Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 1st, 2012
Say goodbye to the Darling family. While the name might imply an endearing group of wonderful folks, nothing could be further from the truth. They are a wealthy and powerful family. The patriarch Tripp (Sutherland) is a ruthless and conniving man very used to getting his way. His wife Letitia (Clayburgh) appears to want to be a nicer person but gets drawn into the incredible scandal and corruption of her family, while Tripp tries to shelter her from it. They have 5 kids. Brian (Fitzgerald) is a priest, but his actions are anything but priestly .He’s even hiding an illegitimate child. Patrick (Baldwin) is a politician who is running for Governor. He’s married to Ellen (Young) but also has a mistress, Carmelita (Cayne) who is a transsexual, played by an actress who is also transsexual. One of the more humorous scenes was one in which Ellen and Carmelita negotiate what days/times she can see Patrick. Karen (Zea) is the big sister who is getting married; that makes husband number 4. Juliet (Armstrong) and Jeremy (Gabel) are twins. Juliet thinks she has some supernatural “twin connection”. Jeremy is a lazy kid who is trying to break out of his non-ambitious life and find out who he is, even if it means giving up the wealth of the Darling lifestyle. Enter Nick (Krause) into the Darling life. Nick’s father was the family lawyer and catered to the family’s every whim, ignoring his own family most of the time. Now he’s dead, and Tripp wants Nick to step into his father’s place. Nick hates everything the Darlings represent. He’s a lawyer who actually wants to help people. Still, the Darlings are used to getting what they want, so Tripp offers him an extra $5 million a year to do charity work with over and above a generous salary to work for the family. It’s an offer Nick can’t refuse, and against his better judgment, he accepts. It’s a deal with the devil, and it is here that the show’s conflict and strength derive from.
The cast and characters of the show are a mixed blessing. Sutherland and Krause are great and quickly develop a strong dynamic. The problem is that the show very soon turns into a who is sleeping with who drama, and therein lies its weakness. When the show concentrates on Nick and the family scandals and dealings, it is one of the most powerful dramas on television. It’s often cleverly written and always well acted. But the writers continually bow to the pressure of the lowest common denominator and spend entirely too much time in bed. I will admit to being amused by the Patrick affair just because of the novelty of the whole thing. Ellen ends up shooting him at one point. There is also an uneven underline plot that just doesn’t work for some reason. Nick suspects that his father’s death wasn’t an accident and that one of the Darlings may have killed him because he “knew too much”. It’s a clever idea and certainly gives Nick more motivation for working for the Darlings, but they can’t seem to decide the truth as writers, so it’s a very awkward thread.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 8th, 2012
An infant chimp is taken out of his natural environment to be raised like a human by a family of curious, rich folk. Upon learning that this chimp, now named Nim, is capable of learning sign language, this family turns to professional educators to research and experiment with this concept further.
I promise to give praise to the filmmakers handling adept handling of their craft later in my review, but I cannot discuss the contents of this film without injecting my own personal opinion because this film, much to it's credit, stirred a very visceral reaction from me. The family that first adopted (adopted being an extremely delicate term, as many could easily argue that “nabbed” or “stole” would suite their actions better) Nim were a wealthy family, said wealth stemming partly from the father's success as a poet. They named him Nim Chimpsky (as a parody of Noam Chomsky, who theorized that language is inherit only in humans, and Nim was their attempt to disprove said thesis). This family dressed Nim in children's clothes and eventually tried communicating with it on a person to person level using American sign language. This experiment, albeit spurred some interesting results once true experts from Columbia University became involved, was born out of ignorance and arrogance. This family did what they did because they had the financial means to offer themselves the opportunity, without considering the unnaturalness of it. By unnatural I don't mean that their antithesis to Chomsky's idea is wrong or implausible. What I mean is the manner by which this animal was taken out of its mother (granted, not born in the wild but a facility) and treated like a human.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 24th, 2011
With smaller cable networks stepping up in the last few years and producing high-quality, original programming, we are living in a veritable Golden Age of television.
And yet.......
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on May 16th, 2011
LXD is a two seasons of collected web shorts, originally appearing on 'Hulu.' A secret society is recruiting dancers and each short reveals prospects who demonstrate masterful performances of different, modern dance techniques.
At first glance, the concept seems to be a bit hammy and contrived. A random, elderly black man (Morgan Freeman must have been out of their price range) narrates in a almost broken hearted yet ever-wise tone, speaking in fortune cookie sayings with promises of mystical yet adventurous things to come. Thankfully, less time is spent on this and more time spent on profiling each dancing character.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 3rd, 2009
“What you see before you is the first of a new species. I call it experiment 626. He is bullet proof, fireproof, and can think faster than supercomputer. He can see in the dark and move objects 3000 times his size. His only instinct: To destroy everything he touches.”
This affront to nature is none other than one of the staring characters in Disney’s 2002 animation feature Lilo And Stitch. It was created by an alien mad scientist, Dr, Jumba (Stiers). Unfortunately, the Intergalactic Federation considers it dangerous and an abomination. They throw Dr. Jumba in prison and sentence the creature to exile on a desolate asteroid. The elusive creature escapes the transport ship, stealing a police cruiser, the red one. He ends up on a backwater planet called Earth, more specifically a place called Hawaii. It seems that the Federation can’t simply obliterate the planet. It has been designated a protected world, a sanctuary for an endangered species, the mosquito. So the council sends Jumba and their representative, the one-eyed worm, Pleakley (McDonald) to either retrieve or destroy the experiment. Meanwhile, living on Hawaii are two orphan sisters. The teenaged Nani (Carrere) and her younger sister Lilo (Chase). They are having some trouble getting along now that Nani must also become a parent figure to her young sister. It doesn’t help that social services has sent their toughest agent, Cobra Bubbles (Rhames) to decide if Nani is fit to raise Lilo. The truth is Lilo doesn’t fit in at school, and she’s grown incredibly lonely. She prays for an angel to come and be her friend. Since angels are scarce in Hawaii, she suggests a dog. They end up at the pound where experiment 626 happens to be. Lilo falls in love with the alien experiment and names him Stitch, thinking him an exotic species of dog. Of course, the two get themselves in a lot of trouble, not to mention being hunted by Stitch’s pursuers. Still, the two bond and both learn to adapt their natures.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 2nd, 2009
A short time ago in a galaxy right in your own back yard….(cue music)
Star Wars Episode XXCV: The Clone Wars: A Galaxy Divided DVD Release:
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 21st, 2009
I have to admit that I’m usually very wary of direct to video sequels to films that weren’t exactly box office smash material to begin with. The original film was a typical and predictable mess of a film that didn’t even make use of a better than average cast for this kind of film. It took me by surprise when Boogeyman 2 came out, but I’m a glutton for punishment, so I rented the title mostly because it had Saw franchise star Tobin Bell in it. I ended up halfway liking the feature, and considerably more than the original film. When I saw the chance to review the third entry, I wanted to see if the DVD franchise was heading forward or backwards. Boy, was I pleased to find out that the answer is both.
Audrey (Sanderson) is the daughter of Dr. Allen (Bell) from the second film. She’s trying to deal with his death when she happens upon his journal. There she reads about the Boogeyman and his need for people to believe in him, which gives him power. So what does she do? She tries to get people to believe that it was he who killed the victims of the second film. She gets killed in an apparent suicide, but her roommate and best friend Sarah (Cahill) witnesses the event and is the only one to know it was the Boogeyman who killed her. Of course, she also comes across Dr. Allen’s journal and picks up where Audrey left off. As her friends begin disappearing and she has strange visions of the creature, she begins to understand that she is pretty much to blame. By using her spot on the campus radio station to spread the fear, she ends up feeding the beast. She attempts a noble self sacrifice in the end.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 18th, 2008
The Longshots is one of those sports films that in many ways you see coming from miles away. It certainly feeds upon that against all odds sports cliché that you’ve likely seen a hundred times if you’ve seen it once. But in so many other ways, this is a story with more than a champion’s heart and courage. In many ways it’s about family and redemption. While the film is based loosely on the story of Jasmine Plummer, it is just as much the story of her uncle Curtis, who was saving himself as he was trying to help his niece. I’m not a huge Ice Cube fan. Honestly, I find most of his characters to be an extension of the punk attitude he garnered as a rapper. But this role is significantly better than anything I’ve seen him do before. The part doesn’t necessarily call for a lot of chops to play, but Ice Cube does add a certain amount of sincerity to the role, without having to extend himself all that far. It almost looks effortless, like he’s sleepwalking through the part, but it leads to rather inspirational results when taken as a whole.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 7th, 2008
On the surface it would seem that Linewatch is going to tackle the controversial illegal immigration debate that is going on in the
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 20th, 2008
What is love worth? How much pain would you endure before you would murder someone you loved to end it? In The Killing Gene our serial killer seeks these answers, reducing it all down to an algebraic equation. The film is actually the American DVD release titles for the British film WAZ or W Δ Z depending on the source. This title refers to the killers equation which translates to roughly W Δ Z = COV. It’s a rather odd indy looking piece, filmed in
