Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 9th, 2006
Director Jonathan Mostow is an interesting director to say the least. He directed Kurt Russell is the great Breakdown where a man must fight to save his wife. He director Arnold Schwarzenegger in the third Terminator film where a machine must fight another machine to help save the human race; but before he made Terminator 3, he directed Matthew McConaughey and Bill Paxton in a film where men must fight against their wits to save themselves. Two of the three films are great and are a joy to watch,...while one is enjoyable to watch, but that is about it.
In U-571, Lt. Tyler (Matthew McConaughey) stars as a young man who wants nothing better than to jump into the command line. His commander, Lt. Commander Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) doesn’t see this though. Tyler isn’t experienced enough and isn’t ready to sacrifice the lives of his men for the lives of others or, more importantly, the safety of the mission at hand. This creates some heat between the two, but all that is quickly put aside when they’re called back to the boat. We soon learn that a German U-boat has become disabled in the middle of the Atlantic. On board this U-boat is a secret Enigma machine, which can be used to cipher messages. This exact Enigma machine was used by the Nazi’s to control all of their shipping lanes.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 1st, 2006
The Chronicles of Riddick takes place about five years after the events of Pitch Black. Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel) continues to fight for his life on Crematoria (what a name), a planet whose sun, apparently, is so blazingly hot that every 15 minutes it blankets everything beneath it basically vaporizing it. But that doesn’t really matter all that much now does it. For Riddick, who is one of the few surviving members of the Furions, has been captured by the Necromongers and now must find a way to po...er his way out like only Vin Diesel can. Apparently these Necromongers want every person to become a Necromonger. They line up behind their Lord Marshal who has visited a planet called Underverse and returned half alive and half something else. Then we meet a character named a character named Aereon (Judi Dench) who can materialize out of thin air and then disappear. This is the perfect idea for a majority of characters in this film. They appear, spend a few minutes of the screen, and then disappear for us to never see them again.
That is the first main problem with this film. We meet countless other characters including a little girl named Ziza who wants Riddick to fight these monsters for her. We hope that sometime during the film a big battle will occur where Riddick must defeat these aforementioned monsters and save the little girl, but such a scene never arrives. Why on earth would you hint at the scene then? I suppose this is because, as we can basically figure out from a few key scenes in the film, that a sequel is inevitable (maybe the sequel is the cartoon that recently came out).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 28th, 2006
The 2005 Version of Assault on Precinct 13 is an obvious remake of John Carpenter’s 1976 classic. Precinct, for Carpenter, was one of his first films made before his ultra famous Halloween. But if anyone has seen the 1976 version, you can easily know what will come from the 2005 version. Instead of making a possible change to the 2005 version, Director Jean-Francois Richet decided to use the similar theme of a police station being abandoned that Carpenter did. Instead though, Richet focuses on the corru...t possibilities of the police. What Richet brings to the table is a few impressive action scenes, a lot of gorgeous snow (especially so in HD), and a few great actors. All this is very impressive considering the low $20 million dollar budget the film had.
In this version of Precinct, the jail is scheduled to close forever at midnight. Burnt-out desk sergeant Jake Fornick (Training Day’s Ethan Hawke) still traumatized by the death of two partners, is on the graveyard shift with old-timer Jasper O'Shea (TV’s The West Wing) announces he will soon retire. Jake just tends to sit around popping bottles of pills trying to overcome his this pain in his life. That is until some terror arrives. Bishop (The Matrix Trilogy’s Laurence Fishburne) has been arrested and is being transported along with Beck (Empire’s John Leguizamo) and a few others including a character played by rapper Ja Rule. Everything seems to be going fine until a big accident blocks the highway to the jail. So, to get these criminals off their backs, the guards decide to dump Bishop and the select others off at Precinct 13. Unfortunately, the guards didn’t know that Bishop’s men are determined to set him free.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 23rd, 2006
The basic plot to The Bourne Supremacy is very similar to The Bourne Identity in that Jason Bourne is still trying to evade any and all forces that seemingly will stop at nothing to kill this man. Naturally though, Bourne can’t just evade these forces in a normal manner, but he has to evade these forces using his explosive martial arts and wit. As we learned in Identity, Bourne had his memory wiped. To escape people, Bourne has traveled halfway across the world living on the beach of Goa in south...rn India. Everything is going fine for Bourne and his new girlfriend Marie until Bourne, who seems to notice every little detail, recognizes something he has never seen before driving a car he has never seen before turning up in all the wrong places at the wrong times. This prompts Bourne to realize that someone is after him again, which turns out to be definitely true.
As the movie continues onward, Bourne discovers that he is being pursued by new people named Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) and her boss Ward Abbott (Brian Cox). Both found Bourne’s fingerprints at the scene of a murder in Berlin involving a CIA agent and his high-level criminal contact. The only issue with this is that Bourne was in Goa at the time sitting on the beach. So the big question here who is trying to frame Bourne and, more importantly, why is someone trying to frame Bourne. This simple question leads Bourne through many locales while he tries to figure every little clue out.
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).
Based on the book by Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell (played by Hanks) and adapted to film by William Broyles (Unfaithful), the film chronicles the story of the dramatic flight. To sum it up for those of you who haven;t contributed to it;s $350 million worldwide box office take, allow me to do so now; Lovell, Fred Haise (Paxton) and Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise, Ransom) are due to take off in Apollo 13. Unfortunately a member of the backup crew had the measles, and Mattingly was scrubbed and replaced by Jack Swigert (Bacon). The relatively young crew tests and retests for the big flight, and it goes off without a hitch.
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?
Written by Akiva Goldsman and directed by Ron Howard (both from A Beautiful Mind), Cinderella Man tells the story of James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe, also from A Beautiful Mind, heavyweight champion in the '20s and '30s. He was on top of the world, married to a beautiful wife (Renee Zellweger, Chicago), and had two kids, and lived in a nice house in New Jersey. Then the Depression hit, and it hit everyone hard. Braddock and his family were forced out of their home and lived in poverty. Braddock still fought occasionally through the years, but began to break down physically, and it got to a point where his skills had deteriorated so much, that his boxing license was taken away. He was left without the basic means to support his family, so he went to the docks to look for work. A proud man, he never asked for money or for public assistance. When he did, it's viscerally heartbreaking to see such a stoic man break down and ask for a hand.
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...r Hill, gangsters were his Superman type hero; they could get anything they wanted including the best seats at the show, the best cars and they actually belonged to something.
As Hill becomes immersed in the Mob world, he starts to do little jobs. It isn’t until he meets Jimmy Conway (15 Minutes’ Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (JFK’s Joe Pesci) that his life starts to change. We learn that Conway and DeVito are two of the most feared hit men in the entire Organization. If someone needed something done, odds are they approached one of these two men. Conway and DeVito teach Hill the basics of the mob world included a few life lessons all while they make it so evidently clear to Hill that they have no problem killing any man and neither should Hill.
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.
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