Posts by Archive Authors

Does anyone remember The Facts of Life? The show ran from 1979 to 1988, but then there was syndication and some reunion movies. So it had a long life and was consistently popular for its predominantly female cast. Where are they now? Blair (Lisa Whelchel) did very well on the 2012 season of Survivor, for one. They were all very young when the show started but were beginning to consider college and apartments in the final years, leaving behind the safe confines that Edna Garrett (Charlotte Rae) had provided. But over the years various cast members came and went. There is a young wise guy in this season who later became a big star. No, it wasn't Leonardo DiCaprio, because that was the series Growing Pains for the 1991 and 1992 seasons. It wasn't Molly Ringwald, because that was the first two seasons of The Facts of Life. The Facts of Life Season Seven is when a young George Burnett (George Clooney) was introduced in 1985. It was one of Clooney's first regular gigs. He also a semi-regular on Rosanne a couple of years later. Tootie (Kim Fields) was another cast member who was in all 201 episodes. Kim Fields went on to star with Queen Latifah in 118 episodes of Living Single. Natalie (Mindy Cohn) was also in all the episodes. Mindy went on to voice Velma in numerous Scooby-Do cartoons. Charlotte Rae (155 episodes) and Nancy McKeon (188 episodes) were the two other main cast members and worked erratically after the show concluded.

The show started with Edna heading a boarding school for girls, but as the years passed she started a shop called Edna's Edibles with the girls helping out. Season Seven starts right after Edna's Edibles burned down, and after dealing with that very special episode, they started a gift shop full of crazy collectibles. George is the contractor they finally hire to do the renovations. George had lived in the Middle East and frequently made light-hearted jokes about his stay there. That is a sign that it took place in the 1980's. Things were different then. Everybody had big hair and strange pastel-colored clothes. The music was full of synthesizers. That makes reissues like this like time capsules. It's not just nostalgia, but an examination of our shared past. Clooney is barely recognizable with his poofy, goofy black mullet and skinny frame. Clooney's future business partner years later, Grant Heslov (Good Night and Good Luck), makes an appearance in an episode as one of Blair's dates.

Walt Disney was a dreamer. Some of his dreams were realized. Some were not. Disney built a kingdom. He built more than one, in fact. One of Walt's dreams that was not realized was the experimental prototype community of tomorrow (EPCOT). He did incorporate some of the ideas of EPCOT into the Disney World theme park, but it was a mere shadow of the original dream. One of the essential elements of EPCOT was, and is, Tomorrowland.  Disney was widely admired in the 1960's by urban planners for his visionary views about the possibilities of the future.
Unfortunately, Disney died in 1966, and the board of directors severely cut back Walt's original vision. Of course, Disney World wound up on 27,258 acres that is a short drive from NASA's main launch site, Cape Canaveral.

In the film Tomorrowland, Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is the daughter of Eddie (Tim McGraw), who is an engineer at NASA. Unfortunately, NASA is not what it used to be, and Eddie is being phased out. In a separate storyline, years earlier in 1964, a young inventor shows up at the New York World's Fair (the time and place that Disney introduced many innovations) with a flying jet pack. That inventor grows up and is central to the story. That young inventor grows up to be grouchy malcontent, Frank Walker (George Clooney). David Nix (Hugh Laurie) is also important to the story, because he is the inventor of Tomorrowland, and Nix first meets Walker at the 1964 World's Fair. A magical young girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) is the final essential ingredient, because she is the catalyst for change throughout the story.

by Dustin P. Anderson

This DVD follows three standups, K. Douglas Tatum, Tone-X and Michael Colyer, as they perform for a live studio audience. We also follow Tommy Ford as he terrorizes the headquarters of Bossip, a gossip website. I would honestly love to tell you more in the summary of this DVD, but there is nothing more to it. A gossip website decided to release a DVD regarding comedy of some sort. This DVD was not good; entertaining such a notion that this DVD could be good should not enter any potential viewer’s mind. From the moment you play the opening credits, you can tell that this was made on a budget; more than that, it looks like it was made on a budget in the nineties. The small, unimportant things that fly by you while the names of the people responsible for this DVD come into view would not look out of place in a movie like Hackers. A lot of dated computer code graphics, a microchip (because technology?) and the sound used for almost every “computer working” moment in every TV show or bad movie (think Dexter’s Laboratory meets Ghost in the Machine). That’s just the first couple of seconds; then we are led into seeing how “The regular person feels about current events” by Tommy Ford. The interviews are overly cut with bad transitions, and lead us to one of my biggest problems with the DVD, the skits. These skits take up about half of the DVD’s run time, and none of them make me laugh or even remotely interested in the happenings at Bossip. I would say that I might not get it because I don’t frequent the Bossip site, but I was familiar with the stories talked about here just from looking at social media, and none of what they were saying was anything new or exciting.  The problem with a gossip column creating a DVD for public consumption is that I will never want to go back to it, since half of what they are talking about are things that have come and gone. It dates the material and makes this AT BEST something to rent. It’s the same problem that I have with movies like Date Movie or Meet the Spartans; the current humor used makes them a quick burn and severely limits the re-watchability.

by Dustin P. Anderson

We follow Melissa, a child neglected by her parents, who argue and are consumed by their careers. Melissa meets a crab and adopts this creature as her pet, feeding it food from her father’s science experiment. Melissa loses her parents in a tragic explosion and is taken in by her uncle. Twenty years after the explosion she has become a “public menace”, shooting anyone who comes close to her property, where she keeps the now-giant crab. The crab goes unnoticed until her eggs start hatching and terrorizing people in the woods. When people start killing her babies, she goes on a rampage and starts terrorizing everyone who was unlucky enough to touch her children. Can Melissa keep her friend from destroying the town?

by Dustin P. Anderson

Scholastic presents the audience with a collection of Halloween themed children’s books to prepare the little ones for a night of fun, junk food, and terror. In this DVD the creators have compiled a slew of short books that range from educational to moralistic, from scary to lighthearted. These books represent different parts of the world and seek to bring such classics as Where the Wild Things Are to life. The first thing I noticed about this DVD was that it needs a different type of review style. In the interest of time and space I shouldn’t go through 20 different stories and give someone a quick review on each while trying to give my overall impression of the DVD as a whole. I also can’t treat this as one big concurrent collection due to changing themes, animation speeds, art styles, the decade in which it was made, etc. So I decided to give you my opinion on a couple of stories that should be appropriate for whatever you want for your child, then give my good and bad about the DVD in the closing paragraphs.

"Meet the Robertson clan. They turned duck calls into a multi-million-dollar empire.  But running a family business is tough when the family just wants to run wild." 

The Robertson family is quickly becoming the most recognizable family on TV, considering they are flooding the stores with their books, DVD’s, and many other products you can find at Wal-Mart.  I can’t help but think this is a family that is doing everything right, and good for them for the success they’ve managed.

Gael Garcia Bernal and Alice Braga are both substantial screen presences in big Hollywood movies for quite some time now. Braga has been in big films like I Am Legend, Predators, and Elysium, while Bernal has been in a long string of interesting projects too long to mention, so I'll single out two by Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Babel and Amores Perros. They also co-starred previously in Blindness. Ardor is a much lower-profile movie. It seems like a passion project for Bernal, who is a producer on the project that is meant to be socially conscious and appeal to the South American market. It was filmed in the Argentinian rain forest and is trying to be a modern day western.

Ardor (The Burning) is very much like an old-fashioned western. It is a simple film about tobacco farmers in the wilderness trying to survive the rugged terrain. The complication is that roving bands of men come and slaughter and burn people off their farms in the area. Bernal plays a mysterious stranger who comes out of the forest to aid Braga as her father is butchered by the men. The movie moves with a hypnotic slow pace as Bernal and Braga manage to escape and hide together in the forest. The scenery is monochromatic and uniform, so it is hard to tell where they are. It seems they don't stray far from the sparse farm buildings which we see from time to time. The dynamic between the two hiding in the woods and the greater number of men hunting them does change for long periods of time. It allows the two to bond in the rainforest. Braga does take an opportunity provide a brief sex scene in the rain. It is all very sweaty and rainy. At some points we see a leopard lurking about, which appears to be a spirit animal of Bernal's.

The most cynical people in the world are Madison Avenue advertising executives. There are probably some other types that would be in the running, but I think they would probably concede I'm right. Thom Payne (Steve Coogan) is a modern-day ad exec who immediately takes shots at the show Mad Men in his frequent narrations. That's not the only thing he and his wife Lee (Kathryn Hahn) curse out in the profanity-laced Showtime series, Happyish. This show is famous or infamous for being the last project that Phillip Seymour Hoffman worked on before he overdosed (but he did complete a pilot episode). Coogan was eventually brought in to replace Hoffman after much hand-wringing and second-guessing. They are pretty dissimilar actors. Hoffman was full of vulnerability and an unpredictable intelligence. I'd love to see the pilot Hoffman filmed, but it has not been made available as yet. It definitely changes the dynamic of the show. Coogan doesn't have the same gravitas, or warmth for that matter. Coogan tends to give off an arrogant and superior vibe. That changes everything.

Happyish, in general, also gives off a totally different feel than the multiple award winner, Mad Men. They take place in different universes. Mad Men is an epic look at the history of one agency over the years. Happyish is a present day satiric attack on just about everything in the culture. Satire can be a rough thing to pull off. Show creator Shalom Auslander was in advertising, and he is aggressive in his attacks on just about anything that comes to mind. When his barbs hit, they hit dead on, and when they miss, they miss by a mile. It is definitely hit or miss. Some of the more successful satire is on actual products and animated company representatives like the Keebler elves and the Geico gecko; both are brought on to spout unconventional bon mots. Coca-Cola, New York Life, the United States Armed Forces, and J.P. Morgan are some of the other real-life targets of other jokes. At one point, Rob Reiner is brought in to direct a commercial using real-life little people to replace the animated Keebler elves. Some of the other guest stars in the 10-episode run are Ellen Barkin as a corporate headhunter, Carrie Preston (True Blood) as a nervous account executive, Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) as the agency head, Richard Kind as Moses, James Deen as a porno actor philosopher, and even Hitler makes a cameo as the somewhat displeased director of a Coke commercial. Coogan is the creative director who has to deal with two 25-year-old Swedes, Gottfrid and Gustaf, who are very social-media-conscious.