My best friend passed away last month.

Actually she was murdered.

She had moved to New York in the spring to work on her music career. On September 19 she got into an argument with the man she was living with, and he shot her twice. She died on the scene.

Penna and I met in 2007 and became instant best friends. Within a year we were referring to each other as “brother and sister.” That’s how close we were – the 20-year age difference also made it quite easy for me to see her as a little sister.

She was one of the most gorgeous women I have ever seen or known. She was also remarkably bright and talented. Her death is a tragedy on many levels.

I have set up a memorial web site for her at http://pennapiererra.com/.

Rating:

You may have to go out of your way to find this movie, or maybe you’ll have to find it on DVD, but it will be worth the wait. This is one of the smartest and most well-made movies I’ve seen in a long, long while.

The basic premise is simplicity itself. Brendan Gleeson plays a highly eccentric Irish policeman. When international drug traffickers come to his small town, Don Cheadle from the FBI arrives to help work the case. Easy enough.

At first this movie seems charming but benign. Gleeson is foul-mouthed and mean-tempered. He samples drugs and hookers. But behind all that you sense a very keen mind. The first twenty minutes are entertaining, but the hook comes when the bad guys are revealed.

The first time you see them, they’re driving down a country road comparing Nietzsche quotes. They’re drug dealers and all that, but the level of discussion is very intellectual. It’s serious, yet hilarious at the…

Rating:

Gremlins In Space

This movie probably deserves better than two-and-a-half stars. It’s not really that bad. But I’m knocking it down a bit because they took a great premise and ruined it.

The premise in this film is that footage from the last actual moon landing shows that there’s critters up there. That eat people. Kind of. It’s shot in the “mockumentary” style made (in)famous by the “Blair Witch Project,” which I’ve always felt was the reality TV equivalent for film-making. There’s simply no substitute for a good cast, good direction, and good cinematography.

So I knocked down my rating right there because what could have been a stark and eerie film ended up looking like . . . the “Blair Witch Project.” The concept was great – to suggest a reason for stopping the moon landings based on an alien threat instead of political bullshit is great. It kind of borrowed from “Alien” in that the…

Rating:

First, let me say that I dig Kevin Smith. “Dogma” was one of the most brilliant things ever put on film and his concert films are epic. He’s kind of like the anti-Belichick on stage, he spends an hour answering one question and in the process gives you his life story.

“Red State” is his new political-social-horror flick and it’s tough for me to give it only 3.5 stars. Tough because it’s a film that needed to be made. Tough because I see where he was trying to go. And tough because . . . I dig Kevin Smith. If there was one word that summed up my rating it would be: “uneven.”

OK. So in a nutshell this one is about one of those hardcore Christian fundamentalist churches – you know: “praise the Lord and the ammunition”. They think homosexuals are the tool of the devil, aren’t really people, and therefore aren’t covered by that annoying…

Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots, is notorious for his dry, fact-filled, yet information-less press conferences. I got to thinking today, what would “BB” sound like if he was answering the kinds of questions that, say, a political candidate might get.