Quad posters are so awesome because they are huge in size and take over the lobbies of movie theaters. To say the least, these posters really promote the movie well.

With that said, The Eagle takes place in 140 AD with two men, one the master and other the slave, venture beyond the edge of the known world on a dangerous and obsessive quest that will push them beyond the boundaries of loyalty and betrayal, friendship and hatred, deceit and heroism…The Roman epic adventure The Eagle stars Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell and is directed by Academy Award winner Kevin MacDonald.

20 years earlier, Rome’s 5,000-strong Ninth Legion, under the command of Flavius Aquila, marched north carrying their treasured golden Eagle emblem. They never returned; Legion and Eagle simply vanished into the mists. 

The Eagle co-stars Donald Sutherland, Mark Strong and Tahar Rahim and is adapted by Jeremy Brock from Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic novel “The Eagle of the Ninth”.

The folks out at A&E sent over a copy of the newest season of Hoarders–season two, part one, specifically–as we go forth into the lives of people who have one big problem–their houses. And you’ll get plenty of drama and astonishing sights, which will be downright amazing in many cases.

If you ever thought your house was messy, you’ll be thoroughly astonished by what you’ll see in the first part of the second season of Hoarders: rotten food everywhere, stacks of garage sale miscellany, broken items, and perhaps worst of all, the trash. Trash, deep and thick–not just piles either, but knee-deep, waist-deep in some cases, drifts of random detritus.

And it’s dismaying to see these people with their condition (Hoarders will go out of its way to assure you that they do have a disease in its way), trying desperately to recover from said condition. It’s sad, in many cases–some people can’t even stand to throw away so much as a button or an old box without searing emotional pain. Looked at by itself, it’s a compelling and yet exploitative all at the same time. Your heart goes out to people in this situation and yet, at the same time, you’re almost enraged at A&E for putting people out on display like this.

And yet, sometimes, it can even be funny–one episode featured a hunt for a set of missing false teeth. But any laughs you may have had will promptly curdle in your throat as something horrible happens. That episode with the false teeth? Funny…until you discover the first dead cat on the floor. I say the first, because there will be more than one.

It’s a disaster, in a great many ways. It’s not only the sorrow of what these people live with, but also the horror of watching the cleaning. Not only do these people find it so difficult to part with anything, but their family doesn’t seem to be much of help in many cases. There’s a lot of yelling, a lot of accusations, lots of shouting and all sorts of uncomfortable drama flying around in several directions.

But if drama is your particular cup of tea–not to mention the satisfaction of watching horrible messes turn into clean houses–then Hoarders: Season Two Part One is going to be just what you’re after.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this dramatic horror a seven out of ten for being powerful drama, and yet in a lot of ways, like a messy house, gone out of control. There’s a lot here that’s exploitative in the worst sense, and yet, there’s still value here. It’s not perfect, but it will be worthwhile in many ways.

The press junket for The Fighter has offered some interesting interviews on the Internet.  This one with Christian Bale stands out as a rather charming piece.  Bale discusses his process of developing his characters.  I think you will enjoy it.  And, I’d like to thank In Contention for bringing this to my attention.

Julie Taymor adapted and directed The Tempest, the last Shakespeare play, which is a tightly woven drama about fantasy and romance.

The cast includes Helen Mirren, Russell Brand, Alfred Molina, Djimon Hounsou, David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alan Cumming, Ben Whishaw, Reeve Carney, Felicity Jones and Tom Conti.

The movie opens this Friday, December 10, 2011.

The crew out at Lions Gate sent over a copy of Frenemy, and they had me pretty interested from the word go for several different reasons–I’ll talk about those in a minute. But for right now, we’ve got the immortal question staring us in the face: is a movie whole worth the sum of its parts?

Frenemy follows a group of friends who’ve seen a terrible crime. And as so often happens following a major traumatic event, they get to wondering why they survived. This is especially poignant in light of the fact that one of their friends did not survive. But it doesn’t stay poignant for long–at least, not so poignant–as the friends begin to realize that their fate is a lot stranger than they expected, and that their chance for redemption isn’t near as far away as they expected.

Like I said, this has a lot of great parts. The plot is unusual to say the least, like a strange Coen Brothers dark comedy. Zach Galifianakis is involved, and in a darker comedy. The last time I saw him in a darker comedy was Operation: Endgame and that was some unquestionably sweet movie. Now, it’s reasonable logic to suggest that this one will make a sweet movie as well–hard not to considering what’s gone into it–but that’s not always the case.

Frenemy, meanwhile, does do a pretty good job here. It’s not quite the dark comedy with an action edge I’d hoped for, but it’s almost like a Coen Brothers production of a Kevin Smith script. It’s very chatty. There’s a lot of dialogue in here, especially for an eighty minute movie. But there are still sufficient odd twists in here that make things sufficiently compelling.

The truly infuriating part of Frenemy is how it does the most horrendous things–murders aplenty, outright mutilation–and do them sort of off to the side, while the dialogue is going on.

It’s like listening to someone talk about their grocery shopping–how they found a really great deal on Ho-Hos, but they got cut off in the parking lot by a minivan with eight prostitutes in it and the wheels on the cart always squeak and stick and they couldn’t even take advantage of that great Ho-Ho deal because they have the heads of eight prostitutes in their trunk–yeah, the same ones that cut them off in the parking lot–and there’s hardly any room in the trunk for their Ho-Hos now and they really should get those heads out of the trunk before they start to spoil–the heads, not the Ho-Hos–and…well, you see what I mean.

That’s exactly what this movie is like. This strange mix of horror intermingled in conversational drama is a jarring contrast–a series of them, really–that can’t help but draw attention. And though the ending is one of those I dislike–in which many things go unexplained–I can at least take comfort in knowing that guessing here is almost certainly accurate. Almost certainly, which distresses me, but only almost.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Frenemy a nine out of ten for being a mostly compelling performance that jars its audience but still splits the difference sufficiently between keeping attention and shaking it away to make it an experience well worth watching.

The studio released the trailer for The Beaver before the movie’s poster was released.  I find that interesting because usually the poster is released before the trailer.

Here we see Walter (Gibson) having a quiet moment with the beaver in a natural background.  The scene is somewhat comical, don’t you think?

Inception DVD/Blu-ray hits the streets tomorrow, so I thought I’d post Inception in real time. It is incredible to watch, but beware of spoilers!  

Please note that the dream sequences are sped up because, theoretically, 2 minutes of sleep time equals 2 hours of dream time. For that reason, you will see all of Inception’s dream levels as they occur simultaneously.

The folks out at Bridgestone Multimedia sent out a special film for us to have a look at today, and it’s especially appropriate given where we are in the calendar. It’s called Homeless For the Holidays, and it’s going to be special for a whole lot of reasons.

In Homeless For the Holidays, we join the Bakers, a family regarded as the “Christmas Crazies”, as they like to do Christmas in a big way. A good part of that is because they love Christmas, as a lot of people do, but patriarch Jack Baker likes to be the best there is at what he does. A worthy goal, sure enough, but it can go too far as Baker will discover during an unlikely encounter with a mysterious Santa Claus. Soon enough, the rising Baker star finds itself bursting into flame and collapsing following a mysterious product failure at his company. But as the bills mount and Jack finds himself jobless for an extended period, he starts to discover what’s truly important in his life. But will he wind up like the title? Or will he discover that there’s often a little extra magic this time of year?

The phrase “based on true events” is bandied around a lot, but even if this one weren’t based on a true story, it likely would be anyway, because it’s so very universal, especially these days. It’s going to hit home for a lot of people–in fact, it’s probably going to hit way too close to home for a lot of people. But this is a message that a lot of people are going to need to hear. Oh, and there’s a nice stab at the idiocy of government assistance, though it gets a little too loud and angry for the overall tone of the movie–it’s a bit out of place, but still a message in its own right with no small validity.

There’s a lot more to Christmas than lights and presents and trees and suchlike, and it’s hard times that make people realize that more so than a lot of other things. Homeless For the Holidays is a movie that will show that nicely, and frankly, should be required viewing for most anyone no matter what side of the have / have not equation they fall on. Whether it teaches you the hard lessons of hard times, or teaches you how desperately those going through those hard times need our help and compassion to get to what’s waiting on the other side of them.

It’s a Christmas movie that truly needs to be seen. It’s going to do a lot for people’s Christmas spirit, and it’s going to do it for a lot of reasons. It can be a little preachy sometimes, a little uneven in its tone (seriously, that whole food stamp scene felt so tacked on at the last minute it was like looking at half a worm in an apple), but it’s still a timely message packaged well.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Homeless For the Holidays an eight out of ten for being just right in a great many ways. And though it’s not without its flaws, it’ll still do an effective job of showing us–in an time in which we need it more than ever. It’s a movie that gets a lot of support from its timing, but still, the movie itself is a very solid release.

Calvin Marshall is available on DVD or Blu-ray, and obviously it’s a baseball movie.  But, it is much more than that. It’s about the guys who never succeed but only dream about it. Steve Zahn is surprisingly good in this low-key movie. If you love baseball movie, you’ll want to see Calvin Marshall.

This trailer has some spoilers, but it’s Jody Foster and Mel Gibson at their best.  Let’s enjoy some find acting.

I know that some folks have some negative ideas about Gibson. It’s better to see the positive in others. He’s a very good actor and a fine filmmaker.