Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 20th, 2006
One of the things that Ron Howard ( Beautiful Mind) mentioned during various little interviews and press junkets for Apollo 13 was that he was surprised that up until this film everyone seemed to forget about story. He could not have picked a better cast to boot, with recognizable names as Tom Hanks (who was coming off his back to back Oscar wins with Forrest Gump and Philadelphia), Bill Paxton (Twister) and Kevin Bacon (Where The Truth Lies), along with Oscar nominees Kathleen Quinlan (A Civil Action) and Ed Harris (A History of Violence).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 16th, 2006
Are we that jaded a country when a movie like Cinderella Man can be somewhat ignored during its theatrical run, and yet when it still garners the occasional award nomination as it did last winter, people snort, "Well, it's just your usual manipulative dramatic crap". Yeah? So what? For god's sake, take a look at what plays during the summer. Did we honestly need a remake of When a Stranger Calls?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 11th, 2006
Training Day stars Academy Award Winning Actor Denzel Washington in the role of Alonzo Harris. Harris, who is one of the meanest, baddest cops in the city of LA, is a person who cruises the streets in his customized Caddy. Harris, in one of the film's opening scenes, meets Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke), a young cop whose dream is to be promoted to the elite narc squad. Naturally, this is Jake's first day of training and he is thrown into the arms of Harris. Alonzo tries to show him the streets so he can understand e...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 7th, 2006
Goodfellas tells the story of Henry Hill (Narc’s Ray Liotta), an Irish-Italian kid whose only ambition, it seems, is to be a type of wise-guy kid. In one of the first scenes with Hill we learn that “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be gangster.” This line here tends to set the emotion and mood for the whole film. Hill, as a kid at least, is your typical child who defies his parents, struggles to do well in school and wants to hang out with the older looking tough guys down the street. F...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 4th, 2006
Swordfish stars Hugh Jackman (X-Men as computer hacker Stanley. Stanley has just spent two years in jail for hacking a program used specifically by the FBI to snoop in on everybody’s email. Enter Halle Berry (also X-Men) as Ginger who has been assigned to recruit Stanley to help stop mastermind Gabriel Shear played by John Travolta (Face-Off). The initial problem here is that Stanley, obviously, doesn’t trust the government. He has been previously forbidden by the courts to come anywhere n...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 2nd, 2006
I will be honest and inform you that I have yet to like a video game based film since 1995’s Mortal Kombat. It seems that no matter how closely they try to follow the story based on the game, the director always fails. One of the more famous director’s in the video-game to movie based series is director Uwe Boll, who has brought us The House of the Dead and the recent Bloodrayne, These movies, as the popular consensus agrees, were extremely awful. They lacked anything redeeming, despite the orig...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on April 29th, 2006
In the era we live in, the eventuality of a movie about war was going to come, whether or not we wanted to see the film. Since the war in Iraq is such a hot button topic with a majority of people, regardless if you were for the war or against the war, Universal thought this would be the perfect moment to capture our interest in war. Enter director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) and stars Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain) and Academy-Award winning Actor Jamie Foxx (Ray) and you know you have a m...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on April 25th, 2006
Clint Eastwood’s film Million Dollar Baby tells the story of an aging fighter trainer named Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) who eventually decides to train a hillbilly girl (Swank) who thinks she can be a boxer. Dunn runs a gym in the Los Angeles area. One day a girl named Maggie Fitzgerald, from Missouri, approaches Dunn informing him that she has been working at a waitress job since the age of 13. She tells Dunn that boxing for her is the only way she can escape this type of job her life has thrown at her.
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Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on April 21st, 2006
With HD-DVD gaining a lot of press and discussion over the past few months, many wondered what would be the initial title for release that would help showcase the power that Toshiba wanted to showcase. Some figured a big blockbuster like The Star Wars Trilogy could be released. (wouldn’t that be nice?) But with Fox being exclusive to Blu-Ray, HD-DVD’s main competition, no one could figure that a moderately successful film like 2003’s The Last Samurai would ever be thought of as a player seller. Well, af...