Written Review: End of Watch (2012)

by Jason Pyles
Movie Podcast Weekly.com

Premise: While going about their daily duties, two LAPD officers keep stumbling onto a ferocious drug cartel with zero tolerance for ambitious cops.

Review: “End of Watch” may be the first found footage, shaky-cam, docu-drama, pseudo-documentary cop movie that also doubles as a feature-length PR commercial for the Los Angeles Police Department. (Seriously, this whole movie could be an advertisement for the LAPD. Perhaps it is.)

Actually, “End of Watch” is quite a number of things: It’s also a love story between two men played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, not too far off from Gyllenhaal’s most famous role in “Brokeback Mountain” (2005). Continue reading

Written Review: Wolf Town (2010)

by Jason Pyles
Movie Podcast Weekly.com

Premise: Four friends get stranded in an abandoned, gold-mining town, where they are preyed upon by a pack of wolves.

Review: Nothing is scarier than being eaten alive. I’d rather be buried alive than eaten alive. That’s why this unthinkable predicament makes such an effective backdrop for the characters in “Wolf Town.” When watching a film like this, it’s impossible not to wonder to yourself, ‘What would I do if I were in this situation?’

I’ve said it many times before on my podcasts, but a golden premise to me is something I refer to as the situational thriller or situational horror film, which is when a movie’s characters find themselves in precarious circumstances that aren’t immediately life-threatening, but the longer they remain in the situation, the more deadly and hopeless their predicament becomes. Continue reading