DVD

Explicit Ills

Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on August 7th, 2009

This film is rooted in the activism of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. Within the film are the stories of several Philadelphia residents, told in sporadic vignettes that are loosely tied together by a mysterious flier that is being handed out in the neighbourhood. While some characters cross into other’s stories they mainly stay separated until the very final scene which reveals that the flier was out promote a rally on behalf of the aforementioned Campaign.
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The Tigger Movie

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 7th, 2009

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“Now this might be the room of any small boy, but it happens to belong to a boy named Christopher Robin, and like most small boys, Christopher Robin had toy animals to play with. And together they had many remarkable adventures in an enchanted place called The Hundred Acre Wood. But out of all of his animal friends, Christopher Robin’s very best friend was a bear called Winnie The Pooh.”

“Oh Bother”A.A. Milne was quite an eclectic writer. He wrote murder mysteries that even appeared on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. From that fertile mind would also come a place known as the Hundred Acre Wood.
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Big Man Japan

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 6th, 2009

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Daisato (director/co-writer Hitosi Matumoto) is having his daily life filmed by a TV crew. This life is pretty depressing. He doesn’t make much money, his wife has left him, and his neighbours hate him. His job isn’t exactly low-stress, either: he is Big Man Japan, a hereditary job that involves defending Japan against monster attacks. So whenever he gets the call, he has to run to the nearest power plant, get himself zapped until he grows into a 50-foot giant, and do battle with various bizarre creatures (one looks like a plucked chicken with a huge eyeball/penis appendage). But though he does his best, his ratings are down, his show is broadcast in the dead hours of the morning, his agent appears to be taking advantage of him, and there’s a new monster in town that mops the floor with him on their first encounter.
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Moon Machines

Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on August 6th, 2009

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This is a 6-part series presented by the Discovery Channel, documenting the different devices created so that America could reach the moon by a deadline that then US president Kennedy had promised the nation.
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All Hat

Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on August 6th, 2009

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The story originally seems to set itself up to be that of redemption for a young man who is fresh out of jail. While this story is around, there seems to be parallel stories that arise as subplot but soon race alongside the original tale like proverbial track horses (and horses also just so happen to be the nexus for said plots). Just as one seems to buck into the lead, another comes along to grab the focus.
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This American Life: Season 2

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 5th, 2009

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This American Life, broadcast on the Showtime network, is a half-hour show based on, or more accurately, spun off from, the award-winning Chicago Public Radio show of the same name. Each episode is loosely based on a theme, which is then explored through stories about real people. The content and style varies from week to week, with stories ranging from light-hearted to incredibly sad.
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American Gladiators (The Original Series) — The Battle Begins

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 5th, 2009

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I, of all people, should know that one person’s cultural detritus is another’s fond nostalgia, and what better example of that can there be than this release. A strange mix of athletic contest, pro-wrestling posturing and silly gimmick game show, this series (which has recently been reborn) pitted hard-bodied contestants against the even-more-hard-bodied (at least in appearance) Gladiators of the title. Some contests involve knocking each off a beam, or dodging tennis balls fired from a gun while trying to get in a shot of one’s own. Or then there’s swinging in on a rope in the attempt to knock the Gladiator off a pedestal. It’s all pretty silly, made even more so by the straight-faced colour commentary. If the intent was to satirize sports broadcast generally, then this is quite brilliantly funny, at least at first, but the joke can’t sustain itself over multiple seasons.
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Milk

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 5th, 2009

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Foreseeing his own assassination, Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), America’s first openly gay elected politician, records his memoirs. The film flashes back to follow his narration, tracking his transformation from don’t-make-waves semi-closeted New Yorker to activist San Franciscan. In his new home, he decides to run for City Supervisor, and after numerous failed attempts, which take a toll on his personal relationships, he finally wins. The battles are only just beginning, however, as he must now wage war against the intolerant laws being pushed by California Governor Briggs and anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant. Meanwhile, a prickly professional relationship with fellow Supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin) is sowing the seeds of tragedy.
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Torchwood: Children of Earth

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 5th, 2009

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“There’s one thing I always wanted to ask Jack back in the old days. I wanted to know about that Doctor of his, the man who appears out of nowhere and saves the world, except sometimes he doesn’t. All those times in history where there was no sign of him, I wanted to know why not. But I don’t need to ask anymore. I know the answer now. Sometimes The Doctor must look at this planet and turn away in shame.”

It all started some decades ago with the BBC’s immensely popular television series, Dr. Who.
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Early Edition: The Second Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 5th, 2009

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Imagine waking up one morning to find a newspaper on your front porch. Here in Tampa, the fact that the paper is actually on your front porch is miracle enough. Imagine further that this ordinary looking paper isn’t today’s paper at all, but rather tomorrow’s edition. If you could trust that what you held was the genuine article, so to speak, just think of the possibilities. For most of us our thoughts turn to the myriad ways in which we could enrich ourselves: sports scores, lottery numbers, even stock tips. If, however, you’re less selfish,
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Leverage: The First Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 3rd, 2009

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“Corporations… They have all the money. They have all the power and they use it to make people like you go away. Right now you’re suffering under an enormous weight. We provide the Leverage.”

I remember seeing like a million ads for this show toward the end of the last football season. If memory serves it was heavily promoted during the Super Bowl. In any case, I had made a mental note to catch it, but it was still several weeks away and I ended up forgetting about it by then. Fortunately, the release of the first season on DVD has given me a second chance for a first look at this intriguing series.
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The Middleman

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 1st, 2009

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Running for a single season in 2008, this ABC Family production is a humorous pastiche of superheroics and Avengers-style adventure. Natalie Morales plays Wendy Watson, a struggling artist making ends meet as a temp. When she demonstrates incredible unflappability when a monster is unleashed at her current job, straight-arrow superhero the Middleman (Matt Keeslar) recruits her to join him in the fight against all sorts of bizarre menaces. A sampling of titles gives the flavour of the series: “The Boy-Band Superfan Interrogation,” “The Palindrome Reversal Palindrome,” “The Flying Fish Zombification.”
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Messengers 2: The Scarecrow

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 1st, 2009

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In 2007, the Pang Brothers, whose The Eye was one of the spookiest ghost stories of recent memory, made their North American debut with The Messengers, a disappointingly ordinary tale of a haunted farm. Nobody asked for a sequel, to my knowledge, but here it is, apparently closer to writer Todd Farmer’s original story than the first film.
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The Lucy Show — The Official First Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 29th, 2009

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This was Lucille Ball’s follow-up to I Love Lucy, and the first season is, apparently, the most highly regarded one. Here Ball is a widowed mother of two, sharing her home with best friend Vivian Vance, who is a divorced mother of one. All the other members of household are, of course, faced with the disasters triggered by Lucy. I screened this set immediately after viewing its close contemporary, Petticoat Junction, and the difference between the two was instructive. There are plenty of hoary gags and situations on The Lucy Show, but there is an enormous difference between the shows thanks to the comic genius of Lucille Ball. Her energy fills each episode, her timing is spot-on, but there is also her commitment to a type of physical comedy that to this day remains pretty much the exclusive domain of male performers. Not only does she make this style her own, she grounds it in a female reality. There is a reason she was so beloved a performer, and why her work still stands up today.
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Petticoat Junction — The Official Second Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 28th, 2009

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Once upon a time, there was an age of TV where hit shows where women in their 20s played high school students, and an entire episode could revolve around the burning crisis of whether the dog that followed one daughter home could stay. It is from this era that Petticoat Junction hails. This series about a widowed mother and her three daughters tending the Shady Rest Hotel ran for seven years, and begat both Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies, in that characters from all three series would interact with each other.
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Third Watch: The Complete Second Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 22nd, 2009

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Since the events of 911 there has been a lot more appreciation, at least publicly, for the real life heroes who populate fire and police stations all over the country. Few jobs offer so little reward for such high risk all in the name of protecting our society from harm. It’s likely no coincidence that while Third Watch began a couple of years before those events, it reached its peak in popularity in the months and years that followed. A better than average procedural drama, Third Watch offered a look at both police officers and firefighters along with their paramedics.
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Peanuts: 1960’s Collection

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 22nd, 2009

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I grew up on the Peanuts creations of Charles M. Schulz. Most of us have, in some way or another. His newspaper comic strip is one of the longest running and most successful strips of all time. The work has been translated into every language currently spoken on the planet. The images of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and the rest of the Peanuts gang have appeared on just about any kind of product imaginable. Our pop culture contains too many references to the strip to mention briefly. For me, it was the television specials starting in the mid 1960’s that brought the gang into my life.
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Matlock: The Third Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 22nd, 2009

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The third season of Matlock brought more of the same. If you’re a fan, that’s very good news indeed. What is that, you ask? Imagine Sheriff Andy Taylor older and now an attorney, and you pretty much have the setup for Matlock. Forget for a second that both characters were played by Andy Griffith. That’s not all they have in common. Matlock is every bit the “southern gentleman” that Taylor was. He might be a little smarter, but he walks and talks like Andy Taylor.
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Bewitched — The Complete Eighth & Final Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 22nd, 2009

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This, the final season of the series, opens with Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) and Darrin (Dick Sargent) on a European tour. This means stock shots of various European landmarks before we return to rather unconvincingly dressed-up studio backlots. There are a few two-parters in the mix, including the opening episodes, where Samantha is zapped back to the court of Henry VIII, and a late-season adventure where the time travel goes the other way, and George Washington is brought forward to the present. Special note should be made of Episode 3, where the Loch Ness Monster shows up, in all his googly-eyed, man-in-a-costume glory.
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Hotel — The First Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 22nd, 2009

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As a Henry Mancini score swells with unapologetic cheese, we are swept into the world of the luxurious St. Gregory Hotel in San Francisco. Owned by aging matriarch Bette Davis (replaced, when she had to pull out due to illness, by Anne Baxter, as her sister-in-law), the Hotel’s General Manager is James Brolin, who has lots of time to wander around the lobby greeting the various guest stars. In other words, he’s Mr. Roarke to the St. Gregory’s Fantasy Island. What follows is pure fromage of the Aaron Spelling variety, with every other guest star a fading Familiar Face, no end of improbable crises, painful comic relief, unintentional comedy gold in the dramatic moments, and much of the feel of a 1970s disaster movie minus, sadly, the disaster itself (but you can always re-watch The Towering Inferno to make yourself feel better).
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Coco Chanel

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 20th, 2009

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In 1954, Coco Chanel (Shirley MacLaine) unveils her first collection in 15 years. The reception is disastrous. As she struggles to bounce back from the fiasco, she flashes back over her life. The bulk of the film then follows the young Chanel (Barbora Bobulova) and her love affairs, first with a callow playboy (Sagamore Stévenin), then with the Englishman (Olivier Sitruk) who will be the great love of her life. Along the way, we see a little bit of her development as a fashion designer.
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Iron Butterfly – Concert & Documentary Europe 1997

Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on July 20th, 2009

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Unless you were around for Iron Butterfly’s big boom in 1968, you might remember this band best as the composers of that song the organ player plays for 17 minutes in that episode of The Simpsons in which Bart sells his soul. Yes, this is how I knew them for much of my youth, and I thought of them best then too.
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The List

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 17th, 2009

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The List is adapted from a novel of the same name written by Robert Whitlow. After returning home from his father’s funeral, Renny Jacobsen (Chuck Carrington) discovers he is the inheritor of his family’s seat in a secret society founded during the civil war. However, Renny suspects the society’s activities are more troubling than they lead on and decides to examine them more closely. When his inquiries are uncovered by the group’s leader (Malcolm McDowell) Renny becomes targeted by a mysterious force that has the power to destroy him and the people he holds close.
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The Betrayed

Posted in No Huddle by Gino Sassani on July 10th, 2009

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Jamie (George) has just been in a violent car accident that was really not an accident at all. She awakes to find herself prisoner in a dirty warehouse room. She discovers that she and her young son have been kidnapped, but her captors are not looking for ransom. Her husband has been secretly working for some pretty bad dudes, and he has squirreled away 44 million dollars of the bad guys’ money. Now they want it back.
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Dragon Hunters

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 9th, 2009

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In a mythical world, a series of apocalyptic prophecies are coming true. These events presage the awakening of a world-devouring dragon. Dragon hunters are needed more than ever, but all of the knights of yore are dead or insane. The only game in town is a couple of misfits: Lian-Chu, who still bears the trauma of the night his village was destroyed by the dragon, and his friend Gwizdo, a two-bit con artist. They are accompanied by Hector, a strange little scene-stealer who might be a rabbit or a dog. Zoe, the excitable niece of the decrepit and blind king, recruits the motley crew to defeat the evil, and off they go, journeying to the end of the world to face terrible danger.
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