Archive Authors

A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence is the title of a Swedish film that won the top award at Venice Film Festival. Many critics think it is one of the best movies of the year. It is also a movie that relatively few people will see. The main reason most people won’t see it is because it is an extremely odd film. It could be called boring and fascinating in the same breath. The film is made up a series of master shots depicting events that have very little narrative clarity. Some characters show up periodically but with little sense that their actions have any potency or potential purpose. The title suggests an underlying philosophy of existential confusion.
Read More

Dustin P. Anderson

Our story follows Davide, a scientist who is trying to exorcise aliens out of the bodies of people who have been abducted. One day Davide is visited by a strange girl who says that she is possessed by an alien. Davide and his team look into it and are startled when they find out that this girl is royalty, and possessed by a leader among the aliens. I would love to give you more explanation, but after sitting through this movie twice, I still cannot make heads or tails of what is going on. I have never been so confused while watching a movie. The small bits and pieces I could understand were that there is a guy who is trying to use the human soul to force out aliens who have taken control of a host body.
Read More

Dustin P. Anderson

Our story follows Kitch, one of only a few survivors from a deadly outbreak that has devastated much of the world. Kitch makes his living by taking down drones and stripping them for parts. The most valued part is Arcanum pellets, which have taken over as currency in this bleak future. One day, after trying to sell some Arcanum pellets to reclaim a camera that was stolen from him, he meets a drone marked with DR1 . Kitch thinks that this drone will lead him to his father, who was last seen trying to find a cure for the plague that ravaged the world. On his travels to find his father, he is joined by the niece of a gangster who is hunting them. The two search for Kitch’s dad together while trying to avoid her uncle and protecting DR1.
Read More

“Sometimes it’s better not to touch your dreams, take it from someone who knows.”

In the first season of Showtime’s Californication, we were introduced to David Duchovny’s character, bitter yet upbeat writer Hank Moody. Hank, after moving to Los Angeles on the heels of his first novel – a critical darling entitled “God Hates Us All” – has recently lost his long-time love and, by extension, his daughter, to a straight-arrow bore who makes his girlfriend Karen (Natascha McElhone) feel safe.
Read More

Dustin P. Anderson

As far as a synopsis for this movie goes, there isn’t too much to it. We are given a brief look inside the mind of a real-life serial killer. A psychopath has been given a conditional release from jail and is only interested in satiating his lust for killing. After some failed murder attempts, the killer finds an empty house and waits for the occupants to come home.  This movie has a lot to say, while being easy to summarize. The story is basic, but there is so much more to it than just the events that take place. It does a great job at making the killer seem more human when we see how clumsy he is at killing people. During the killer’s beginning inner monologue, he states, “this time he won’t get caught,” which, I thought meant he had some grand scheme in place to kill a bunch of people and never see the inside of a jail cell again.
Read More

“Looks like the crazy is starting.”

Actually, it started three seasons ago. The creator of Dawson’s Creek and The Vampire Diaries, Kevin Williams, delivers a thriller that is a bold new entry in the crime drama for television. The Following was 15 episodes of nail-biting bliss that kept the viewer guessing and riveted long after its gut-wrenching cliffhanger season after season. For a while I was beginning to wonder if Williamson had lost his touch with the Scream series, but what you’ll discover here is that Williamson may just be the king of creating and penning one of the darkest serial killers on the small screen. 
Read More

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.
Read More

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.
Read More

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.
Read More

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?
Read More

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.
Read More

“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.
Read More

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.
Read More

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.
Read More

by Dustin P. Anderson

Charlie Brown and his gang of friends are at it again; this time the crew must go to France for a foreign exchange program. Before his journey begins, Charlie Brown receives a strange letter from France telling him to come and stay at a Chateau. Little does Charlie Brown know, he is going to an infamous Chateau in this small French community, which is notorious for not allowing visitors. Charlie Brown and Linus sleep outside in a stable with no sign of anyone actually living at this place, but they are still provided food each morning by some unknown entity. It is up to Charlie Brown to find out who this person is, and why he has been forced into sleeping under such conditions.
Read More

by Dustin P. Anderson

Our series follows Mikey and his friends as they thrown into the digital world while trying to save a strange creature from certain death. This creature is a Digimon that leads him to encountering a strange, intangible voice which gives him the choice of saving the hurt Digimon or walking away. Mikey chooses to save him and in turn receives something known as a Fusion Loader, and is transported into the digital world. Once there, it is revealed to Mikey that the hurt Digimon is seeking to become the ruler of the Digiverse so he can protect all of his fellow Digimon from the evil overlord, Lord Bagra, conquering lands one by one. Facing insurmountable odds, it is revealed that Mikey has one thing the evil conqueror doesn’t: his Fusion Loader. This Fusion Loader is capable of fusing together all types of Digimon to create one new, more powerful being. With the Fusion Loader in hand, and his friends by his side, Mikey sets off to right the wrongs caused by the overlord.
Read More

Dennis Hopper was probably a friend of James Dean, since he appeared in two of Dean’s three films, Giant and Rebel Without a Cause. It’s hard to tell about Hopper, because he went through so many changes over the years. In the fifties and early sixties, he was clean-cut and quiet. After Dean’s death he started to acquire a rebellious streak, famously confronting director Henry Hathaway on the interpretation of a scene requiring 80 takes. It nearly destroyed Hopper’s career early on, but John Wayne got Hopper on two other Hathaway westerns, and fences were mended in the Old West.
Read More