Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on April 1st, 2009
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on March 31st, 2009
Open relationships have never really been in my repertoire. I’m a pretty committed guy. I find a girl or she finds me and we stick it out until one or both of us feel otherwise. Some people will argue that it is not natural to simply have one mate, instead we have to find multiple people to share relationships and intercourse with. In the movie Fling, it deals with an open relationship between Samantha & Mason. My money is on the fact that one of them goes too far in their openness and the relationship becomes strained. Let’s see how good my guesses are today.
Sam (played by Courtney Ford) and Mason (played by Steve Sandvoss) are in an open relationship. Sam is looking to open her own business while Mason writes trashy romance novels. They also find time to have relations with each other and anybody else they can shack up with. At a wedding, Sam rekindles a relationship with James (played by Brandon Routh), an old boyfriend. Mason, meanwhile finds out that his best friend Luke’s (played by Nick Wechsler) sister, Olivia (played by Shoshana Bush) is very taken with him.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on March 30th, 2009
Risk taking has never been my specialty. I tend to keep things pretty conservative and never really tried anything out of the ordinary, at least nothing I would consider dangerous. However, I have been interested by many forms of extreme sports. There is skateboarding, motocross, and of course, snowboarding. This beautiful sport combines flawless riders and picturesque snowy landscapes. So how would I take to a movie that tries to make a comedy out of snowboarding? Hopefully well. But then I saw that it included Tom Green and one of the guys from Jackass. This is not off to a good start.
Max (played by Dave England) and Eddy (played by Jason Bothe) are in charge of Team Shred. Team Shred consists of Chris, Tracy & Juice (played by Carlo Marks, Amber Borycki, & Alain Chanoine respectively). Chris is the breakout star of the team while Tracy & Juice are up and coming. However, Max and Eddy only focus on their breakout star as they arrange parties, videos and other events for Chris and only include the other two as a mere afterthought.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 29th, 2009
"Chicano" is a term for a Mexican American (US born with Mexican ancestry).
El Chicano was and is a band that started in the late 60s as club players called The V.I.Ps (playing after hours at a Japanese restaurant in East Los Angeles) who became popular because of their jazzy approach to Latin rock. This musical approach was really defined by this band, as well as by Santana who started about the same time, and their songs became the anthems for the "Chicano Movement" around the late sixties and early seventies.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 28th, 2009
Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) have been friends since school, and are now terminally broke roommates. As their utilities are turned off one by one, and they face the prospect of eviction, Zack hits on the idea of shooting a porn flick to get out of debt. They gather together a motley collection of actors and crew, and, letting no setback stand in their way, start making their movie. But the real question is not whether they will succeed, but whether they will come to terms with their feeling for each other.
In his review of the film Roger Ebert writes, “'I don't know bleep about directing,' Smith once confided to me. 'But I'm a bleeping good writer.'” Smith is half-right. The direction here is very meat-and-potatoes, every shot serving little more than to get the actors decently framed. But I can't agree with his self-estimation as a writer. There are some funny lines here, but many of the laughs are due to Smith's stellar cast. Rogen does his usual shtick, but it's still funny, thanks to his appealing naive/cynic vibe and befuddled stoner delivery. Justin Long shows up for a single scene, and walks off with the movie. None of his lines are particularly stellar, but his cameo is hysterical, all of it due to voice and body language. The man could make the yellow pages side-splitting. This is not to say that Smith's script is that dry, but it veers between clumsy earnestness (I kept waiting for the punchline during the final emotional speeches, the clue that I wasn't really supposed to take this hackneyed dialogue seriously, and it never came) and a potty mouth approach that clearly finds naughty words to be funny in and of themselves. You know, like we all did in grade five. David Mamet this is not. But when all is said and done, there's the cast. Determined to save Smith from himself, they make the film a bizarrely endearing and sweet experience.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on March 26th, 2009
The WTO or World Trade Organization came into being on the 1st of January in the year of 1995. It was the successor to GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and was designed to supervise and liberalize international trade. In their ministerial conference of 1999, they decided to have the conference on US soil. The site chosen was Seattle, Washington. The WTO had drawn criticism from protestors around the globe that proclaimed that the WTO was pursuing commercial interests ahead of human principles. In 1999, the WTO convened at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. Protestors came by the thousands and soon despite their peaceful efforts, riots ensued. There was mass police involvement. It also gave way to some of the more horrific scenes of innocents and guilty arrested alike. Battle in Seattle is a docu-drama directed by Stuart Townsend that mixes a drama-thriller with the real events that surrounded the days that followed November 30th, 1999 in Seattle, Washington.
Jay, Lou and Django (played by Martin Henderson, Michelle Rodriguez, and André Benjamin) are three activists who are planning a mass protest at the 1999 conference of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington. Meanwhile, a SWAT cop named Dale (played by Woody Harrelson) gears up for that same conference in order to keep the peace. His mind is not on the protestors, instead his mind is focused on his wife, Ella (played by Charlize Theron) who is five months pregnant.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 25th, 2009
This is not your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. If you’re at all like me, you grew up on the 1960’s cartoon series and, of course, the Marvel comic. A lot has changed since those early days of the web slinger. There’s been a not too successful television live action attempt. The comics themselves have changed significantly. You can’t discount the enormously profitable Sam Raimi films, that have given new legs to an old superhero. It stands to reason that a new cartoon series was in order. Enter The Spectacular Spider-Man, the 10th series based on the Marvel character. This recent cartoon series updates the world of Spidey. The shows take from both the original comics and the film series to create a new fusion of the hero. Like in the comics, Parker is the loner high school kid teased constantly by bullies like Flash Thompson. He has a few girls on his radar like Gwen Stacey and Mary Jane Watson. He still lives with his kind old Aunt May. Unlike the film, Spider-Man was not endowed with his web slinging ability by the radioactive spider. He developed the shooters and the chemical mixture that makes them work. That means he can run out of fluid and lose his ability to shoot webs. The Osborne relationship from the movies exists here. It’s also likely no coincidence that the villains featured in the film have prominence here. Doc Ock, Sand Man, The Goblin, and even Venom are hinted at in the last episode of this collection.
These cartoons are actually pretty good. The animation is pretty solid. Some of the characters look rather strange. Aunt May looks like she’s a 20 year old with white hair. Character jaw lines have a distinctive angular style that makes everyone look like they’re posing for some tough guy magazine cover. MJ looks like a matchstick and says “tiger” way too often. They are not really standalone episodes. Unlike the 1960’s series there is a story arc that connects the episodes into a longer form. The character’s mythology is also played with quite a bit. The cartoons work in a few origin stories and connect them together as a master plan plot devised by OsCorp and spearheaded by Dr. Octavius. The only real complaint I have is that each disc, sold separately, contains a mere 3 episodes. While this is great for bit rate and picture quality, it’s not much of a bargain material wise. The total running time for each disc is just 69 minutes. (That’s about 23 minutes an episode.) Because the stories are continuous, you never really reach the end of the plot. I think Sony would have done much better to wait and release season sets of the cartoon. I wouldn’t be surprised if that comes, making these discs unnecessary in the long run, except to add more money in the Sony cash registers.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 25th, 2009
This is one of those direct to video sequels I never saw coming. It’s not like anyone was exactly breaking down the box office doors to see the first Happily N’Ever After film when it debuted in January of 2007. Universally panned by the critics and audiences alike, it disappeared rather quickly from the scene and was, or so we thought, destined to become a distant memory, a legend used from time to time to scare little children into behaving for their parents. “Clean up your room now, or I’ll force you to watch Happily N’Ever After again”. Most of us where never really sure it existed at all. A quick expedition to the local theater revealed the name on a marquee, but did we ever see anyone actually enter the theater to watch the film? There was one scientist in Austria who claimed to have seen a couple enter the theater, but the snapshot he took was fuzzy and it was just not possible to confirm the siting. HBO did one of their expose stories on the existence of an audience for the film, but again no hard evidence was ever presented. It is said that stars like Freddie Prinze, Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sigourney Weaver, and even George Carlin provided voices for the film, but in interviews none of the alleged voice cast was willing to confirm they even worked on the film. Rumor has it that Carlin was presented with absolute proof of his participation just before he died. Of course, such rumors are rampant in Hollywood and should be discounted as unsubstantiated gossip.
Whether or not there ever was an actual audience for the first film, someone at Lionsgate decided that the film demanded a follow up. This former Lionsgate employee could not be reached for comment at Joe’s Car Wash, where he currently claims to be “cleaning up in the auto industry”. For some inexplicable reason the original voice cast decided not to be involved in the sequel. In fact the IMDB does not even list a voice cast at all on the film’s entry. It’s pretty bad when even industry nobodies want to distance themselves so badly from a project. If I had anything to do with this film, I’d sue to have my name removed from the credits.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 23rd, 2009
In the vein of The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and a sprinkle of The Sting (1972) John Dahl brings us Rounders. Card prodigy Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) quits the game after losing everything. Once Mike’s best friend Les “Worm” Murphy (Edward Norton), gets out of jail, Worm attempts to get Mike back into the poker world. As Worm’s behavior begins to implicate Mike, Mike decides to come out of poker retirement.
The film itself is good. The on-screen chemistry between Damon and Norton is not forced. The other performances in the film do not distract from the narrative, with Martin Landau’s standing out. The film is shot very plainly without too many fancy editing techniques or wild Dutch angles. Dahl simply conveys a character piece that does what it is set out to do with little failure. David Levien and Brian Koppelman’s script has been appropriately dubbed “cool” by the poker community. Upon initial viewing most poker references will soar above the viewer’s head. However, upon multiple viewings, you tend to pick up on the language. This collector’s edition offers a plethora of bonus features which is miles away from the previous release.
