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...ar a computer. Ginger decides to use a little persuasion in the form of a lap dance and a weapon to give him exactly one-minute to hack into a government computer. It looks like Stanley still has a bit of hacker in him as he completes this task. Stanley is offered $10 Million Dollars to work for Shear as one of his main men. Why on earth Shear would trust Stanley we soon learn.
Shear wants to recruit some of the world’s best hackers, Stanley being one of them, to help him break into a DEA bank account that contains some money. Some money in this cast is being translated into $9.5 Billion Dollars. I must take a quick break here and comment on the work of John Travolta. Ever since becoming a ‘nut-case’ (in the media’s eyes) along with Tom Cruise, it seems like audiences have forgotten how great of an actor he is. Travolta has made some of the best action films in Face-Off and Broken Arrow all while making funny films like Get Shorty. Back to the program though, Shear is able to, through his cunning skill, manipulate and use many people, including us in many scenes.
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...nal source material being pretty good. When I heard of a film being made on the game series Doom, I began to worry as I figured it would follow the typical trend of terrible video-game based movies. Can Doom reverse the horrible trend of terrible video-game based movies? Read on to find out
Doom begins with a fly in shot over the red planet Mars. We move in more and see the Olduvai Research Station, which is a remote scientific facility on Mars. And that is the last scene we see of the planet Mars. For a movie based on a game that takes place on the red planet Mars, we never fully see the planet except for the opening scene. Maybe this is me wanting what I saw in the game series. But every film director has to take a few creative liberties right? Well, I am very disappointed to report to that director Andrzej Bartkowiak and Universal seem to have taken a few too many creative liberties when making this film as the film is nothing like the game at all.
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...vie that will pique the average person’s curiousity. But was Jarhead made too soon? Would people really want to see what our soliders are going through? Let’s find out shall we?
Jarhead is based on the 2003 memoirs of Anthony Swofford who is portrayed by Gyllenhaal. Swofford served in the first Gulf War. The film is obviously about a war, but what makes the film amazing is that it is a war film that rises way, way above the concept of a war to tell an intriguing story of exhaustion, boredom, lonliness, obession and drama.
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.
< ...>Dunn, naturally, doesn’t want to give this girl a chance because there is no way he will train a girl. Dunn’s former boxer Scrap (Morgan Freeman) convinces Dunn to give this girl a chance because she knew growing up that she would be nothing but trash if not given any chances. Scrap serves as the film’s narrator, similar to his role in The Shawshank Redemption. His voice is very flat and subdued usually putting no effect on what he is ever saying. He talks about how the girl walked into the gym, how she refused to ever leave and how Frankie decided to finally train her. Scrap, to some, may just serve as a person who tells us what is going on, but he is more. Scrap serves as an individual breathing life into his own when he is not focusing on Maggie or Frankie.
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...er jumping through the disc, one can easily understand why Warner Brother’s decided to chose this title for the main release.
The Last Samurai stars Tom Cruise as Captain Nathan Algren, who is a decorated Civil War hero. Algren, as of late, has fallen into a world of drunkenness and performing in side shows selling rifles. He wants a sort of redemption from the world he lives in now so he can eventually return to his famed world of before. It turns out that the Japanese government is looking for a military leader to train their new Imperial Army. Japan, who was trying to move into the world of modernization, needed an army to fight against the rising world of the samurai who wanted to preserve the countries sense of the old. Algren accepts the job for the main reason of the nice pay.
![Swordfish [HD DVD] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/swordfish-hd-dvd-large.jpg)
![Doom [HD DVD] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/doom-hd-dvd-large.jpg)
![Jarhead [HD DVD] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/jarhead-hd-dvd-large.jpg)
![Million Dollar Baby [HD DVD] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/million-dollar-baby-hd-dvd-large.jpg)
![The Last Samurai [HD DVD] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/the-last-samurai-hd-dvd-large.jpg)
