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Hollywood is a machine. Every week, every month and every year, countless films are released into theaters and not every one is as successful as the studio heads would hope. Sometimes the publicity machine was askew, sometimes the movie targeted an odd demographic, sometimes the release was steamrolled by a much larger movie and occasionally the movie is flat out bad.
But Hollywood's loss is our gain. There is a veritable treasure trove of film out there that you may not have seen. I will be your guide to this veritable wilderness of unwatched film. It will be my job to steer you towards the action, adventure, drama and comedy that may have eluded you, and at the same time, steer you away from some truly unwatchable dreck.

Hopefully we'll stumble across some entertainment that may have slid under your radar. Wish us luck.

Push (2009)

Push is a troubling film for me. On one hand, this is a movie with some excellent production values, created by a smaller company. It has an excellent if somewhat underground cast (Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Djimon Hounsou...) and a wicked concept. On the other hand, this is also a film that either sidesteps logic or fails to explain aspects of its plot. The third act and finale of this film left me with what can only be considered with a bad taste in my mouth. It was disappointing, despite the mandatory and enormous gunfight at the end of the film.

The film starts out ridiculously strong. Dakota Fanning's character Cassie lays out the groundwork and mythology of this world via voice over in a little less than three minutes, and it's an easy buy in. Nazi Germany, in an attempt to create super soldiers, located and started to develop people with extraordinary abilities. Cassie lays out the groundwork for all the abilities with descriptive but simple titles. Pushers, Sniffers, Shadows, Stitches... the list goes on and on.

The Germans are defeated after WWII, and other nations take up their own super soldier projects, called Divisions. One division in particular (America) is particularly aggressive in this regard, terminating people who refuse to come in for ‘training and testing'. (Training and testing being division code for imprisonment, torture and death.) The American division has also developed a serum that supercharges the abilities of any individual they give it to. Unfortunately, the serum also has a lot of side effects, the most prominent one being an ugly, painful and rapid death.

Naturally, the moment after Cassie finishes laying out the framework for this new world, we see a young woman (Kira, played by Camilla Belle.) being injected with the serum. She convulses, dies.... then her heart immediately restarts and she pops out of bed and immediately escapes in less than 60 seconds - with the help of a marble - from a super secure facility designed to secure psychics, telekinetics and people that can yell really, really loud.

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