Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 2nd, 2011
"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrariwise what it is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would be, you see?"
To be perfectly honest with you, I have never read either of the two Lewis Carroll books on which this film has been based. Under ordinary circumstances, that would put me at a decided disadvantage in both watching the film and certainly in providing an insightful review of the movie. But these are not ordinary circumstances. The characters and their stories, originally told in both Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There, have become an indelible part of our culture. One need not have read a word to be intimately familiar with Alice and her fanciful friends and rivals from Underland, which Alice herself interprets for us as Wonderland. There have been animated features as well as other live action attempts. The characters have become iconic and have appeared in advertising campaigns and even an episode of Star Trek. The surprise isn't that I feel like I know this story without having read the source material. The real surprise would be if there was anyone out in the civilized world who wasn't familiar with these characters. They were originally oral stories told to a group of sisters, one of which was Alice Little, the inspiration for the tales. They would only end up in book form at the insistence of the young Alice.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 31st, 2011
"He paws fiercely, rejoicing in his strength and charges into the fray. He laughs at fear, afraid of nothing. He does not shy away from the sword. The quiver rattles against his side, along with the flashing spear and lance. In frenzied excitement, he eats up the ground. He cannot stand still when the trumpet sounds."
Disney has a grand tradition of putting out a certain kind of sports film. You know the type well. There is a champion that must overcome incredible odds and usually their own flaws to rise to the top of their game. Secretariat fits that mold, but only to a point. Usually the movie centers on the athletes themselves, and it's something from within that must change or conquer. With this film, the champion is a horse, and while that often doesn't stop the folks at Disney from allowing us to hear from their perspective, this is based on a true story and remains firmly planted into a reality, of sorts. But, we can't hear from Secretariat himself. Instead this is really the story of his owner Penny Chenery, and it's not a very flattering story at all. I'm afraid that I didn't find myself cheering for the hero this time, and therein lies the fatal flaw of Disney's latest rise-of-a-champion story.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on January 27th, 2011
A young man wants to stimulate the economy of his tiny community, mostly for the sake of his parents struggling motel, and inadvertently welcomes what would become the original Woodstock festival into his back yard (literally).
Based on the true origins of this music festival that changed the world, we do not see the happenings of the stars onstage like other Woodstock films might. From beginning to the end, we only witness the muddy setup of the campsites and the infamously congested highway leading to the stage.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 20th, 2011
"Give me a stage where this here bull can rage."
Under normal circumstances and certainly under less skillful hands the story of Jake La Motta would not be one worth telling. His life is a story without heroes. It's a life of abusive behavior and an almost unredeemable personality. The only way he was ever capable of expressing himself was in the boxing ring. Even there he was doomed to feel inadequate most of his life. Even as he was rising toward the middleweight championship of the world, he was obsessed by his own small hands and the realization that he was fated to never test himself against the world's very best fighters. He alienated everyone around him. He was utterly and completely self-destructive, and you either left his sphere of influence or you let him drag you down in to his own dark abyss. Why in the world would anyone want to see, let alone make a film based on the life of Jake La Motta?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on January 11th, 2011
Most of you watched in horror as we went through our first round of the trilogy of terror. Round 2 in this Romantic terror-thon is coming right up. In this chapter, we explore two godparents who get thrown together after a baby devours her parents whole. Scared yet? No. How about the parents were thrown into Hell to act as Oprah’s personal foot massagers and the couple of Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel have to pick up the pieces? There we go. Let’s explore this mess shall we?
It is the year 2007. I was starting a new relationship. AHHHHHHHHHH. Oh wait, that’s not supposed to be scary but apparently it was for Holly Berenson (played by Katherine Heigl) and Eric Messer (played by Josh Duhamel). They go on a first date and everything goes horribly wrong. This leads to a disastrous ending where the actual date doesn’t even get started. Why did they even try to go out on the date? Well it had something to do with their best friends.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on January 11th, 2011
For those who have made it through my prior two reviews of terror by romantic comedy, I salute you. You are certainly stronger and far more resilient than one could ever imagine. But, we always save the best (worst) for last. It is an unspeakable tale of big Hollywood stars, revenge and a great overdose of Disney movie magic. Come in, if you dare and witness the debacle that can only be known as You Again.
We travel back to 2002. Marni Olsen (played by Kristen Bell) is making her part of the video for a high school time capsule. She talks about how she is always picked on and abused by the other children. This leads to an impromptu scene where her arch-nemesis Joanna (played by Odette Yustman) and her friends throw her out of the school. All of this is accomplished while playing We are the Champions and making the loser hand gesture at poor Marni.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 11th, 2011
"Did you ever notice how you let a Mexican into your home just because he's got gardening tools? I mean, no questions asked. You just let him right in. He could have, you know, a chainsaw or a machete."
The last year has been a hot year for the illegal immigration debate, between the Arizona law and the various politicians to the vigilante groups that volunteer to arm up and patrol the borders. As the debate rages on and the violence increases, it was only a matter of time before someone exploited it all for your entertainment pleasure. Who better than Robert Rodriquez and his usual cast of suspects?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 6th, 2011
"If you're going to face the fires of Hell, you need to be prepared."
And that's exactly what someone should have told the folks behind the horror thriller Case 39. This has been one of those cursed films from the very beginning. The film appears to have begun production way back in 2006. It appears the film was done, at least in one form, by 2007, but there were reshoots and pick-ups for so long that it's going to be hard to imagine what the film might have originally been intended to look like. A fire on the set destroyed quite a bit of the set; fortunately no one was badly injured. The movie took so long to make that the life changes are quite noticeable in the characters. When the film did finally reach the box office on October 1st in 2010, the numbers were very disappointing. The film only took in $13 million with a budget that is listed at $26 million but was likely considerably more than that when you put it all together.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 3rd, 2011
"I love it when a plan comes together."
I love it when a movie comes together that offers you some value for your entertainment dollar and manages to touch a bit on the old nostalgia strings along the way. I'm not going to try to convince you that the new A-Team film is a great movie. It's not even close. But neither was the series a great series. What I am going to try to convince you to do is go out and at least rent a copy of the A-Team movie and allow it to do exactly what it was intended to do ... take you for a little ride while jogging those old memories just enough to bring the occasional smile to your face. Think about it. Could you really ask a movie to do anything more?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 3rd, 2011
Paul Rudd is desperate for a promotion. Moving from the drudgery of the sixth floor to the executive seventh will, he feels, cement his financial status and convince his girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak) to marry him. Opportunity knocks, but also has a price: he must find an idiot to bring to boss Bruce Greenwood's dinner party, where these unfortunates will be ridiculed. Rudd doesn't like the idea, but then he (literally) runs into Steve Carrell, a man of such transcendent idiocy that Rudd can't resist the siren call he represents. But before they can make it to the dinner, Carrell's well-meaning stupidity threatens to completely derail Rudd's life.
This is a remake of 1998's The Dinner Game (Le diner des cons). Francis Veber's farce clocked in at 80 minutes. Jay Roach's bloated retread is half again as long, and only half as funny. The Paul Rudd character in the original, played by Thierry Lhermitte, was a superior, cruel SOB who deserved to have his life taken apart. Furthermore, the characters never actually make it to the dinner of the title. The remake, of course, finds it necessary to stick literally to its title, and gives us the dinner, thus inviting us to engage in precisely the form of cruel laughter it pretends to condemn. It also tries to make Rudd sympathetic, and having his character be a nice guy runs counter to the very premise of the film. End result: a film that tries much too hard to be funny, laboriously working every last predictable gag until those horses are fit for nothing more than the glue factory. There are some amusing moments, but this is, by and large, a gigantic, time-consuming waste of the talent involved.
![Machete [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/machete-blu-ray-large.jpg)
![Case 39 [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/case-39-blu-ray-large.jpg)
![The A-Team (+ Digital Copy) [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/the-a-team-digital-copy-blu-r-large.jpg)
