectly. Yet there is more to the perfectly tailored clan than meets the eye. Director Derrick Borte withholds the narrative ace up his sleeve as long as he can because once his grand design is revealed, the film slowly loses dramatic momentum. Centurion
(15, 97 mins, Twentieth Century Fox, DVD £15.99/Blu-ray £28.99)
Stars: Michael Fassbender, Olga Kurylenko, Dominic West, David Morrissey, Liam Cunningham, Noel Clarke, Riz Ahmed, JJ Feild, Ulrich Thomsen, Imogen Poots.
ROMAN General Titus Virilus (West) leads the legendary Ninth Legion into battle against the savage Picts and is taken hostage and most of his loyal men are slain. Quintus Dias (Fassbender) and a splinter group of sword-wielding warriors including Bothos (Morrissey), Brick (Cunningham), Macros (Clarke), Tarak (Ahmed) and Thax (Feild) are pursued by legendary Pict tracker, Etain (Kurylenko).
Set in 117 AD Britain, Centurion is a bloodthirsty B-movie that barely pauses for breath for such trivial concerns as character development or historical veracity. Slow-motion fight sequences and the flashing blades of swords are Tyneside director Neil Marshall’s primary concern, accomplished with a miasma of digitally rendered blood and guts.
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/trade_directory/