Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 20th, 2006
Synopsis
The setting is an exclusive boys’ private school in New England, 1959. Welton Academy is deeply hidebound and conservative, and into this environment comes one of its graduates, Robin Williams, to teach English literature, and along the way encourage his students to make of their lives what they want, now what is expected of them. This approach clashes with the establishment’s ideas of how things should be done, and raises the ire of one parent in particular, whose son takes too much interes...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 20th, 2006
2005 was definitely a big year for Tim Burton. He had the mega successful Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and ended the year with this film, Corpse Bride. Neither Charlie or Corpse deserved to be placed on the top of Burton’s best work list, but both are filled with typical Burton qualities from his funny jokes to interesting visuals.
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is similar to The Nightmare Before Christmas via Burton’s usual trademarks. Corpse Bride features...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 18th, 2006
Synopsis
Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz are sisters. Collette is the older, sensible one, who has made a career as a lawyer. Diaz is the hard-drinking, terminally selfish party girl. After a series of disasters, which culminate in Diaz sleeping with Collette’s beau, the sisters have a seemingly irreversible falling out. Collette’s life is in ruins, but the pieces are gradually picked up by a co-worker who has loved for from afar for years. Diaz, meanwhile, discovers that she has a grandmother she nev...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 18th, 2006
Disney continues to pull its disappearing acts on DVD with their limited time offers, this time using the new Toy Story 2 2-disc release as the proverbial carrot in front of the mule. While such marketing tactics may be a little annoying to those of us that don’t like to be told when we can or can’t see a movie, there should be no greater incentive to pick this up if you haven’t yet claimed a copy of the film. Toy Story 2 cemented Pixar’s name in quality animation and continued to prove the little studi...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 17th, 2006
The Gospel is the first mainstream film to come out in quite sometime that deals with the role of the African-American church. Reading the title of the film, one must think The Gospel is an overly heavy religious filled film right? Well, I am very happy to say that the film is not particularly a religious film, but what a film that has the type of characters that can make a viewer become a believer. Not necessarily the type of believer of the church, but the type of believer in the music that is sung in...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 17th, 2006
Jodie Foster stars in this film as a propulsion engineer named Kyle Pratt who decides to take her six year old daughter Julia on a transatlantic flight aboard a brand new jumbo jet (which she helped design). Aboard the plane, her daughter goes missing. Naturally she has no clue what is going on as the captain (Sean Bean), nor the sky marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) are of any assistance. Foster calmly looks around the plane for her daughter wondering what has happened to her. We learn more and more facts about the daughte...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 14th, 2006
Synopsis
The unfortunate part for me is that movies like this, and before that, Sling Blade, were only in arthouse theaters that are in downtown Washington, DC, and I really have a problem with driving 25-30 miles to pay $10 for 2 hours of joy, and possibly that same amount of time spent in traffic trying to get in and out of DC. If you want to call it laziness, I'll admit to that also, but I think my first excuse holds a lot more weight. It's gotten better lately, but there's still some work to be d...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 14th, 2006
Synopsis
I was amazed that a film starring three Academy Award winners (Robert De Niro (Raging Bull), Kathy Bates (Misery), F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus) would be so ignored and passed over by the movie going public. Based on a novel by Thornton Wilder and adapted for the screen and directed by relative unknown Mary McGuckian, the film recounts a tragic incident where several people fell to their death from a bridge collapse. A monk by the name of Brother Juniper (Gabriel Byrne, The Us...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 11th, 2006
Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz) is not your standard activist. She won’t be satisfied by simply standing on protest lines – she must be where the action is, and for her it’s in disease infested Kenya. When a pharmaceutical company sets up shop there to distribute a prototypical drug to the people, Tessa becomes involved in a conspiracy that will eventually costs her her life.
After Tessa turns up dead – and this is no spoiler – her death is featured in the opening scenes of the film, husband Justin (Ralph Fien...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 8th, 2006
It seems that every action movie that is being released out of Hollywood nowadays always has to feature out of this world stunts that no real human could ever do. Now this is not necessarily bad if the action is done in correspondence to the film in a skillful manner. When the original Transporter was released onto DVD, it quickly gained a reputation through many action fans that caused the film’s sales to skyrocket. The sales skyrocketed so high that Twentieth Century Fox quickly greenlit the sequel to a film...
