Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 9th, 2023
"Space...the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before!"
Since the relaunch of Star Trek on television via the Paramount+ streaming service, I must admit to being a little underwhelmed. It's truly bad when Alex Kurtzman makes me pine for the days of Rick Berman. There have been some pretty good moments in the various new Trek shows. Picard has shown promise and has improved with a third season that looks very exciting. Lower Decks is just too campy for my taste, and Discovery has so many ups and downs I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster. So along comes Strange New Worlds, and this is the Star Trek I've been waiting for these last decades.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on December 8th, 2023
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
It is hard to ignore the hype around the film Oppenheimer. Any time a Christopher Nolan film has come out, it has become a pretty big deal for cinema fans, whether it was for his The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Inception, or Tenet, his films carry the same kind of respect alongside the names of Stanley Kubrick and James Cameron, and his films can be just as divisive. But the anticipation for the release of Oppenheimer feels like a different beast entirely. The release coming out the same day as Barbie has created such a stir on the internet that the term Barbenheimer has become a part of the zeitgeist of modern day. Then another aspect is how the film was literally shot on 70mm film, which is unheard of in today’s digital-hungry climate, and the film is being released in certain theaters on 70mm prints that reportedly weigh around 600lbs. And now with critics finally getting to see the film, I can’t scroll through my news feed without seeing headlines that tout the film as not just being the most important film of the century, but the best film of the century as well. So what’s my take on all this hype, and is it worth it? Is Oppenheimer the film that will save cinema?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 5th, 2023
Most people, when asked to provide the best Korean film in modern times, would probably answer Oldboy or Parasite. Others might respond Memories of Murder or Train to Busan. Maybe A Tale of Two Sisters or The Wailing. I, on the other hand, always respond with the same title, The Man from Nowhere, which to this point in the US has only been released on Blu-ray from Well Go. That Blu-ray was also the victim of a bunch of discs from Well Go that came away with a quick dose of rot, infecting my copy as well as many others. For the last couple of years, I've been working with a bootleg, which I'm not exactly proud of, but felt necessary because I loved this film so much. However, that changed, as Well Go has released a 4Kcopy of this sensational film (and also of The Wailing, which I will get to later in the week). I thankfully received it a little bit earlier than expected and took it for a spin. Let's see how it does.
Kim Chi-Gon (played by Kim Tae-hoon) lights a cigarette and calls his squad into position. The crew of police detectives and squad members wake up and talk about their plan. They have been at this stakeout for two months and can't afford to mess this up.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2023
"Is that the biggest one you got?"
Remember the old days of the action movie? Those films where someone like Stallone or Schwarzenegger would run around and take out armies of bad guys while barely breaking a sweat. You know the kind of movie I'm talking about. The ones where the hero goes up against a hail of bullets and explosions and manages to pick off the bad guys without catching a single slug himself. Those were the days when a guy like Bruce Willis could fall thirty floors, get a spike impaled in his ribcage, have a ton of concrete wall fall on his head, and get run over by a truck, but still manage to take out the bad guy while muttering some witty little catchphrase that we would all be repeating, because if we could deliver the line just right, that meant we were tough guys too, and we didn't even have to fall out of an airplane to prove it. Well, you won't have to remember. You just have to watch Sly Stallone's love letters to the action movie fans. The franchise is called The Expendables and along the way we got to relive some glorious moments with our favorite action stars from the 70's to the 90's.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2023
"I don't know about you, but it always makes me sore when I see those war pictures ... all about flying leathernecks and submarine patrols and frogmen and guerillas in the Philippines. What gets me is that there never w-was a movie about POWs - about prisoners of war. Now, my name is Clarence Harvey Cook; they call me Cookie. I was shot down over Magdeburg, Germany, back in '43; that's why I stammer a little once in a while, 'specially when I get excited. I spent two and a half years in Stalag 17. "Stalag" is the German word for prison camp, and Number 17 was somewhere on the Danube. There were about 40,000 POWs there, if you bothered to count the Russians, and the Poles, and the Czechs. In our compound there were about 630 of us, all American airmen: radio operators, gunners, and engineers. All sergeants. Now, you put 630 sergeants together, and, oh mother, you've got yourself a situation. There was more fireworks shooting off around that joint ... take for instance the story about the spy we had in our barracks ..."
Stop me if you've heard this before. The premise is we're in World War II, but not where all of the action is. There aren't any big firefights, and you won't see or hear any of those big guns raining Armageddon down on some poor hapless pinned-down soldiers. Instead we're inside of a German POW camp, which they called Stalags. This one is run by a self-important commandant who takes pride in the fact that there has never been an escape from his Stalag. The prisoners themselves are always trying to find a way to outwit the camp Sergeant, a rather rotund officer named Shultz. Of course, I'm talking about Hogan's Heroes. But I'm not. 12 years before the CBS comedy would hit the airwaves, iconic film director Billy Wilder gave us a quasi-serious version of that particular scenario in the film Stalag 17. The film was based on a contemporary Broadway production written by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski based on their own actual experiences at the real Stalag 17. The film was originally planned as a vehicle for Charlton Heston, but when Wilder came on to direct, he immediately dismissed the idea, believing that it would become a Charlton Heston film more than a film about its own actual elements, and he was likely correct. Heston was big at the time, coming off larger-than-life parts like Moses and Ben Hur. The role went to William Holden, and the casting would become one of those lightning-in-a-bottle kind of things that can elevate a film from good to classic. And by the way, Wilder and gang sued Hogan's Heroes when it did arrive on the scene but were not successful.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 22nd, 2023
"All right, listen up, ladies and gentlemen; our fugitive has been on the run for ninety minutes. Average foot speed over uneven ground, barring injuries, is four miles per hour. That gives us a radius of six miles. What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, hen house, outhouse, and doghouse in that area. Checkpoints go up at fifteen miles. Your fugitive's name is Dr. Richard Kimble. Go get him."
The Fugitive, since its’ original release in 1993, has always been seen by a majority of people as the defining thriller of the 1990’s. The film stars Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble. Kimble, a very well known Chicago doctor, has just been framed for killing his wife. He claims a one-armed man killed her, which prompts nearly everyone to laugh at him. Kimble is immediately arrested and sentenced to death in a cold courtroom scene that doesn’t even give Kimble time to defend himself.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 15th, 2023
By JC.
Cinematically speaking, the name Eli Roth has been synonymous with murder and mayhem. The director is best known for his work in the horror genre, bursting on the scene with 2002’s Cabin Fever and upping the ante with Hostel and Hostel: Part II a few years later. So it was a bit surprising to hear he’d be taking on a remake of Death Wish — the iconic 1974 Charles Bronson revenge flick — until I started thinking about the bloody possibilities. If the Hostel films gained notoriety as prime examples of “torture porn”, then it seems like Roth has graduated to “revenge porn” with this slick and (intentionally) silly re-imagining.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 7th, 2023
Hopefully, most of you reading this review enjoyed my breakdown of the 1st part in this series. I honestly haven't been this vested in a two part series since Batman's Long Halloween. That one had the added sting that we had to wait a full year until we got the complete 4K version. At least in the case of Justice League and RWBY, we get the full 4K splendor from the get-go. However, as I alluded to in the first review, there was certainly room for improvement. We shall see if the creators can correct those issues now that the series shifts into the Justice League's world. Let's take a look.
Last time on Justice League X RWBY, the Justice League and RWBY teams had fought off Kilg%re and his army of superhuman Grimm. It was actually revealed that Remnant was nothing more than a simulation to eradicate the two teams, and it nearly succeeded on that front. A portal was then opened up, which returned Justice League back to Earth and RWBY back to the real Remnant. However, just because both teams are returning back to their home doesn't mean that everything is fixed the way it should be.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 7th, 2023
Hopefully, most of you reading this review enjoyed my breakdown of the 1st part in this series. I honestly haven't been this vested in a two part series since Batman's Long Halloween. That one had the added sting that we had to wait a full year until we got the complete 4K version. At least in the case of Justice League and RWBY, we get the full 4K splendor from the get-go. However, as I alluded to in the first review, there was certainly room for improvement. We shall see if the creators can correct those issues now that the series shifts into the Justice League's world. Let's take a look.
Last time on Justice League X RWBY, the Justice League and RWBY teams had fought off Kilg%re and his army of superhuman Grimm. It was actually revealed that Remnant was nothing more than a simulation to eradicate the two teams, and it nearly succeeded on that front. A portal was then opened up, which returned Justice League back to Earth and RWBY back to the real Remnant. However, just because both teams are returning back to their home doesn't mean that everything is fixed the way it should be.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 7th, 2023
"It's called the Impossible Mission Force for a reason."
I imagine this is how it happened. It's January of 2019, and Tom Cruise has just popped into the bathroom to shave. He opens up that can of Barbasol just to make sure there isn't any dinosaur DNA left in the can, but as he takes off the cap, an authoritative voice begins to speak: “Good morning, Mr. Cruise. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to make a two part film of the Mission Impossible franchise. It won't be easy. That's why only the IMF team can be counted on to complete this task. There are agents out to stop you before you even get started. In China there is a virus code-name COVID, and this virus will spread to pandemic levels just as you're starting to get your production crew together. Elements within our own government will take measures to shut you down. Delays will cost an extra $100 million and necessitate crucial cast changes. They'll be serious injuries, and your release date will be July of 2021 ... I mean November of 2021 ... Would you believe May of 2022? ... Let's shoot for July 14, 2023. You will have to deal with nefarious crew members who will attempt to sabotage the project by standing closer than two meters apart. You may use over-the-top rants to attempt to intimidate these factions into compliance. Beware that said rants don't end up released by the press to the world. Somehow through all of these challenges you must create a Mission Impossible film that will be bigger and better than anything that came before. And remember, Tom, if your film fails to bring in a billion or more, the studio will disavow your team, and your movie will go straight to streaming ... or worse, get shelved as a tax write-off. Good luck, Tom. This message will self-destruct in 10 seconds.” There's a swoosh of fog, and Tom Cruise is sitting in his bathroom with no shaving cream to complete his original task. I figure that's how it must have gone.
