Genesis Rodriguez
Occupation
Actor
Run All Night Review
By Rich Cline
Good
With a script by Brad Ingelsby (Out of the Furnace), this thriller has more substance than most, although it's also been compromised by the inclusion of a lot of contrived action mayhem. At its centre, there's a nice exploration of two retirement-age men looking at the world they have created, and how things have changed since they made key decisions as younger men. But director Jaume Collet-Serra (Non-Stop) seems uninterested in these serious themes, and would clearly rather stage another shoot-out or chase instead.
Liam Neeson stars as Jimmy, a lifelong criminal who's now a wheezy husk of his former thrusting self. But he maintains his childhood friendship with Shawn (Ed Harris), who turned his crime empire legit but is having problems keeping his son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) out of trouble. Now Danny has made a dodgy deal with some Albanians, and when that goes predictably wrong, it accidentally puts Jimmy's estranged good-guy son Mike (Joel Kinnaman), his wife (Genesis Rodriguez) and kids in danger. So Jimmy sets out to set things right, although this means that he ends up on opposite sides of the conflict from Shawn. And he and Mike also have to outrun his detective nemesis (Vincent D'Onofrio) and a ruthless assassin (Common).
There's a nice sense of respect and inevitability to the relationship between Jimmy and Shawn that goes a long way in making this overlong movie watchable. Neeson and Harris are terrific at playing men who are too old to be running around with guns. Their quietly tense conversations are by far the most riveting scenes in the film. By comparison, the action sequences feel rather routine: brutal and fast, with flashy editing, outrageous stunts and more firepower than is strictly necessary. And for a man who can barely stand when the film opens, Jimmy is suspiciously able to run, jump, drive and shoot like a trained professional a third his age.
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Big Hero 6 Review
By Rich Cline
Good
Fans of bright, flashy things will love this colourful, kinetic animated adventure, although anyone seeking originality or involving characters should probably look elsewhere. This is the first Disney animation based on a Marvel comic book, although they have essentially only retained the title and a vague semi-Asian setting. The result is a film that feels like something you've already seen before, with the usual Disney plot formula, characters and action beats, plus lots of sentimentality. At least it's witty and fast-paced enough to keep us entertained.
The futuristic setting is San Fransokyo, a slightly more Japanese version of San Francisco in which 15-year-old computer-geek orphan Hiro (voiced by Ryan Potter) lives with his Aunt Cass (Maya Rudolph). Both are shaken when Hiro's brother Tadashi dies in an explosion Hiro thinks he might have caused. Then he meets Tadashi's health-care robot invention Baymax (Scott Adsit), a cuddly inflatable creature who just wants to take care of Hiro. He goes along with Hiro's plan to turn him into a fighting machine that helps find the masked man who stole Hiro's microbot invention and actually caused the explosion. Baymax also helps Hiro assemble the Big Hero 6 team, adding Tadashi's nerd-inventor pals: goofy Fred (T.J. Miller), rebellious Go Go (Jamie Chung), nice-guy Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.) and girly Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez). Together they set out to stop the villain before he enacts his nefarious plan.
All of this is animated with bright colours and a snappy sense of the technology. There are several exhilarating set-pieces along the way as the young heroes work out their special powers by inventing all sorts of gadgets. But nothing about the script meaningfully deepens these characters. Each person on-screen is essentially one personality trait, while potentially colourful side roles (including Aunt Cass) are left badly undefined. What holds the interest is the superb interaction between Hiro and Baymax, mainly because of the obvious affection between them. And also because Baymax has all of the film's funniest lines.
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Tusk Trailer
Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) has a job that most could only dream of. He spends his working days travelling around and discovering interesting people whom he then interviews for his radio podcasts. It's a voyage of education and cultural vibrancy - though it rarely occurs to this adventurous wanderer that it could be a little dangerous. He decides to travel to an isolated area of Manitoba in Canada to meet a man with many stories of his own adventures at sea, including being rescued from a sinking boat by a walrus. However, Wallace finds himself drugged at the man's house within hours and spends the next few terrifying days being tortured into behaving like a walrus while this mysterious Mr. Howe (Michael Parks) prepares to perform a gruesome and disfiguring operation involving a carefully prepared pair of ivory tusks. Meanwhile, Wallace's girlfriend and colleagues are getting seriously worried about where on Earth he's got to.
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Big Hero 6 Trailer
Hiro Hamada is a young robotics virtuoso whose best friend is a large, balloon-like humanoid machine named Baymax which he designed at the San Fransokyo Institute Of Technology. However, having such expert knowledge in this kind of scientific field is bound to be dangerous and soon enough they find themselves under attack from a vicious enemy who sends his army of miniature robots after them. Going to the police proves fruitless, and so Hiro decides he must fight back. He designs a powerful suit for Baymax and joins a team of like-minded vigilantes who have been appointed by the government to save the world; they are Wasabi-No-Ginger, Honey Lemon, GoGo Tomago and Fred and together they form the ultimate superhero team. Hiro and his friends must uncover the villain's plot of destruction – without breaking curfew.
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Hours - Featurette
The cast and crew of upcoming Hurricane Katrina drama 'Hours' discuss the flick in a short featurette, talking about everything from the musical score to the reasons behind its creation. Among them are actors Paul Walker and Genesis Rodriguez, director and writer Eric Heisserer, producer Peter Safran, executive producer Dan Clifton, composer Benjamin Wallfisch and cinematographer Jaron Presant . 'Hours' was one of the last movies Paul Walker starred in before his tragic death on November 30th 2013.
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Hours Trailer
Nolan and Abigail are hoping to welcome their unborn baby daughter into the world in just a few weeks, but things take a terrifying turn when the child is born five weeks prematurely. Abigail is rushed to hospital just as New Orleans becomes embroiled in a menacing looking storm that gets gradually worse as the hours go by. As Hurricane Katrina causes the nearby levee to break, the streets are flooded and the entire hospital is forced to be evacuated. However, that means that some people cannot be moved from the building if their survival relies solely on non-portable machines and so Nolan insists on staying in the unit where his fragile baby daughter is hooked up to a ventilator. Soon, though, the emergency battery begins to die down and with no-one around to change it and a severe power cut underway, he is forced to find a generator and do everything within his power to save his child - even if that means risking his own life.
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The Last Stand Review
By Rich Cline
OK
Korean filmmaker Kim played with the Western genre before in his wacky 2008 pastiche The Good the Bad the Weird, and this film is just as chaotically uneven, mixing cartoon-style silliness with grisly violence. But the high-energy approach holds our interest, as does Schwarzenegger's immense screen presence in his first starring role since his political career. The film is far too jumbled to hold together, but its sardonic sense of humour makes it a decent guilty pleasure.
Arnie plays Sheriff Owens, who has a quiet routine in his sleepy Arizona-Mexico border town. So when a stranger (Stormare) appears, he sends his deputies (Alexander and Gilford) to investigate. Things get violent quickly, so he deputises a drunken veteran (Santoro) and a moronic gun-nut (Knoxville) to work alongside another deputy (Guzman). What he doesn't yet know is that the baddies are part of an elaborate plan to help a drug kingpin (Noriega) escape from a Law Vegas FBI Agent (Whitaker) and cross the border to freedom in Mexico.
The whizzy plot actually has promise as a straightforward action movie, but Kim throws so much nuttiness at the screen that we can't take anything seriously. The story zings from set-piece to set-piece without much concern for credibility or coherence. It's all very cool, especially the baddie's glimmering, super-fast prototype Corvette, which travels "faster than a chopper" on isolated country roads that are improbably smooth. And his climactic plan to get over the border is astonishingly silly, but played dead straight.
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The Last Stand Trailer
Ray Owens is a police sheriff whose major crime fighting days are all but over when he swaps his job in the LAPD combating drug crimes for the much less strenuous post in the quite town of Sommerton Junction on the Mexican border, after a botched drugs operation left him feeling defeated when his friend and colleague ended up crippled. His comfort in his new post is challenged all too soon when the most formidable drug tycoon in the western world, Gabriel Cortez, slips from the clutches of the FBI. Cortez and his ruthless army head towards the Mexican border in Sommerton Junction at 250 miles per hour in a deadly modified Corvette ZR1 with a hostage, mercilessly shooting at the police officers attempting to arrest them and easily sweeping police cars out of their way. They are pursued by the entire law enforcement of America led by Agent John Bannister, though Owens is unwilling to bring his team into the fight at first, feeling not the officer he used to be. His reluctance becomes irrelevant anyway when he is told to take a backseat due to the lack of experience of his team; however Owens soon changes his mind and bands his modest taskforce together to forcibly take on the fierce drug gang themselves.
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Video - Genesis Rodriguez: 'Telenovelas Were Fun To Make'
Actress Genesis Rodriguez (Man On A Ledge) attends a press junket for her new movie 'Casa De Mi Padre' at the Regency Hotel in New York.
Genesis recalls how she spent six years working on Spanish telenovelas and reveals that behind the scenes is as much fun as the shows themselves. She also admits that characters in the telenovelas had 'wacky' storylines - one of her characters, who had a birth defect, undertook a makeover, with the end result being that she turned villainous as she was now beautiful.
Genesis will be starring in What To Expect When You're Expecting, alongside Cameron Diaz; Jennifer Lopez and Matthew Morrison.
Genesis Rodriguez and Diego Luna Wednesday 29th February 2012 The premier of Casa de Mi Padre at the Colony Theater - Departures
Man On A Ledge Review
By Rich Cline
Weak
There's so little to this film that you've almost forgotten everything about it by the time the closing credits start to roll. It's so easy to watch that you're lulled into thinking that it's quite good, even though it's not.
Ex-cop Nick (Worthington) is only a couple of years into an excessively long prison sentence for stealing a giant diamond from a ruthless jewel magnate (Harris). But he manages to escape, positioning himself on a 21st-floor ledge above a busy Manhattan street. As the crowd gathers and cops (Banks and Burns) come to talk him down, Nick's brother Joey (Bell) and his bendy girlfriend Angie (Rodriguez) are breaking into a nearby building. Basically, it's Nick's last-ditch effort to clear his name.
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