Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 6th, 2006
Synopsis
Roy Scheider is the police helicopter pilot and Vietnam war vet (cue flashbacks) who is tapped to test Blue Thunder, a new helicopter equipped with every conceivable weapon and means of surveillance. He discovers that the machine is at the heart of a conspiracy to undermine all that is good and free, and chief bad guy here is Malcolm McDowell, for whom Scheider has a more than cordial dislike thanks to what happened back in 'Nam. The stage is set for high-tech showdown in the skies over LA..../p>
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 5th, 2006
Synopsis
Maria Bello Arrives in Wales with teen daughter Sarah in tow to visit estranged husband Sean Bean. Relations between mother and daughter are tense, to the dismay of the father, who senses something is wrong but can’t divine what it is. Then tragedy strikes, when the duaghter disappears, apparently drowned. While Bean searches frantically for her (or for her body), Bello becomes convinced that Sarah has been abducted into the Welsh land of the dead, and that another girl, dead these fifty yea...s, has returned in her place.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on April 4th, 2006
Synopsis
I’ve gotta admit that for a long time, Four Weddings and a Funeral was in a category of movies that I had no intention or curiosity to see because of the title, the cast and the story. Hugh Grant was a significant step down towards the emasculation of man, where are start wearing large sweaters, hang out in pseudo-Starbuck coffee shops and talk about what happened on American Idol or some lame thing along those lines.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 2nd, 2006
Synopsis
Music journalist Tre (Andre Royo) arrives at the Hamptons home of his cousin Sky (Chenoa Maxwell) and her cad of a husband (Blair Underwood). Tre is here to interview Summer G (Richard T. Jones), megastar rapper, who has just bought a home in the area. Sky and G have past, and old embers flare to life when they see each other.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 31st, 2006
Synopsis
Lie With Me is proclaimed in its trailer to be a film in the tradition of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Sex, Lies and Videotape. But at its core, it’s more along the lines of another one of director Clement Virgo’s film influences, Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. The characters in Lie With Me experience each other rather provocatively at the start of their relationship, and work their way outwards.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 31st, 2006
“Who you gonna call?” By now everyone knows the answer. Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson are the Ghostbusters. As their ad proclaims, they’re ready to believe you. Ghostbusters was originally conceived by Aykroyd as a vehicle for John Belushi and himself. When Belushi died, reportedly from a drug overdose, the project sat on the shelf a few years. Harold Ramis would eventually team up with Aykroyd and finish the script. It’s been said that “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Leave it to these ...wo knuckleheads to combine the two and create a phenomenon. Like pretty much anyone else, I’ve seen Ghostbusters many times in the last 20 years. And just like all of you, I’m still not tired of it. I am, however, done with the repetitive theme song. This release marks at least the third time Ghostbusters has appeared on DVD. This version appears to be identical to the double package release of both films about a year ago.
Ghostbusters pioneered the big budget comedy. Not since “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” have the genres of comedy and horror combined in such masterful form. Ghostbusters had the quality f/x of a blockbuster sci-fi epic. The casting was nothing short of genius. Each cast member brought a distinctive and integral element to the film. Murray provided the used car salesman aspect. Aykroyd perfected the common wide-eyed man with just enough knowledge to be dangerously funny. Ramis played the 50’s style scientist with the stoicism made famous in films like This Island Earth. Hudson was brilliant as the Joe six-pack, obviously intended to represent us, the audience, on this adventure. Sigourney Weaver weaves in just the right amount of sultry and unintended villainy to complete the palette of colors necessary to pull this all off. The supporting cast features actors destined to become stars themselves in the likes of Rick Moranis and William Atherton. While many of the f/x don’t quite meet today’s exploding expectations, they were state of the art in 1984. Forget Kong. Who can resist the giant Sta-Puft Man?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 29th, 2006
Synopsis
Growing up as the oldest son in an upper-middle class neighborhood outside of Washington, DC, I am familiar with rap as much as, or even more than, KRS One, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Public Enemy or NWA. I come from dem hard streets, where I can kill a muhvuggah! Well, maybe not exactly, and in the age where lame musicians become lame actors (or vice versa in the case of Jennifer Lopez), anyone who tries to be the entertainment “double threat” deserves to be subjected to any and all s...orn and ridicule. Surprisingly though, some of the musicians who have started appearing in movies have employed the easy strategy of appearing as themselves (or dramatically licensed clones of themselves), and some of them have surprisingly interesting stories to tell, such as Eminem in 8 Mile.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 29th, 2006
Synopsis
One year after causing a destructive panic because he believed the sky was falling, Chicken Little is still living down the embarrassment, and is desperate for his father to be proud of him. Miraculous success at baseball seems mark the turnaround in his life, but then he is bonked on the head by another piece of the sky, and discovers that this fragment is in fact a tile from a flying saucer. Now he and his group of misfits must save the town from possible alien invasion, despite the fact t...at no one but them believes in the danger.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 29th, 2006
John Carpenter can be hit or miss on some of the things he’s done in his career. Vampires may be a good case in point. In his version of The Thing, remade from Howard Hawks’ 1950’s classic, he doesn’t focus on the creature as much as the relationship between the men in the camp, and how the paranoia starts to creep in the group, as they try to figure out who may or may not be infected by the creature. I might have jumped ahead of some people who haven’t seen it, but just to briefly recap for those few w...o have missed this:
An American crew working in the Arctic circle encounter a Norwegian crew who are frantically shooting at a dog that is running to the camp. The Americans defends themselves as soon as one of the men is hit, and the Norwegians are killed. The Americans take the dog in, but they also go out to the Norwegian camp to find out just what exactly spooked them so much. They find a camp littered with bodies, along with something that was thawed out by the group before they were brutally killed. From that point, various members of the group get infected and plucked off one at a time. But what made this one maybe a bit scarier than most was Carpenter’s ability to create enough of a dynamic between the men, and that most of them were fleshed out enough to the point where you understand how they work together. And the cast is very able, from older members Blair and Copper (Wilford Brimley and Richard Dysart, respectively), to younger members Childs (Keith David, Armageddon) and Palmer (David Clennon, From the Earth to the Moon), all held together by the film’s star (and frequent Carpenter leading man) Kurt Russell (Dark Blue), who plays MacReady.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 28th, 2006
Synopsis
Clive Owen is a man approaching the end of his tether. His marriage is becoming stagnant, his job at an advertising firm is no better, and he is worried about his daughter, who has type 1 diabetes. He and his wife have set aside a lot of money to pay for an experimental drug for her. One day, on a train, he meets Jennifer Aniston. A friendship is sparked, and then an affair begins, only to be violently disrupted by Vincent Cassel. He brutalizes both, and begins to blackmail Owen for ever-inc...easing sums of money.
