Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 14th, 2016
"What we do has consequences, intended and unintended. The decisions we make, the actions we bring have weight."
When upcoming heavyweight contenders like Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and Andrew Ross Sorkin get together, you have reason to expect big things. And Billions is very much about heavyweights. The entire show is one big metaphor for a heavyweight prizefight. In one corner you have U.S Attorney Chuck "The Scholar" Rhodes, played by Paul Giamatti. He's the reigning world champion with a record of 80+ to 0. In the other corner is Bobby "Axe" Axelrod, played by Damian Lewis; he could also be considered undefeated. He runs a sexy brokerage firm. He's the people's champion because he gives very freely to notable charities and particularly to first responders because his wife's brother was a fireman killed at ground zero on 9/11. Both of these guys walk and talk like champs. There's a lot of trash-talk between them, but both have very lurid and potentially devastating skeletons in their perspective closets. And most of the first season plays out like the traditional preliminaries of the big fight. They are headed to an ultimate collision, and it's even-money who, if anyone, walks away with the belt.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 15th, 2016
"Going on down to South Park and meet some friends of mine."
After 20 years or more, they really do feel like friends. I've known Cartman, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny longer than most real people in my life. Only the Simpsons have been around longer these days. Over those years South Park has always been a series of stories that rarely connect with each other in any significant way. There have been multi-part episodes, and certain experiences have come back up over the years. Still, we're talking about a universe where killing Kenny had become a running joke and happened pretty much in every episode. Those days are gone, and it's been a while since Kenny met his demise, and now South Park has joined the ranks of the continuing story season. I do believe that's one of the signs of the Apocalypse. I'm just sayin'.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 7th, 2016
"That's me, Mike Hanover, and I just killed a man in a taco shop bathroom. Hey, he started it. I been hiding near the border looking for The Vigilante..."
You've found him. Anchor Bay's The Vigilante actually started life as a web series. The web episodes followed the exploits of The Vigilante, played by Paul Sloan and his sidekick The Kid, played by Kevin L. Walker. It was pretty much a hyper-superhero kind of series with ramped-up action on a limited budget. Now we have a feature film version that is quite the mixture of genre films. You get a little grindhouse mixed with some Leone Spaghetti Western with extra sauce. Throw in The Expendables with a side of Deadpool. Stir in some graphic novel clichés and season it all with a bit of exploitation film violence and characterizations. The result is a film that doesn't take itself very seriously and might be good for an entertaining ride. That is, if you don't overcook the whole thing. At about 108 minutes, let's just say it was bordering on overcooked.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on June 22nd, 2016
Disaster films are something that for me screams American cinema of the 90’s. I know there were films before that had come out, but a good portion of my teen years of the 90’s were of the mega-blockbuster variety like Twister, Dante’s Peak, The Perfect Storm, and so forth. Now we have The Wave, the first disaster film to come out of Norway, and from the looks of the trailers they were going for something BIG. This is a film that comes out with so much potential and is a film that could even possibly find an American audience that could look past the fact that subtitles may be involved. With the way technology has come along over the years, smaller countries have been able to produce films as big as anything released in our cinemas here in the states. Now here’s the question: is it any good, though?
Welcome to the small mountain town of Geiranger, Norway. It’s a quaint little town that attracts tourists with its isolation and beautiful landscape. But having this little slice of vacation paradise comes at a price. Geiranger sits in an area that has a lot of activity with the rocks moving beneath the surface, this movement geologists believe will one day cause a collapse of a mountain spilling into the fjord below which will create a massive Tsunami. Basically Geiranger is a town simply waiting to be wiped out by this massive wave. This is where we meet Kristian (Kristoffer Joner), a geologist that has been studying Geiranger for years but is now moving away to the city for a “better job”. It comes as no surprise that as he and his family are packing and ready to move that Kristian is troubled by recent recordings from around the area and has a feeling something bad is going to happen. (One thing I’ve learned from disaster films, always listen to the nut job that believes the end is coming.)
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on June 15th, 2016
Bad Robot, in my eyes, is simply the best at keeping things a secret. In this day and age, to be able to surprise audiences is just about an impossible task. When the first Cloverfield trailer was released in 2007 in front of Transformers, it was a trailer that had us all guessing up until its release. In my opinion Cloverfield was one of the best found-footage films to come out and was a grand achievement, considering it was a monster film that had been pretty much been kept under wraps until its actual release. Bad Robot managed to surprise us again, releasing a trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane that set the internet on fire with theories and hopes for this to be a long-awaited sequel. But is that what this really is?
What I want to go ahead and get out of the way is, if you’re hoping for spoilers, there will be none, other than to say if you are expecting a big-budget extravaganza filled with monsters destroying cities, this is not that film. Don’t waste your money on the big IMAX presentation, because you will feel cheated. Instead, what 10 Cloverfield Lane delivers is something more intimate than I would have expected, and it takes the thriller genre back to its basics.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 7th, 2016
"A good family business is not the same as a good family."
You can say that again. The television landscape is changing, at least on cable. Ray Donovan is the latest in the string of new shows that are attracting talent once thought out of reach for television. A show starring Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight: this Showtime series looked to be something very special... and it has gotten better... perhaps a lot better.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on January 7th, 2016
“Ballet is the ultimate optical illusion. We make effort appear effortless.”
If ballet dancers make the seemingly impossible look graceful and elegant, then Flesh and Bone similarly soars when it doesn’t try quite so hard to conjure drama. The best version of this provocative Starz miniseries explores the psychological toll that ambition, competition, and the (impossible?) quest for creative perfection can take. Unfortunately, the series also introduces way too many subplots and distractions during its 8-episode run.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on October 15th, 2015
It wasn’t until I settled in to watch Spike TV’s three-part/six-hour miniseries based on the (relatively short) life of King Tut that I realized we hadn’t really seen his story depicted on screen before. I mean, it’s probably a bad sign that the most famous on-screen portrayal of the ancient Egyptian monarch comes courtesy of…Steve Martin. Given the liberties this miniseries takes with casting and storytelling, I reckon some historians would’ve preferred Martin as the famous pharaoh here. However, I still found this to be a suitably entertaining and attractive (if somewhat overstuffed) melodrama.
"No one fears you. You are the boy king who lives behind other men."
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 12th, 2015
I grew up on the horror comics of the 1970's. Eerie and Creepy were two of my favorites. My father would buy them and pass them down to me when he finished reading them. They were black and white so that they could take advantage of a loophole in the Comics Code and often featured lurid and gory stories of horror and depravity. Probably not the most appropriate reading for a young boy, but I ate them up. Before those comics there were the EC horror comics from Bill Gaines in the 1950's. Titles like Tales From The Crypt and The Vault Of Horror called out to readers with gory and hideous covers. But it didn't really start there. It all goes back to 19th century England and the publication of weekly pamphlets that featured the same kind of ghoulish entertainment for the masses. They were called “penny dreadfuls”, describing the price and the material they contained. That tradition has evolved over the last century or so, and television has taken the place of that kind of literature. It was only a matter of time before that 19th century tradition would be reborn as a Showtime series called, appropriately enough, Penny Dreadful.
The series has used three popular horror novels as its foundation. You'll find characters and situations from Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray. John Logan, who brought us the thrilling Roman adventure Gladiator, takes these basic works of literature and weaves a complicated story that sprinkles in a few other horror elements to bring us something deliciously new. He whips them together in a period piece that is thick with atmosphere. He populates them with incredibly animated characters played by actors that are, for the most part, quite solid in their roles. We were introduced to them in the first season, but we hadn't been given that season to review. So let me give you a rundown of the characters you'll encounter.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on September 4th, 2015
If nothing else, The Curse of Downers Grove lives up (or rather down) to its morose title. It’s too bad because this (non-)thriller actually has a promising premise: every year, a supposed curse in the titular suburban Illinois town kills a senior at the local high school. The movie could’ve gone for darkly comic thrills or tried to construct a mystery around who the latest victim might be, to name just a couple of examples. Instead, this shoddy, inert flick squanders a variety of opportunities on the way to its preposterous conclusion.
The action here picks up with one week to go in the school year. Chrissie Swanson (Bella Heathcote) is a sharp, skeptical senior who doesn’t fully believe in the curse, despite witnessing the previous year’s victim plunge to his death. Did the curse kill him and the other teens or was it bad luck and good ol’ fashioned stupidity? I’m sure the fact that the high school was built on sacred Native American ground has nothing to do with anything.
