Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 2nd, 2018
There's a lot going on with Fox's X-Men property these days. Legion became the first live-action television series based on that universe. It's an odd show that takes the franchise in more of a mental direction. There is a new film that features the First Class cast that deals with Jean Grey and her Dark Phoenix nature. While that film is being delayed...again, you can get your mutant fix with the release of the first season of The Gifted on DVD as well as the upcoming second season soon to air. This show is more in line with the kind of action and mutant powers display that fans of the franchise are likely looking for. It appears to exist in the X-Men universe created by Fox, as there are multiple mentions of the X-Men in the show. The first three films are now out in 4K, and there's a lot of X-Men stuff coming to your home theatre. Add to that list The Gifted: Season 1 on DVD.
Stephen Moyer plays Reed Strucker. He has been a prosecutor who has been working with the Mutant Task Force to help convict dangerous mutants. He saw his job as pretty much cut and dried until his own son and daughter exhibit mutant abilities. Son Andy (White) has been bullied at school and finally lashes out with an unexpected power to cause destructive vibrations that literally bring the school down. Daughter Lauren (Lind) has known for some time that she has the power to send a barrier kind of force much like Sue Richards in The Fantastic Four but without the invisibility. When the Task Force comes for the children, Reed and his wife Kate (Acker) make a run for it. They are assisted by a group of mutants who have established an underground to help shelter mutants and offer resistance to anti-mutant actions.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 2nd, 2018
Mention the name J.K. Rowling, and the first thing that pops into your head is Harry Potter. She was a struggling writer just getting out of a bad marriage when her first Potter book took the world by storm. Now she's the wealthiest woman on the planet. The problem has been her life has since been Harry Potter all the time. I can well understand why she might want to find a way to distance future novels from all of that hype and expectation. So she invented Robert Galbraith and wrote a series of detective novels based on a character named C. B. Strike. The novels didn't come close to the sales of a Potter novel, but they did fairly well, particularly in England. So BBC One and HBO got together for a joint production of the show for both England and the United States. The result is a kind of mini-series that tackles three of the novels in seven hour-long episodes starring Tom Burke as the title character.
The first of the three stories is called The Cuckoo's Calling and is separated into three hour-long segments. It serves as an introduction to the character. Strike is an ex-military police officer who lost his leg in action. His father was once a huge rock star, but they are estranged. His office/apartment is a small place over a guitar shop where he works alone amid a huge trash heap that looks more appropriate for Hoarders than a detective story. Enter Holliday Grainger as Robin Ellacott. She arrives as a temp that he really can't afford, but she's persistent enough to remain and organize his office. He's not very thrilled to have her, but when a complicated case falls in his lap, he finds her to be indispensible.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 28th, 2018
"How will we be remembered? Will it be for saving the world...Twice? Nope. We're the team who broke time. That's right. History has been torn to shreds, which means it's up to us to put it back together again, piece by piece, finding these so-called anachronisms before we get torn to shreds. So please, don't call us heroes. We're legends."
At the end of the second season the team broke one of the cardinal rules of time travel. You can't revisit a time and place that you already visited. The result is that you break time, and that's exactly what the Legends of Tomorrow have done. The result is that they have been recalled and dismissed from service by the newly-formed Bureau of Time. Now our legends are back in the mundane world, where Sara (Lotz) is working as a clerk at a bed and shower store, having fantasies of killing her boss. Ray Palmer (Routh) went from owning the world's largest tech company to working for a kid at a dating app... eh, make that a holistic social networking program. Professor Stein (Garber) is enjoying his new family with a grandchild on the way. Jackson (Drameh) is just bored to death with a normal life. And Mick (Purcell) is chilling on a beach in Aruba when his chill is interrupted by Caesar (Merrells). That's Julius, and not the salad, hotel, or talking ape. Of course, he's an anachronism who happened to arrive in Aruba for the annual Aruba-con celebration. It looks like the team is going to have to get together, but the powers that be don't quite see it that way. So they steal back the Waverunner, which was retired to a training simulator, and it's off fighting the problem that they created.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on September 28th, 2018
“Told you it was aliens.”
What if Michael Bay was Australian and he was only given $6 million to make an alien invasion movie? The result might look a lot like Occupation, a rollicking, gleefully dumb sci-fi/action flick that works best as a throwback to simpler (i.e. dumber) times at the multiplex. But while Occupaton has its charms, the movie's shoddy special effects and production values consistently undermine the kickass story it's trying to tell.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on September 27th, 2018
“So here we are...in the belly of the beast. A lot of power and money in this room.”
That cheeky line came from Iggy Pop during The Stooges' induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. It's also featured in Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: In Concert — Encore, a wonderfully comprehensive collection of the four induction ceremonies between 2010 and 2013. The 2-disc Blu-ray set features over 8 hours of content, including full induction speeches and 44 musical performances from rock and roll icons and rising stars. Iggy was right about the power and money in the room; this set features some of the biggest names in the history of music...plus A-listers like Meryl Streep and Oprah Winfrey!
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 26th, 2018
"Is there life out there? Good heavens! To doubt it is a failure of more than the imagination. It is a failure to recognize the limits of our own stupidity. The nascency of our science. The rudiment of our tools. We listen. We search. We hope for a sign, as if our eyes and ears are good enough, our brains large enough, our egos small enough."
By the time The X-Files had reached its seventh season, the two stars of the show were feeling the stress of doing over 20 episodes of the series every year. In the eighth season David Duchovny was going MIA, and Gillian Anderson's Scully character had a new partner in Robert Patrick's Agent Doggett. They used Duchovny's absence as a new story arc in the overall mythology, and the story became the search for Mulder. It provided an interesting chance for Anderson to take even more center stage, and she actually handled the changes pretty well. But even Anderson was getting tired, and the ninth and final season would feature Anderson in only a limited role as Doggett and his new partner Agent Reyes, played by Annabeth Gish, became the new agents on The X-Files. The missing Mulder storyline began to get stale, and the show limped through that final season. But fans hoped that Mulder and Scully would find a way to reunite and bring back the core team that really was the heart of The X-Files.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 26th, 2018
Are you feeling a little déjà vu when you turn on a television or live stream these days? It seems like almost half the shows on television today are either revivals or reboots of shows that have aired before. Recently there have been revivals of The X-Files, 24, Prison Break, Growing Pains, Roseanne, and even Murphy Brown. The box office is filled with feature films of Star Trek, The Equalizer and Baywatch. While Tom Selleck is playing a family patriarch on Blue Bloods, Jay Hernandez is in Hawaii driving a bright red Ferrari in a new version of Magnum P.I. Hawaii 5-O is one of the most popular shows on CBS, and Charmed is bewitching an entire new generation of streamers on the internet. You might consider this a time of little ingenuity on the tube, but CBS has gone back in time to resurrect the very definition of ingenuity in MacGyver. The show is about to begin a third season, and the second season is now out on DVD thanks to some cooperation between Lionsgate and CBS.
The basic idea of the original series remains here. Angus MacGyver is now played by Lucas Till. He still works for the Phoenix foundation, which remains a covert government agency disguised as a think tank. Just like the Richard Dean Anderson character, MacGyver has the uncanny ability to use whatever happens to be handy to build what he happens to need to bring down a bad guy or save lives. The name has become a part of our lexicon and refers to using something in a makeshift procedure to solve a problem. As much as the basic elements of the original remain, there are quite a few significant differences to be found here.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 26th, 2018
"A long time ago in a galaxy far far away..."
Yes, those lines open this Star Wars story, because the filmmakers want to be sure you know what you're watching. This is Star Wars. Just in case there was anyone at all in the audience who had no idea they just bought a ticket to Star Wars. If he were dead, George Lucas would be rolling over in his grave. Instead, maybe he's just having some restless nights with little sleep. It is Star Wars. And that means there will be a droid as a main character, space battles, and some good old fashioned one-reel-serial-days adventure. It's a heck of a visual amusement park ride, and the film will certainly entertain. But I have to open by saying it is my least favorite of the Disney Star Wars films to date.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on September 26th, 2018
With Halloween just around the corner, it’s that time of the year when the studios start cranking out horror films to fill up the shelves hoping that eager fans will scoop up any new horror titles they can add to their collection. The Row is one of those releases that has the cover with beautiful girls and the tease of murder and mayhem to ensue. Does it deliver what the cover is attempting to sell? Well, the simple answer is yes, but to call this film horror is the equivalent of calling a toddler’s finger painting art. This is a film that sadly is a product of the times. Though it has an R rating, the film seems tame, and considering the director claims he was aiming for Spring Breakers meets Friday the 13th, I have to wonder if he saw either of those films.
Riley (Lala Kent) and her best friend Becks (Mia Frampton, yes, Peter Frampton’s daughter) are attending college, and as rush week is occurring they are looking to join the Phi Lambda sorority. As it turns out Riley’s mom was also a member of the sorority, just one of the many mysteries that seem to shroud her mother’s past, a mother Riley seems to know little about since her mom died when she was seven. Randy Couture plays Riley’s overprotective father, who is on suspension after a drug bust goes wrong, so to deal with his empty nest syndrome he manages to involve himself with a homicide case involving a student who is killed at Riley’s college. It just so happens that it seems this killer is just getting started, and there are plenty of pretty sorority girls who can be potential victims.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 24th, 2018
"Once upon a time there was a magical forest filled with fairytale characters. One day a powerful curse trapped them in a city which had no magic, and each of them forgot who they really were. This is how it happened..."
Once Upon A Time hasn't been a big ratings winner for the last few years. Each season the show appeared on the bubble and ended up getting renewed at the last minute. One of the reasons the show managed to escape the axe was because it had some value for the network's parent company, Walt Disney Studios. The show was a good way to keep the studio’s properties in front of an audience. That's pretty much what the show finally became. They threw the books at us, from Frozen to The Little Mermaid. With that value in mind, the decision was made last season to keep the show but completely retool it. The network cut most of the cast and started the story over again.
