Watch For Love of the Game (1999) Online

For Love of the Game (1999)iMDB Rating: 6.5
Date Released : 31 May 2000
Genre : Drama, Romance, Sport
Stars : Kevin Costner, Kelly Preston, John C. Reilly, Jena Malone
Movie Quality : BRrip
Format : MKV
Size : 870 MB

Detroit Tigers Veteran Pitcher Billy Chapel (Costner) has always been better at baseball than at love. Just ask Jane (Preston), his on-and-off girlfriend. After a bad season, just before he is about to start in what could be his final game, Jane tells Billy that she's leaving him...for good. Now with his career and love-life in balance, Billy battles against his emotional and physical limits as he strives for a Perfect Game. The suspense is never drawn back in this heartwarming drama about life, love, and risking it all For Love of the Game.

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Review :

9 on a scale of 10

I would have to say that I have seen very few movies better than For Love of the Game. My favorite genre is Romantic Comedy. This wasn't a comedy, but it was feel good. It was light drama and it was extremely well done.

Costner portrayed an aging baseball player with a romantic attachment to the game that reminded me of Robert Redford in The Natural - another movie I rated a 9. The symbolism of the movie was the notion of ending a romance for the game and transferring that romance to a woman. For him, at least, there was room for only one at a time. And, fortunately for her, his career was at the very end. Fortunately for us, we got to see his last game interspersed with flashbacks.

The movie was brilliantly done with respect to the actual game of baseball. I cannot recall having seen a sports movie that did such an excellent job of maintaining accuracy about the game. I honestly could have believed I was watching an actual game. The plays were realistic. The situations realistic. And, Vin Scully was sensational doing the play by play.

I've only rated a few movies as 10's in my life. One of them was Field of Dreams - another Costner vehicle. This movie wasn't far behind FOD. In fact, it was nearly as magical and it was a lot more romantic. Why the reviewers of IMDB only give it a 6.7 is beyond me.

Streaming Balls of Fury Online

Balls of Fury (2007)iMDB Rating: 5.2
Date Released : 29 August 2007
Genre : Comedy, Crime, Sport
Stars : Dan Fogler, Christopher Walken, George Lopez, Maggie Q
Movie Quality : HDrip
Format : MKV
Size : 700 MB

In the unsanctioned, underground, and unhinged world of extreme Ping-Pong, the competition is brutal and the stakes are deadly. Down-and-out former professional Ping-Pong phenom Randy Daytona is sucked into this maelstrom when FBI Agent Rodriguez recruits him for a secret mission. Randy is determined to bounce back and recapture his former glory, and to smoke out his father's killer - one of the FBI's Most Wanted, arch-fiend Feng. But, after two decades out of the game, Randy can't turn his life around and avenge his father's murder without a team of his own. He calls upon the spiritual guidance of blind Ping-Pong sage and restaurateur Wong, and the training expertise of Master Wong's wildly sexy niece Maggie, both of whom also have a dark history with Feng. All roads lead to Feng's mysterious jungle compound and the most unique Ping-Pong tournaments ever staged. There, Randy faces such formidable players as his long-ago Olympics opponent, the still-vicious Karl Wolfschtagg. Can Randy...

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Review :

Not the greatest "stupid movie" made, but it certainly made me giggle.

This has to be, quite possibly, the dumbest movie I have seen in a very, very long time.

However, that is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't think there was a single moment in this film that purposely wanted any smidgen of intelligence whatsoever.

And, heck, the reason I went to see this movie was because I thought it looked funny. And, guess what? I laughed. I don't know if this will go into the treasury of greatest stupid movies ever made, but it did leave me with a smile on my face.

I think it was because it was ping-pong. Yes, I like a good game of ping-pong as much as the next person, but come on. It's ping-pong. Just try telling that to these characters. The fact that anyone could take so slight a game so seriously cracked me up.

And that's where this movie works.

It's pointless, silly, and down-right brain cell killing. But I found myself forgiving everyone because they were so good-hearted in waltzing around with their idiotic humor.

No, it will probably not be nominated for Best Picture. But as for dumb comedy goes, this nicely held its own.

Watch Freedom Writers Online

Freedom Writers (2007)iMDB Rating: 7.5
Date Released : 8 March 2007
Genre : Biography, Crime, Drama
Stars : Hilary Swank, Imelda Staunton, Patrick Dempsey, Scott Glenn
Movie Quality : HDrip
Format : MKV
Size : 870 MB

It's 1994 in Long Beach, California. Idealistic Erin Gruwell is just starting her first teaching job, that as freshman and sophomore English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School, which, two years earlier, implemented a voluntary integration program. For many of the existing teachers, the integration has ruined the school, whose previously stellar academic standing has been replaced with many students who will be lucky to graduate or even be literate. Despite choosing the school on purpose because of its integration program, Erin is unprepared for the nature of her classroom, whose students live by generations of strict moral codes of protecting their own at all cost. Many are in gangs and almost all know somebody that has been killed by gang violence. The Latinos hate the Cambodians who hate the blacks and so on. The only person the students hate more is Ms. Gruwell. It isn't until Erin holds an unsanctioned discussion about a recent drive-by shooting death that she fully begins to ...

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Review :

A superior entry in a long history . . .

"Everyone who remembers his own educational experience remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the kingpin of the educational situation." Sidney Hook, Education for Modern Man

It would be easy to criticize Freedom Writers as just another cliché-infested classroom redemption story, more Blackboard Jungle than History Boys. But because it is based on a true story of at-risk students attending Woodrow Wilson High in Long Beach, a voluntarily integrated school, I have to avoid accusing it of being derivative and offer that it relates the essential truth about education: Most students have a voice if a teacher can find it; most students can thrive when a teacher creates a sense of family amid chaos, as Emily Gruwell did in the early '90's of Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. The diaries her students wrote inspired students around the country to do the same.

Seeing the photo of the real Gruwell with her students as the end credits roll, I can understand cynics saying this is typical Hollywood—no teacher can look like Hillary Swank! But rising above the petty carping that includes skepticism about transformation of unruly kids into real students within a year, I have to admit it happened because of the transforming power of love and words. As in Charlotte's Web, both ingredients are potent reformers of the disaffected.

Gruwell sacrifices, as cases of true love sometimes require, her personal freedom and loses her marriage for the higher good of the young people she teaches. Admittedly, her slacker husband, Scott (Patrick Dempsey), doesn't deserve such a gifted wife, and her crusty dad, Steve (a monumentally weathered Scott Glenn), has some stereotypical responses to his daughter's choices. Most of all I object to those actors as students: They are way too old to be playing 14 and 15 year olds. Surely there are gifted teens who could do the job! Overall, however, the film rings true about the magic a dedicated teacher can do with rebellious but malleable teens.

For those of us who still toil in the fields of education, Freedom Writers reminds us why we love a profession that gives us a chance to save souls in the only way we can certify outside the uncertain faith of religion. This film is a superior entry in a long history of teaching brought to its ideal form in film.

Watch Diana (2013) Online

Diana (2013)iMDB Rating: 5.4
Date Released : 14 November 2013
Genre : Biography, Drama, Romance
Stars : Naomi Watts, Naveen Andrews, Cas Anvar, Charles Edwards
Movie Quality : BRrip
Format : MKV
Size : 700 MB

During the last two years of her life, Princess Diana embarks on a final rite of passage: a secret love affair with Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.

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Review :

A film benefiting from none of the charm of its otherwise talented star and director.

On paper, DIANA had everything going for it: the biopic had lined up one of the finest actresses working today for the title role (Naomi Watts), and paired her with a serious-minded director (Oliver Hirschbiegel) who had turned Adolf Hitler's final days into a gripping, powerful drama (Downfall)... there was even a precedent set by The Iron Lady, which proves that a biopic can be mediocre and/or take liberties with its subject and still provide room to think, feel, and appreciate the pure strength and power of the performances on display. Not so with DIANA, sadly.

Watts plays the tragically doomed people's princess just as her marriage to Prince Charles is properly disintegrating. Left with a husband in name but not in fact, Diana tries to figure out how to redefine herself independently of her estranged Royal Family. The answer, apparently, is to fall in love with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews), who inspires her to do more and better with the media attention lavished so excessively upon her.

The senseless tragedy of Diana's death in a car accident, hunted down by media to her very end, looms large over the entire film, as well it should - but it's not the only tragedy that befalls it. That dubious honour belongs to Stephen Jeffreys' script, which is full of unrealistic characters and ponderous dialogue. For all of Watts' valiant efforts, there isn't much wit and soul to her Diana. The cunning ingenuity she displays in her battle against the Royal Palace in the first ten minutes of the film fades away rather too quickly, leaving her to be defined almost entirely in terms of a soppy, soapy love story that never really takes flight.

Any depth of character or charitable intent that she's given is connected to her growing love for Hasnat: a reductive and regrettable approach if ever there was one. It doesn't help that Hasnat is portrayed in so frustrating a way. Andrews is just as hamstrung by the script as Watts, forced to deliver painfully awkward and stilted lines while playing some kind of spoilt man-child who alternates between throwing tantrums and pleading for Diana to understand the inexplicable predicament he believes himself to be in.

Anyone searching for depth and complexity here will be sorely disappointed. DIANA provides few, if any, real insights into a public figure who suffered some of the greatest slings, arrows and presumptions attributable to media speculation and persecution. Rather than clearing away some of those cobwebs and claptrap, this melodramatic biopic adds to them: reducing a complex, troubled human being trapped in extraordinary circumstances to the shallow, unsympathetic female lead in a badly-written, utterly banal romantic drama. If there were a greater tragedy than Diana's untimely death, it's the fact that she's forced to live on in this film.

Watch The Last King of Scotland Online

The Last King of Scotland (2006)iMDB Rating: 7.7
Date Released : 8 February 2007
Genre : Biography, Drama, History
Stars : James McAvoy, Forest Whitaker, Gillian Anderson, Kerry Washington
Movie Quality : BRrip
Format : MKV
Size : 700 MB

In the early 1970s, Nicholas Garrigan, a young semi-idealistic Scottish doctor, comes to Uganda to assist in a rural hospital. Once there, he soon meets up with the new President, Idi Amin, who promises a golden age for the African nation. Garrigan hits it off immediately with the rabid Scotland fan, who soon offers him a senior position in the national health department and becomes one of Amin's closest advisers. However as the years pass, Garrigan cannot help but notice Amin's increasingly erratic behavior that grows beyond a legitimate fear of assassination into a murderous insanity that is driving Uganda into bloody ruin. Realizing his dire situation with the lunatic leader unwilling to let him go home, Garrigan must make some crucial decisions that could mean his death if the despot finds out.

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Review :

Great Acting! and Gillian Anderson!

I like movies based on real people in history. Because of the Oscar buzz surrounding Forest Whitaker now, I knew this movie is about Idi Amin. This is of course a familiar name in my childhood (asked in General Information contests), but I don't really know much about him, except that he was a dictator.

This film has a documentary feel to it. It is really very realistic, even if upon reading background info that the Dr. Garrigan character is fictional. Even though granted that the Idi Amin regime was compressed into a coherent Hollywood storyline, it does not feel contrived. The final sequence of events at the Entebbe Airport was very suspenseful indeed.

Idi Amin was not really the lead character in this movie. It is actually Dr. Nicholas Garrigan. Being a physician, I could not help but be able to identify with his situation and dilemmas. Would you accept to be the personal physician of a country's president upon his personal request? It seems to be an offer and career opportunity you could not refuse.

There is sex and violence in this movie. I could not agree though with Dr. Garrigan's rashness regarding his love affairs, particularly his morals of hooking up with wives of his supposed friends. But considering that this movie is set in the 1970s, that was a totally different world pre-HIV. The violence, what can I say? After watching one violent film after the other, you get sort of anesthetized already. That said, the scene with hooks at the airport was still something else! The acting is very good. Forest Whitaker has channeled the Idi Amin persona very effectively. I could feel the scary and suffocating craziness whenever he is on screen. There's something about this performance being based on a real character though. I think it would be harder to essay a totally fictional character since you have to create this new character from scratch. And I feel James McAvoy (who was actually Mr. Tumnus in "Narnia"!) did so very well as Dr. Garrigan. You dislike him, yet you can empathize the stickiness of his situation.

Before I end this review, I have to mention that I was very happy to see the luminous Ms. Gillian Anderson again. I totally did not know she was in this film and it was a welcome surprise. She handled her few scenes as the wife of a volunteer doctor very well indeed. I hope she gets meatier movie roles in the future.

Streaming The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Online

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)iMDB Rating: 7.6
Date Released : 8 November 2007
Genre : Biography, Crime, Drama, History, Western
Stars : Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard, Mary-Louise Parker
Movie Quality : BRrip
Format : MKV
Size : 870 MB

The last months of Jesse James's life, from meeting Robert Ford, a 19-year-old who idolizes Jesse, to the day Ford shoots him. Jesse's a wanted man, living under a pseudonym, carrying out a train robbery, disappearing to Kentucky, and reappearing to plan a bank holdup with Robert and Robert's brother as his team. The rest of the gang is dead, arrested, or gone from Missouri. Whenever Jesse's around, there's tension: he's murderous, quixotic, depressed, and cautious. Ford wants to be somebody and wants the reward. On April 3, 1882, things come to a head: Jesse is 34, Robert 20. Ford becomes famous, reenacting the shooting on stage, facing down the label "coward," shot dead in 1892.

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Review :

One of the best so far this decade

This almost defines the oft-used term "elegiac Western". It has some of the well-worn themes of Westerns, such as the creation of Western myth vs. the cold, harsh realities. But for some reason, it never feels like anything else I've ever seen. It has a style more reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni than any of the great Western filmmakers. It's slow and likes to surround its characters with enormous landscapes that almost swallow them whole. But it's also not averse to close-ups. Director Dominik, who has only made one other film, Chopper, and it's been seven years since then, loves to concentrate on facial expressions, as well as body language (don't know if I've ever seen a film with this level of attention to body language, or maybe it's just not something to which I've ever been lead to pay much attention). The cast is uniformly brilliant. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck are the titular leads, and neither has done as well. Affleck is a revelation. The supporting cast includes Sam Rockwell, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeremy Renner, Garrett Dillahunt and Paul Schneider. Andrew Dominik is the star, though. There have been plenty of successful Westerns over the past couple of decades, but I'd be hard-pressed to name a single one out that so beautifully and completely re-invents the genre. 3:10 to Yuma may well be the big money-making Western of the year, but I think history will recall it as being the year that The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was released. It is the best film of the year so far, and will be hard to top.

Streaming The Devil's Double (2011) Online

The Devil's Double (2011)iMDB Rating: 7.1
Date Released : 8 September 2011
Genre : Biography, Drama, Thriller
Stars : Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Raad Rawi, Philip Quast
Movie Quality : HDrip
Format : MKV
Size : 870 MB

Baghdad, the playground for the rich and infamous, where anything can be bought - but for a price. This is Uday Hussein's world and with his depraved lust for debauchery and immorality, he helps himself to whatever turns him on. When army lieutenant Latif Yahia is summoned to Saddam's palace, he is faced with an impossible request - to be Uday's 'fiday' - his body double, or have his family condemned to death. In a world entrenched in betrayal and corruption, knowing who to trust becomes a matter of life or death for Latif, as he battles to escape from his forced existence.

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Review :

surprisingly good

Saw this movie today at Berlinale and was pleasantly surprised that as I walked out of it thought to myself that it's been a really long time since I saw a decent movie like this. Before I looked Uday/Latif up on the internet I had doubts about how close the plot was to reality, turned out to be quite interesting showing that, well everything in the movie has (kind of) happened. Makes it disturbing to know on a different level.

The depiction of Uday's psychotic character throughout the movie seems very real and does not spare or cheat the viewers any disturbing torture/abuse scenes. Some people might dislike this, some maybe even enjoy it.

That being said I liked the overall acting, both main and lesser characters did a good job. And on a side note: i found the movie sets and props were quite awesome.

btw: I can still remember the news of Uday's and Qusai's deaths back in 2003, but that meant little to me at that time. At least now i know.