Archive for the ‘BD-Live’ Category
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 31st, 2010
Vampires are hot right now, at least that’s what everyone keeps telling me. The truth is that everyone is absolutely wrong. Vampires are not hot right now. They’ve always been hot. Since at least since 1897 when Bram Stoker took the world by storm in one of the earliest examples of a horror novel. Of course, I’m talking about Dracula. Dracula, as a character, might have been based on the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler, but the vampire legend that Stoker perfected in Dracula is pure fiction. Still, it wasn’t quite Stoker’s novel that created the vampire craze, it merely lit the fuse.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 30th, 2010
It’s been said that all good things must come to an end. In television that could not be more true. In the world of entertainment good things end, often quickly without a chance to leave any kind of an impact. Maybe six years wasn’t exactly quick for Lost, but at least it can’t claim not to have left an impact. The show changed how we watch television, and it will be a long time before anyone forgets about it.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 10th, 2010
“Okay, first of all, let me get something straight. This is a journal, not a diary. Yeah, I know what it says on the cover. But, when my mom went out to buy this thing, I specifically told her not to buy one that said ‘diary’ on it. This just proves that Mom doesn’t understand anything about kids my age.”
I guess I missed out on the phenomenon. Apparently in 2007 a guy named Jeff Kinney created a sort of crude comic book. The figures are little better than stick men, and the wit is something from the sixth grade.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 4th, 2010
“This is James Henry Trotter. He lived with his mother and father in a cozy little house by the sea. It was a wonderful life. They had each other, and they had their dreams. Then, one day a terrible thing happened. An angry rhinoceros appeared out of nowhere and gobbled up his poor mother and father…”
Pretty bizarre for a kiddie flick, wouldn’t you say? Not when Roald Dahl is penning the story. Roald Dahl was no stranger to children’s movies. Some of the most beloved classics in that genre were once just a thought in Dahl’s rather eccentric and delightfully twisted head
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 3rd, 2010
“I always wondered why nobody did it before me. I mean, all those comic books, movies, and TV shows. You’d think that one eccentric loner would have made himself a costume. I mean, is everyday life really so exciting? Are schools and offices so thrilling that I’m the only one who ever fantasized about this? Come on. Be honest with yourself. At some point in our lives, we all wanted to be a superhero. Who am I? I’m Kick Ass.”
You have to give the folks at Lionsgate some serious credit for the way they promoted Kick Ass. The film was generating a lot of buzz almost a year before it actually came out.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 19th, 2010
In an attempt to win over more of the male viewers into their audiences, filmmakers of the romantic comedy genre have tried many tactics. To date, very few of them have worked to any great extent. The problem appears to be getting the mixture just right. Too much of the guy stuff and you’ll turn away your core “chick” audience. Too little and you’re really not reeling in too many guys. Of course, we go anyway to please the ladies in our lives.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 15th, 2010
The name says it all. With just those four words, you can pretty much figure out everything you need to know about Hot Tub Time Machine. This is very much a party film in the tradition of the Saturday Night Live alumni movies of the 70’s and 80’s. With the release of this movie, you no longer need to travel back in time to 1986 to watch a film that relies almost entirely on sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll for most of its situational comedy. The rest gets filled in with your standard toilet humor. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, or who exactly I should blame
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Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on June 28th, 2010
Most people associate the book, War and Peace in the same respects as they do torture. A one thousand, two hundred and twenty five page book that is regarded as one of the most brilliant pieces of historical fiction is a nightmare to most advanced high school and college kids. However, perhaps more fascinating than any single piece of work by Leo Tolstoy is the life in which he lead. Last Station attempts to give us the last few years of the Count’s life in film form.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 7th, 2010
“I try to believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Count them, Alice. One, there are drinks that make you shrink. Two, there are foods that make you grow. Three, animals can talk. Four, cats can disappear. Five, there is a place called Underland. Six, I can slay the Jabberwocky.”
To be perfectly honest with you, I have never read either of the two Lewis Carroll books on which this film has been based. Under ordinary circumstances, that would put me at a decided disadvantage
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 25th, 2010
“On Robben Island, in Pollsmoor Prison, all of my jailers were Afrikaners. For 27 years I studied them. I learned their language. Read their books, their poetry. I had to know my enemy before I could prevail against them. And we did prevail, did we not?”
Leave it to Clint Eastwood to make even rugby look interesting. Of course, Eastwood himself would correct me and observe that Invictus isn’t really about rugby. As the words of Nelson Mandela above suggest, this movie wasn’t really about rugby at all.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 19th, 2010
“It doesn’t look like they have chicken tenders here.”
How can you not like Jackie Chan? If there has been a more versatile action or martial arts star, I haven’t heard from him. The man made a name for himself in China’s film industry as a remarkable martial arts performer. For decades he’s been the closest thing the film industry has seen to Bruce Lee. But, unlike Lee, Chan wasn’t content with being the best in a single genre. When he finally came to Hollywood, he decided it was a good idea to work a bit more lightheartedness into his films,
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 18th, 2010
“You, sir, are guilty of disseminating disbelief. Killing dreams. Committing first-degree murder of fantasy, which by Fairy Law, in order to pay your debt to humanity, you are hereby ordered to serve time as a Tooth Fairy. The normal sentence is one week, but because you have the nerve, the unmitigated gall, to actually call yourself a Tooth Fairy, thus making a mockery of everything we stand for, I’m sentencing you to two weeks Tooth Fairy duty.”
Dwayne (once The Rock) Johnson has made a bit of a new career move over the last few years.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 17th, 2010
For most of this last decade Mel Gibson might as well have vanished from the face of the planet. The once extremely popular actor had charmed the world. Women found his childish grin to be irresistibly sexy, and men bought into the “kick ass and crack a joke” style that made the Lethal Weapon films such a romp of fun. But lately, you expect him to be the subject of a “Where Are They Now” segment from a late show on television. It’s no secret why Gibson climbed so quickly out of the public eye. I’m sure everyone still remembers the drunk-driving arrest where Gibson compounded his already serious case of bad judgment with even worse judgment.
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Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on April 9th, 2010
Growing up in life came a little later for me than most people. Most people seem to hit maturity right around their later teen years and early twenties. Honestly, I didn’t really grow up until I hit my mid twenties. But what would happen if one was forced to grow up sooner, say around their seventeenth birthday? Well then, you might be like Jenny Mellor from An Education who had to grow up a lot sooner than she probably expected to.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 2nd, 2010
“Boggis, and Bunce and Bean. One fat, one short, and one lean. These horrible crooks, so different in looks, were none the less equally mean.”
Roald Dahl was one of the more eccentric writers to come upon the scene. While he often wrote for children, his work is most decidedly dark and often quite sinister. He’s most known for such tales as Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. His work has not been adapted to film as often as you might suspect given his popularity. The most famous was certainly Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, which was far brighter and more cheerful than the original work.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 31st, 2010
“More of this is true than you would believe.”
What was intended as a somewhat thought-provoking quirky comedy looks a lot like something you would expect to see on a late night rerun of The X-Files. All of the subject matter has been covered there, just not quite in this way. It all started with a non-fiction book written by Jon Ronson. He claimed to have researched various government studies in human behavior that entered into the world of the paranormal. It was part of an ideology of waging non-lethal war. It was a strange combination of 1980’s new age mysticism and actual studies that showed that soldiers in World War II were, in fact, quite reluctant to kill
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 30th, 2010
In the long run what was more important to Pixar and its relationship with Disney wasn’t the milestone that Toy Story provided being the first computer animated feature. Movies are, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, a business. In the end, a film has to make some money. Toy Story was like a private printing press for the two companies bringing in nearly $200 million at the box office. Add another nearly $200 million in foreign receipts, and this prototype of a movie pulled in nearly a half billion dollars before the first DVD was released. That’s huge for what was basically a children’s cartoon. The second Pixar film would be A Bug’s Life, and it would bring in nearly the same kind of jingle.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 30th, 2010
It’s hard to believe it, but Toy Story was the very first computer generated animated feature film. CG graphics had already appeared as parts of films starting with the “Genesis proposition video” from Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. It was a rather fitting movie for this Hollywood and technological first to occur. The piece was rather short and not as breathtaking as we’ve come to expect today, but, it did herald the beginning of a new era in filmmaking, to be sure. What better place for such an historical technological breakthrough than in Star Trek?
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Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on March 28th, 2010
Around Thanksgiving of last year, I started to see trailers of a particular movie that quite literally made me laugh out loud. The reason behind it is because I knew with the title of the movie and the obvious plot, there was no way I was not going to review it when it came to dvd & blu-ray. I have a reputation for certain movies, I guess you could say. That movie was Ninja Assassin. Several months later, I am reviewing it for a mass audience. Funny how that works.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 25th, 2010
If you are a regular reader here, you know I’m not much for the romantic comedy department. I tried to pass this one off on the rest of the staff but couldn’t find a taker. We finally got a woman to review this stuff, but not even she was enthused enough about this title to take it on. This experience is pretty typical when it comes to Did You Hear About The Morgans. With a $58 million budget and a $30 million gross at the box office, it would seem that a lot of folks took a pass on the movie. In less than 4 weeks it dropped from nearly 3000 screens across the fruited plain to just about 500.
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Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on March 19th, 2010
It seems like yesterday, but about a year ago; my cat of 14 years had died. Her name was Burns. She had survived through my college years and the worst period in my life during my 20’s. Sarah had come into my life at that point and I guess my cat finally realized she could let go. Burns was always a loyal companion and there to bring me up when I needed it. I never had a better pet than her, and I probably never will. Hachi, A Dog’s Tale is another story about a faithful animal, adapted from a Japanese true story.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 18th, 2010
It’s back to the 1950’s with its telltale alien invasion science fiction matinees. There’s Doo Wop coming out of the radio. The cars have tail fins and plenty of color and chrome. That’s right. This is 1950’s Americana. Well … almost. You see, the alien invaders are humaniacs. They turn the helpless population into mind-controlled zombies, and they eat brains for breakfast. Those sure are the classic cars, all right. But they’re rounded, and instead of wheels they ride on a cushion of air. And then there’s the “people”. They’re green. They have tentacles for hair. And they have only 4 fingers and toes on each hand or foot. Can anyone say, “Give me a high four”?
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 16th, 2010
If any studio out there knows princesses, it has to be Disney. Uncle Walt has brought us so many memorably magical moments in the realms of fairy godmothers and the rags to riches tradition. A list of such Disney characters would serve as a rather complete roll call of such familiar animated ladies: Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, and now you can add yet another name to the growing list. The studio that invented the animated fairy tale returns to its hand-drawn animation roots with The Princess And The Frog.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 15th, 2010
So, this guy goes to see three rabbis….
No, that’s not the start of some insensitive anti-Semitic joke. It’s the rather offbeat idea behind the latest film by the Coen brothers. Of course, off the wall is business as usual for Ethan and Joel Coen. Fans of the brothers’ work already know to expect the unexpected. You’re likely not looking for the same kind of logical coherence that you might otherwise demand in your movies. The films often share a modern allegory to some classic fable or tale.
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Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 29th, 2010
Madea’s been everywhere. She’s even been to jail. But I Can Do Bad All By Myself is not actually a Madea film, per se. She has a cameo, of sorts, but this film is based on a series of stage acts that Perry has collected under the single title of the film. So much of this movie has been out there on stage. I’m not really a fan of Perry’s Madea character and the collection of films she/he’s been involved in. I had a friend once who used to get them for another friend of his, and he used to joke about making me a copy. Now you know why we’re not friends any more.
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