Posted in: Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on June 6th, 2012
“When I saw you, I believed it was a sign… that something new can come into this world.”
John Carter first appeared in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom magazine serial nearly a century ago in 1912. The science fiction pioneering Carter stories captured the imagination of masses and inspired countless authors and directors. For example, George Lucas himself has stated there would be no Star Wars without John Carter of Mars. It took nearly a century to get it to screen and in time countless others have mined the series for inspiration.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on June 5th, 2012
A successful writing team, who also happen to be a married couple, are the creators of an award-winning show in the UK that has just completed after four seasons. An American network wishes to create a US version of the show. The couple are flown to LA, put up in a lavish mansion and are introduced to the Hollywood method of creating television...and it nearly destroys them.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on June 5th, 2012
"I'm yelling for society, for everybody! It's not just me!"
That's Larry David chastising a dog walker who didn't bring along a bag to clean up after her pooch, but that statement also tidily summarizes the premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm. After 11 years, seven seasons and 70 episodes of over-analyzing and kvetching — and after pulling off an incredibly well-received Seinfeld reunion in season 7 — a small part of me wondered if David had anything left to complain about heading into season 8. I should've known better.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 5th, 2012
"Blacks are mentally inferior, by nature subservient, and cowards in the face of danger. They are therefore unfit for combat." - U.S. Army War College Study 1925
Obviously, there's another story to be told here. George Lucas says that he's been wanting to tell this story for over 20 years. It's a story that has often been told in both film and documentary form. In none of those cases has the movie been made into the kind of spectacle film that we find in Red Tails.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on June 5th, 2012
YouTube had all but killed off the idea of mailing silly home videos to the likes of America's Funniest Home Videos. These days, people prefer to stream dozens of videos on their computers and save themselves from the watered down jokes of Bob Saget or current host Tom Bergeron. Tosh.O takes a similar format of displaying such silly videos, but focuses on things that have gone “viral” online. Like AFHV, Tosh.O adds their own commentary and sketches to the presentation but in a much more crass, cable-savvy manner.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 1st, 2012
For most of the last decade or more CBS has dominated the primetime drama market on network television. One of the reasons, of course, has been the prevalence of top-flight crime dramas like the NCIS and CSI franchises. From 2003 until 2009 the Thursday line-up on the eye network included the blockbuster pairing of the original CSI and Without A Trace. Both were products of filmmaker Jerry Bruckheimer's television stable. While CSI focused on the science behind a criminal investigation, Without A Trace took the more traditional route of the human element to the FBI's Missing Persons Unit.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 31st, 2012
At first glance it would be very easy to say that Beyond doesn't really offer us anything terribly new in the crime drama genre. For the most part I would tend to agree with that criticism. I would counter with the argument that a very good film doesn't need to be very original to be good. Sometimes the value in a movie lies in the fact that it does what it does do extremely well. That's how I would describe the sleeper direct-to-video release Beyond.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on May 29th, 2012
Often in columns, writers are basically forced to do enough research on their own to qualify as experts. But that is not always enough. Sometimes, we are a lot better off if we just consult an expert from the get-go and ask them all of the pertinent questions we need answered. My wife happened to be that expert I needed for the latest season of True Blood, Season Four. Without her, Sookie Stackhouse might just be another girl from the Jersey Shore. Wait, which show am I reviewing again?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on May 29th, 2012
"This Martius is grown from man to dragon. He has wings. He's more than a creeping thing. There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger."
There's a certain hierarchy when it comes to the amount of cinematic interpretations of William Shakespeare's plays. At the top tier, we have the endlessly adapted Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth the Scottish Play. A step below that, you've probably got your King Lear, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream and a few more. And about a dozen tiers below that, we finally come across Coriolanus.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 28th, 2012
Steven Spielberg’s very-long-in-gestation adaptation of Hergé’s Tintin finally came into being over Christmas. The story, very much in keeping with the globe-trotting adventures of the comic books (drawing heavily, in fact, upon The Secret of the Unicorn), has Tintin (voiced by Jaime Bell) become embroiled in a treasure quest after buying a model ship that has one third of the secret concealed in its mast. Captured by nefarious evil-doers who will stop at nothing to find the treasure, he encounters Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), and a legendary friendship is formed.
