Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 5th, 2024
" I think their whole family's like some weird medical experiment. I think they're, like, circus people."
Be honest, who hears the theme music when anyone even mentions The Addams Family? I know I do, and then I have to resist the urge to do the finger snaps. Just in time for 31 Nights of Terror as well as the release of the animated version comes the of The Addams Family: Family Values on UHD (4K), featuring Raul Julia and Angelica Huston as Gomez and Morticia Gomez, and let’s not forget Christopher Lloyd and Christina Ricci as Fester and Wednesday Gomez respectively. Based on the wildly popular cartoons that appeared in the New Yorker that went on to find success as television series, the The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd, wealthy, aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware, or do not care, that other people find them bizarre or frightening. For me, these movies were my introduction to this family, as the TV series was bit before my time, but a gothic family unaware of their difference from other people.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Sean Boelman on July 23rd, 2024
When a new 4K restoration of the 1993 Palme d’Or winner Farewell My Concubine — the first Chinese film to ever take home the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival — debuted at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, physical media collectors were waiting for the announcement that it would be released through the Criterion Collection. Well, fans did not have to wait long, as the Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film is being released by Criterion on both 4K and Blu-Ray, and this gorgeous restoration alone makes this edition worth picking up. That’s not even to mention the quality of the movie itself, which is considered a seminal film in Chinese cinema for both its content and form.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on July 3rd, 2024
In 2004 when Team America: World Police was released, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were already well established in the film industry as the guys who created South Park. They had even dipped their toes into doing live action films like Orgazmo and BASEketball, but what the industry knew them for was their animated series South Park that began back in 1997 and is still going strong on Comedy Central. The duo isn’t afraid to take chances, whether it’s insulting celebrities (after all, part of their charm is being equal opportunity offenders) or creating their musical for the stage, The Book of Mormon, so was it a big surprise they’d want to do an action adventure film entirely with puppets? The film is very much a parody of the action films of the 90’s and early 00’s that were produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. In case you are unfamiliar with his name, he produced the mega hits like Top Gun, The Rock, Con-Air, and Pearl Harbor. But what this film was also tapping into was the over-the-top patriotic attitudes that the media projected. I mean, everything needed to be patriotic in a post 9-11 world.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on May 29th, 2024
Francis Ford Coppola is one of those directors that you don’t have to love, but you have to at least appreciate his contribution to cinema. Personally my favorite film of his is Apocalypse Now, and then The Godfather II. I know other film geeks out there will argue with what his ‘best” film is, but I think it’s fair to say he’s one of the greatest film directors out there no matter how you may rank his films. When the chance to review One From The Heart came along I jumped at the opportunity, because, well, it’s a film I had never actually seen or even knew that Coppola had done. In watching the bonus features on the disc, I found it amusing that this was supposed to be a simple film for him to do after the insane task of directing Apocalypse Now. This was supposed to be a simple rom-com with a budget of $2 million, but things got out of hand. Coppola bought a studio for his American Zoetrope company and used all the studios stages to build sets for the film,
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 9th, 2024
"People scare better when they're dyin.'"
Mention the name Sergio Leone and you immediately think of Clint Eastwood and their Man With No Name trilogy. The truth is that Leone was the master of the spaghetti western and largely responsible for making Clint what he is today. When the Italian director decided to try his hand at Hollywood, he was welcomed with open arms, except they weren't interested in anything but an American copy of a spaghetti western. Leone had something else in mind. He had a "been there, done that" attitude about the westerns and wanted to do an epic called Once Upon A Time In America. But Hollywood was hearing none of that. So they compromised. If Leone delivered a stylistic western, the studio would spring for the epic he wanted to make. The result of that parlay turned out to be Once Upon A Time In The West.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on May 3rd, 2024
As is sometimes the case when you write a review, one does not have the fortune of doing everything in its exact order. I was extremely excited when I found out I was reviewing the second part of Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earth. 4K steelbooks are pretty hard to come by for review copies, and I was quite elated. One little problem: I had not been able to watch the first part of this planned trilogy. As I racked my brain and started to flip through some streaming channels, I was very fortunate to come upon HBO Max, which had placed the first part on their service only a few days ago. Sometimes, it pays to be lucky more so than good. Let's take a look at the second part and see if it can start to answer the questions left behind from the first.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on May 3rd, 2024
"People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it, and the soul can't rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right."
OK, let me get this out of the way. The Crow was a vehicle for Brandon Lee, son of martial arts legend and movie star Bruce Lee. The elder Lee trained Brandon in martial arts from the day he could take his first steps. When Brandon was only eight years old, his father tragically died just before finishing production on Enter the Dragon, a movie which would go on to become an international blockbuster making Bruce Lee the greatest icon of martial arts cinema. Brandon followed in his father’s footsteps studying martial arts and drama.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on April 25th, 2024
by Joshua Nuances
"I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. Years ago we had the church. That was only a way of saying - we had each other. The Knights of Columbus were real head-breakers; true guineas. They took over their piece of the city. Twenty years after an Irishman couldn't get a f$#@&% job, we had the presidency. May he rest in peace. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it's this - no one gives it to you. You have to take it."
The Departed, a basic remake of the Hong Kong film Internal Affairs, tells the story of Boston mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) and his ruling ways of the streets.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by John Delia on March 1st, 2024
When Contagion was released in 2011, it was considered a horror film, more a flight of fancy than anything else. It wasn't a great box office winner. But in 2019 all of that changed as we lived through the pandemic that was mere science fiction before then. Looking back at the film, it becomes a game of what they eerily got right and what was far off the mark. Much of the world disaster element, thankfully, never came through, but in hindsight it is quite surreal the things the film did get right. The idea of a therapy drug possibly being downplayed by the government and an internet guy trying to drive those discords. The fear of a quickly-created vax also looks very much like what is still playing out in the world today. The film depicted a nasal vax that I wish had been true. The film avoided much of the political fallout, but you really must see this film in a post-COVID world.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 19th, 2024
"You are now the property of Erewhon Prison. A citizen of nowhere. The Geneva Convention is void here; Amnesty International doesn't know we exist. When I say your ass belongs to me, I mean exactly that."
I am a huge John Woo fan, especially his earlier classics like Hard Boiled. I’ll admit it’s been several years since I last seen Face/Off, but I don’t have a reason why, as I remember really liking this movie then. At either rate now I have a copy of the movie to call my own, and a special two disc release at that. Let’s just hope that it is what I remember, but as a big fan of Nick Cage I don’t think I’ll be let down. In order to catch him, he must become him. I couldn’t put it any better myself, Face/Off tells quite the eccentric story of revenge, devotion, and of course crime. Sean Archer (John Travolta, Wild Hogs) is an extremely devoted FBI agent, obsessed with catching terrorist Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage, Ghost Rider).
