Disc Audio

High school was a nightmare for me, I try to forget most of it. For me, there was no 10 year high school reunion and I was glad I never went. Speaking of ten & high school, this is the 10th year anniversary of 10 Things I Hate About You, a Gil Junger comedy that helped launch quite a few careers. As such, they made the leap to Blu-Ray with a well-done anniversary edition. But how does the movie hold up?

I've seen some dysfunctional families on television over the years. Haven't we all. It's fun to laugh at someone else's flaws. Along comes Showtime, and it's rather hard to classify the series The United States Of Tara. This one takes dysfunction to a whole new level. Tara (Collette) suffers from multiple personality disorder. Laughing yet? She has managed to control the problem by using medications and attending frequent therapy sessions. But the medication is sapping her creative ability. You see, Tara was once a gifted artist. She painted murals and was somewhat critically acclaimed. The meds put an end to all of that.

It would appear that Michael Landon, Jr. is attempting to cash in on his late father's Little House On The Prairie appeal. He is one of the driving forces behind this series of made for television films. He has directed several of them and serves as an executive producer on them all. He has also been involved with some of the writing on the series. They are based on a series of books written by Janette Oke. They follow three generations of women in the days of the Western frontier. When I say that Landon is spending on his father's legacy, you need look no further than the common elements of the films themselves to understand how I come to that conclusion.

For five years now, Lost has taken us through mystery after mystery. I’m beginning to think that the show’s title is more a mission statement for where they want to take the viewers. Each time Abrams appears to answer a question and move on, closer examination proves that nothing has actually been revealed. The series has become the poster child for misdirection and script sleight of hand. When I examine the 13 episodes from season 4, I’m left with the inescapable, pun intended, feeling that nothing significant has really happened here at all. But at the same time it’s the most significant event of the series. All the while I find myself compelled to watch episode after episode.

“Every story has a beginning. Every life has meaning and potential…”

Kyle doesn’t really know his story, and he’s beginning to understand his potential. But that was before. This year things are about to come to a conclusion for our adolescent boy without a belly button. For Kyle's fans, this is your classic good news/bad news scenario.

"When nature rules, beauty reigns."

Ryan Hale (Gade) is on a winter break from school. Her parents are off touring Europe, so she has to leave her city life at Beacon Hill in Boston to spend some time with her grandfather (Lloyd) who lives in the wilderness of Montana. She might have been excited at first to see Montana, but soon learns that Miley Cyrus is nowhere in sight. Instead she is quickly bored with the seemingly unending parade of trees and snow. She becomes impatient with her grandfather's appreciation for nature along with a lack of cable television. It all spells out a rather dull winter break until she finds a wounded wolf/dog.

"To everyone's surprise, the ship didn't come to a stop over Manhattan or Washington or Chicago, but instead coasted to a halt directly over the city of Johannesburg. The doors didn't open for months. Nobody could get in. They eventually decided, after much deliberation, that the best thing to do would be to physically cut their way in. We were on the verge of first contact. The whole world was watching, expecting, I don't know, music from Heaven and bright shining lights..."

It all started when Peter Jackson's long anticipated Halo project went belly up.

Few television situational comedies have produced the stable of A-list stars that this one did. Every one of these cast members were relatively unknown at the time that Taxi was taking fares on our television sets each week. Not so today. The cast was so remarkable that it is here that I decided to spend much of my review. The episodes were often funny, even more often hilarious. But after all of these years, it is the characters that are most remembered by the fans. Yeah, we all have our favorite moments. Many of them in this release. And I’ll get to those moments, but first:

The film begins in the middle of the story, at the end of one journey and the beginning of another. Marlon (Aldemar Correa) and Reina (Angelica Blandon) are illegal Columbian immigrants, and have just arrived in New York City. They are staying in a beyond-seedy hostel in Queens, and Reina has just spent their last coins on a fruitless phone call. Frustrated, Marlon hits the street, and after a panicky encounter with the police, winds up lost in NYC. So begins his second journey one that is both a search for belonging as well as his beloved Reina, that is intercut with flasbacks to the trip that brought Marlon and Reina to the city in the first place, beginning with their leaving the relative comfort of their lives in Medillin and tracking their increasingly nightmarish trek to the States.

On February 11th, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from the Victor Verster Prison is often seen as the symbolic end of apartheid in the country of South Africa. However, the apartheid was not fully removed until the elections of 1994. Furthermore, the story was way more complex than the African National Congress leader’s freedom. The story that was more focused on Willie Esterhuyse, Thabo Mbeki and Michael Young. These names might seem foreign to most of us, but they are perhaps three of the most important names to the recent history of South Africa.