Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 10th, 2017
When we begin the second season of Blindspot, three months have passed since the first season's explosive finale. We are placed back in the action with the same time having passed on the show. Jane (Alexander) has been kept at a covert CIA black ops location where she is being tortured for information. It is a fortuitous time to rejoin the action, because we arrive just in time to see her engineer a clever escape. Meanwhile Kurt Weller (Stapleton) and his team have been back to more mundane FBI cases, and it's obvious they miss the excitement of working the tattoos. They're about to get their wish, and things are about to get pretty intense as we join the sophomore season of Martin Gero's Blindspot.
When Jane rejoins the team, there are now a lot of trust issues between them. She's upset that they allowed her to be taken and tortured, and the team has learned more about the organization that sent Jane to the FBI. Enter new co-leader of the team, NSA Agent Nas Kamel, played by The Good Wife alum Archie Panjabi. She has named the organization Sandstorm because of the fearful ones she experienced as a child. She had trusted the wrong agent, and it cost lives on her team when he betrayed them. Now it's a little personal, and she's not going to be quick to trust Jane.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by John Delia on August 9th, 2017
Putting a twist on the original movie Going in Style, director Zach Braff does a good job of reviving the comedy for modern-day audiences. He turns up the laughter with memorable situation comedy and actors who can deliver some of the best one-liners. It’s a lot of fun for a date night or just a chance to get away from the humdrum to laugh a little. Retired and trying to scrape by on his retirement check, Joe Harding (Michael Caine) is about to hit an unexpected brick wall. With his mortgage in jeopardy from lack of timely payments and his granddaughter needing help with tuition, he’s in a very tight spot. His best friends Albert Garner (Alan Arkin) and Willie Davis (Morgan Freeman), who have been living together for the past 25 years to curb expenses, are about to be in the same boat.
The company the three men have worked for has decided to close doors in America and movie their operation to a foreign country. This makes them not responsible for American retirement funds dumping all their former retirees and anyone being fired due to the dissolution and move to overseas operations. Now without their income, the three find themselves open to other measures. Joe comes up with a bright idea to rob the bank where their retirement funds are located. To add icing on the cake, it’s also the place where Joe has been bamboozled into one of those adjustable loans.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on August 8th, 2017
“Extraordinary people come with singular issues and needs.”
On the surface, being blessed with a genius-level intellect seems like good thing, right? So it's interesting that movies about uncommonly smart people (Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, and The Imitation Game to name a few) tend to focus on the extreme isolation and inevitable exploitation of these individuals. Gifted is about a potential “one-in-a-billion” math prodigy and her weary, protective uncle, who carries himself like someone who's seen too many movies about exploited geniuses and knows full well that “nobody likes a smart-ass.”
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on August 4th, 2017
An action film with a running time of 89 minutes should mean that it’s going to be lean on the story and keep things moving at a fast pace. S.W.A.T: Under Siege delivers just that, but unfortunately in the process delivers something that we’ve seen many times before. The film is being branded as a sequel (by name only) to S.W.A.T (2003), the film with Colin Farrell which was an adaptation from the TV series from the 70’s. S.W.A.T: Under Siege has nothing to do with any of the previous incarnations, and has relocated from sunny California to Seattle Washington. But is the film worth checking out? Well I’m not a fan of sequels that go straight to DVD, but this film does dangle a wild card for the audience that convinced me to give this a shot, Michael Jai White (Spawn, Black Dynamite).
It’s the 4th of July and the S.W.A.T unit is ready to have a short and easy day so they can get home and enjoy the holiday with their families. But what kind of an action movie would it be if the holiday didn’t take a turn for the worse with terrorists and a lot of gun fire? The team gets a call about a big shipment that’s being made at a shipping yard, with the DEA taking lead they head to the warehouse that turns out to be something more dangerous than it seems. After an intense firefight, instead of finding drugs or guns in a shipping container, they find a man The Scorpion (Jai White).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on August 4th, 2017
“It's not all it's cut out to be...it's not about being on stage all the time. It's about the killing of time.”
There certainly hasn't been a shortage of sitcoms starring stand-up comedians. Many of them (Roseanne, Home Improvement, Everybody Loves Raymond) have grafted the comic's persona onto a family-friendly format. Even the shows that have depicted the life of a comic tend to take a surreal approach (Louie) or fast-forward to the part where the star is an established comedian (Seinfeld). HBO's Crashing stands out because it honestly (and painfully) depicts the struggle of an aspiring stand-up...and makes it look very, very funny.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on August 3rd, 2017
“My persona's very, like, witty yet narcissistic.”
These self-aware words are spoken by Hannah Horvath, the on-screen alter ego of Girls star/creator Lena Dunham during the premiere of the show's final season. Of course, anyone who's watched Girls knows the “witty yet narcissistic” label applies to practically every character in Dunham's often flawed (and even-more-often brilliant) HBO dramedy. So while this final batch of episodes includes some superb moments, it's not a total surprise that this polarizing series concludes its run with a frustrating finale that is more satisfying for the show's creators than it is for its fans.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on July 31st, 2017
Ever since Lionsgate acquired the Vestron Video collection and has been re-releasing these remastered titles, I have to say I’ve been in nostalgia heaven. I remember seeing these VHS boxes in the horror section at my nearby video store and renting many of these to get my weekly horror fix. Waxwork was always a box cover I always appreciated, but one of the most memorable was Warlock, because in the sea of black VHS boxes with gory box art, Warlock was this white box with the mysterious Julian Sands and this menacing shadow in red. I even remember seeing the trailer attached to my VHS copy of The Monster Squad, and I always dug the trailer for the film, but it took forever for me to finally get to see the film. Now jumping ahead two decades later, I’m getting to review this trilogy. I have to say this is the title from the Vestron series I’ve been the most looking forward to.
Director Steve Miner (Friday the 13th 2 & 3) helms the first film in the series from a script by David Twohy, who would go on to create the little sci-fi gem Pitch Black. Despite how the cover art may look for this film, and even though it is about a warlock (Julian Sands) hoping to eradicate all existence, the film really doesn’t play out as a horror film. In many ways the film feels more so like The Terminator or Highlander. Not that this is a bad thing, but the trailers are a bit misleading.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on July 26th, 2017
“I'm done with crazy.”
When it comes to movies about psychotically wronged women, the crazier things get, the better. Unfortunately, the makers of Unforgettable — a dull domestic drama/wannabe thriller — never got the memo. It's a shame because the movie had some of the ingredients to be a deliciously pulpy thriller, including an amusingly unhinged turn from one of its stars. But in the end, this comes off as a Lifetime movie that slipped through the cracks, fell upwards, and was accidentally released in theaters.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 14th, 2017
"Freedom has a price. I died 7 years ago. Left behind a brother, a wife, a son, but the dead talk if you listen. They're there with you. Reaching out. Trying to tell us something. Because not all deaths are the same. Some are real. Some are a story. Question is: do you believe the story? Was the man who died who you thought he was? The dead talk. If you listen..."
The same can be said for dead series. Fox has been riding a wave of series revivals that have brought shows back from the dead in a limited-run event series format, and it has actually been doing well for the network. 24 was revived a couple of times. These episodes were used to take us from one lead character into another it was hoped could lead the way for a renewed franchise. While the series worked, the full revival did not. Perhaps the best example of Fox's event series is the six-episode return of The X-Files after so many years. It was a bit inconsistent, and six episodes were too few to tell a real good X-Files story arc. The series will return again with a slightly longer run. The most recent event series at Fox was Prison Break. At nine episodes it turned out to be just the right fit to tell another story of the brothers and their cohorts. It's now available on Blu-ray, and it's worth a look, but only if you have watched the first four seasons of the show's regular run. Otherwise things can get a bit confusing, and some of the nice subtle nods won't really pay off for you at all. But if you're a fan, it's worth the space on your video shelf.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on July 5th, 2017
When a film like The Belko Experiment comes along there is a part of me that wonders, how far off is the film from reality? Films like Death Race 2000, The Running Man, The Purge, and Battle Royale have all flirted with the idea of the government using murder as a form of entertainment while also using it as a way to control the public. You look at the violence in the world and how numb we’ve all seemed to have gotten towards violence in the news and our favorite TV shows. I can’t help but wonder, would it be so crazy to see murder on our television screens? Looking back at history and the gladiator times, there was murder for entertainment, where families would cheer on the bloodshed and carnage. So when I look at film like The Belko Experiment, it’s something that frightens me, more so than any creature feature Hollywood can concoct. After all, how well do we really know how governments around the world function? Perhaps a film like this wouldn’t become a reality in the states, but in places like North Korea or Russia or even South America, is it really out of the question for a game like this to go on? In a building with no windows in the middle of nowhere, is it a crime if no one is around to hear the screams? James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) pens a script that takes a harsh look at what people will do to survive under the harshest conditions, and at the helm we have Greg McLean (Wolf Creek) directing the action. Are you ready to take part in the experiment?
In Bogota, Columbia, Mike (John Gallagher Jr.) is heading into work. He works for Belko Industries which has an office building just outside of the city. On this day, it’s evident that it is not like any other normal day at the office. All the locals at the office have been sent home for the day due to a security threat to the building. All that remain at the office are its 80 American employees that are all led by Barry Norris (Tony Goldwyn). We spend a little time getting to know the employees, Wendell (John C. McGinley) who seems to have an innocent crush or is possibly stalking Adria (Leandra Florez) who is Mike’s girlfriend. There is the new girl at the office, Melonie (Dany Wilkins) and there are also a few familiar faces like Michael Rooker, who plays a maintenance worker in the building, and Sean Gunn, who is the paranoid pot smoker Marty. As you watch the film, there are plenty of faces that look familiar, and that is one of the immediate impressive things about the film: how great the cast is. Sometimes you don’t need A-listers to be a hit; you just need to fill it with the right talent. What works with the casting as well is how believable everyone is in the part. This is one of the first times in a while where an ensemble cast was put together and I could believe everyone fit the part. Whether you’ve worked in an office environment or just in a business with a variety of personalities, right from the get go you can identify with this group, and that is what is so crucial here, because when tough decisions come up and people are about to die, the decisions matter, and several of the kills and darker moments in the film are a punch to the gut.
