Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 24th, 2020
Remember when Eddie Murphy was funny? You know, before the fat suits and fart jokes. I guess many of you hadn’t even been born yet. Ronald Reagan was still president of these United States. CD’s were the latest thing. VHS was just catching on. The Rams were still in L.A., and it was the Cardinals who were playing in St. Louis. No one had ever heard about DVD, Blu-ray, 4K, MP3, or Wi-fi. It was 1988, and Eddie Murphy was staring in Coming To America. This is the second of two classic 80's Eddie Murphy films that Paramount is delivering on UHD Blu-ray this week. They happen to be two of his best films in 40 years. I’ve long considered this the last funny Eddie Murphy film. It just seems like he’d turned to gimmicks and quick physical humor. He got lazy, and you know what? So did I. I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to get my seat into those theater seats to see him clown around anymore. So journey with me back to a magical time when Murphy was still hungry and he let his talent shine.
Prince Akeem (Murphy) has come of age. He’s lived the good life where he has wanted for nothing. His Father (Jones) is king of their African country, and all is good. He even has chicks to wipe his butt for him. Yet he yearns to discover the real world. And so, with his right hand man Semmi (Hall) in tow, he seeks to sow his wild oats in America. From the moment he lands in Harlem, the fish-out-of-water story begins. He finds a crummy apartment and has all of his belongings stolen. He’s in search of his future queen, but doesn’t want to win her over with his title. He pretends to be poor, and the two take a job at McDowell’s, a blatant restaurant rip-off of McDonalds. There he meets owner Cleo McDowell (Amos), and more importantly, his lovely young daughter, Lisa (Headley). He tries to impress both father and daughter with mixed results, while Semmi is trying to get out of living in such squalor. When the parents arrive on the scene to put an end to this nonsense, they discover their son’s in love.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 24th, 2020
"The heat is on..."
From the bouncing opening music by Glenn Fry to the final frame of Eddie Murphy's smile, Beverly Hills Cop has established itself as a classic. Now finally out on Blu-ray, the film shows us all over again why we fell in love with it almost 20 years ago. Murphy hasn't been as funny since, but we'll always have Beverly Hills and Axel Foley.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 24th, 2020
Eddie Murphy has a ton of films under his belt. If you’re like most folks, his antics have long ago become tired and worn out. Come with me now to a time when Murphy was young and full of energy. Trading Places was really only Murphy’s second film after 48 hours. In Trading Places, we get vintage Eddie Murphy. You can tell he was still hungry. Today he simply calls too many performances in. Dan Aykroyd was also at a turning point in his own career. It hadn’t been too long since he lost his longtime partner Jim Belushi to a drug overdose. He was just learning to stand on his own. Put these two guys together today, and there’s not much chance you’d get the solid gold that was possible in 1983. Fortunately for us, there is this HD release of Trading Places, when both actors still felt they had something to prove. The cast was brilliant all the way around. Jamie Lee Curtis displayed her obvious assets for the first time in a film. Known mostly as a scream queen at that time, Curtis was a choice the studio was not at all happy with. The Wolf Man’s own Ralph Bellamy, along with fellow veteran actor Don Amechi, played the Duke brothers to perfection. Finally, Denholm Eliott added his own understated brilliance as Coleman, the butler.
Trading Places was originally written as a vehicle for Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. That team had had great success with a few films already, and it was felt they were the only ones capable of pulling off this kind of a film. I’m not sure how that might have worked. Certainly it still might have been a funny outing, but somehow I think everything worked out for the best. Trading Places broke many conventions of the time. The black and white stereotypes were a concern, as were other elements. Having a hooker play such a pivotal role was questioned. The studio even expressed some problems with the fate of Mr. Beaks. A little gorilla love went a long way toward the poetic justice these kinds of villains often require. John Landis stood his ground the entire time, refusing to budge. Remove any of these elements, and who knows what we might have ended up with.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 21st, 2020
"Things are about to get dangerous."
Keep your hands and feet inside the ride vehicle at all times. At some point in his life, Michael Crichton must have had a really bad experience at Disney World. Maybe he got stuck on a ride, or a ghost followed him home from the Haunted Mansion. Whatever his reasons, the man sure had it in for the amusement park industry. He's created two iconic franchises from the "way out" amusement park idea. His novel Jurassic Park incited all of our imaginations, not the least of which was Steven Spielberg's. That amusement park brought back living and breathing dinosaurs who would entertain park attendees, that is when they weren't eating said attendees. But long before that came his screenplay for the 1973 film starring Yul Brenner and James Brolin called Westworld. It was another future amusement park. This time androids were created to serve out an attendee's darkest fantasies. It was a kind of Fantasy Island meets The Stepford Wives. You could go to Westworld and live out your wild west fantasy. You can shoot it out with outlaws or become an outlaw yourself. You could kill at random and be perfectly safe from the carefully programmed androids that populated this version of the wild west. Of course, just like Jurassic Park, things go wrong. The androids begin to rebel, and the vacationers become the hunted. Three years later came a sequel with Yul Brenner returning along with Peter Fonda in Futureworld. It's been over 40 years, but Westworld has come back, and it's come back big. HBO has now completed three seasons of the series, and things keep getting better.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 18th, 2020
Every generation has had its Christmas classics, films that have become as much a part of the holiday family traditions as Christmas trees and candy canes. For me it has been the more modern A Christmas Story with ol’ Carl Kolchak himself, Darren McGavin. Kids today have taken more of a shine to even more recent films, but for more than one generation, Christmas wouldn’t be the same without Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Since 1947 the film became a seasonal fixture in neighborhood movie houses across the fruited plain. In the 1970’s the film temporarily fell into the public domain and was played relentlessly on local television stations as each holiday came and went. Unfortunately, these were usually prints in horrible condition, so that scratches and splice marks became a part of the experience, not to mention ads for department stores touting their early-bird specials. It is with that experience that I, as did most from my generation, become acquainted with Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey. When the home video market began to bloom with VHS in the mid 1980’s, a better print resurfaced, so that the experience improved dramatically, along with the loss of those commercials. Of course, this new resource of home entertainment created a fight for the rights to the film to once again be restored to a single owner. It ended up being the film’s score that would allow the rights to be enforced once again. The crappy television prints disappeared, and by the early 1990’s, efforts to restore the film began.
These restoration efforts invariably turned to the controversial subject of colorization. If anyone remembers Ted Turner’s push to colorize RKO films, including King Kong, you will also remember how bad those films looked. The color was an added texture of hue covering the picture so that the subject’s textures and subtleties were obliterated. It was almost as if some child decided to finger paint all over the negative. There was nothing magical or at all realistic about the process. It’s A Wonderful Life has been colorized no less than three times. In both 1986 and 1989 the film got the colorized treatment, both failures. In 2007, It’s A Wonderful Life had been colorized by a new process developed by Legend Films. This new process allows films to be colorized naturally, retaining all of the detail and texture of the original print. These are the guys who are working with legendary Ray Harryhausen to colorize and restore many of his classics. The new process uses a 16-bit grayscale, which offers over 64,000 shades of just gray. The process, called “Photo-Real”, can reproduce HD quality pictures with stunning, lifelike color. I was a very cynical skeptic of the process and was prepared to rip this color print to shreds in my review. I was blown away by how natural the color looks. You will be hard-pressed to believe this wasn’t an original color print. Not only are the colors realistic, but the print retains the particular color palette of the 1940’s, so that the film still looks like one from the correct era. I know you’ve seen incredibly bad colorization before, and it likely has made you unwilling to even give this one a chance, but you owe it to yourself to check it out. And this is the version you get on the Blu-ray copy of the film.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 16th, 2020
Three-time widower Ben Cartwright (Greene) runs his famous Ponderosa Ranch with the aid of his three grown sons from three different mothers. There’s Little Joe (Landon), Adam (Roberts), and Hoss (Blocker). Set some time in the mid 1800’s, this long-running series followed the family’s many exploits. In the late 1950’s, westerns accounted for six of the top ten programs on TV. Only Gunsmoke had a longer run than Bonanza. From 1959 to 1973, Ben Cartwright and his boys rode across the small screen. Years later in syndication the series re-emerged as Ponderosa, and a handful of TV movies continued the tale into the 90’s.We never have grown tired of the genre that gave us such heroes as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
Unlike many of the 1960's Western television shows, Bonanza was all about the characters. You rarely saw a gunfight. There was often a bit of fisticuffs, but usually it ended with a lesson that violence never pays. The show prided itself on using the Western genre to deliver a family kind of show, and it's no surprise that series star Michael Landon would use many of the same kinds of stories and lessons on his own Little House On The Prairie. The Cartwrights are always helping widows, the wrongly accused, and the local Indian population. That help often lands them in hot water.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Brent Lorentson on November 11th, 2020
It’s not uncommon for actors to want to take that leap from being in front of the camera to taking on the mantle of being director. There are some big names who have made that transition successfully. Ben Affleck, Mel Gibson, George Clooney, Peter Berg, and Clint Eastwood are some of the bigger names that I can name off the top of my head. For The Vanished, Peter Facinelli is adding his name to that list. So how does he fare in this low-budget psychological thriller? While I wouldn’t put him in the same league as those previously mentioned, Facinelli does show some promise, but the film’s greatest weakness is its script, which Facinelli also is credited for writing. This is one of those instances where I just wonder if someone else took a pass at the script how much the film could have improved, because this was a frustrating film to sit through.
Paul (Thomas Jane) and Wendy (Anne Heche) have decided to take a family vacation with their daughter, and very quickly this trip goes horribly awry. They’ve taken an RV to a quiet camping ground, and it’s not long before their daughter manages to disappear without a trace. It doesn’t take long for the film to introduce a few characters where this becomes a simple whodunit scenario. There is the wounded escaped prisoner, the nearby couple that is struggling to have a kid, and there are the creepy employees at the camp. In comes the town sheriff, played by Jason Patric, to solve the case.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Jeremy Butler on November 11th, 2020
"And so it began. 30,000 years ago, man discovered his best friend. Dogs were man's best friend and only animal companion for the next 15,000 years. And then cats came into the house, y'all. For the next 15,000 years cats and dogs fought each other, hissing and barking and breaking things along the way. With the emergence of technology, harmless skirmishes grew into diabolical plots as cats and dogs tried to eliminate each other as humans’ companion. Eventually humans grew tired, so dogs and cats had to do something if they wanted to stay the number 1 and number 2 animals in the human household. Cat and dog leaders worked together to stop these plots and formed an organization called The Furry Animals Rivalry Termination... The last decade has been the most peaceful in centuries."
This movie is proof positive that Hollywood refuses to let a franchise die. I wasn’t really fond of the original film in the franchise, and I completely ignored its sequel; however, this standalone sequel managed to be mildly entertaining. Granted, it is extremely over-the-top. To the point that it borders on the ridiculous with some of its antics. Like a parrot driving an ice cream truck. Still, I had to remember that I was not the demographic that the film was designed for. This is where I rely on my trusty daughter to help me give these movies a fair shake. Her exact words were, “Is it over yet?” I think that pretty much sums up how she felt about the film. It’s ironic; the movies that I don’t mind so much are the ones that she really doesn’t vibe with. And the movies that she tends to be intrigued by, for me it’s like my eyes are bleeding. I begin to realize how different my daughter and I are.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Jeremy Butler on November 10th, 2020
Anyone wondering what exactly happened to Jesse Pinkman after the series finale of the AMC popular drama Breaking Bad? I mean, when we last saw him, he was fleeing captivity in a stolen El Camino for parts unknown as police began to surround the place that had been his prison for months. Anyone curious how that story concluded for the fan-favorite character? Well, you’re in luck, as Netflix has answered the request and produced a subsequent film in order to give Jesse Pinkman a more of satisfying ending to his story. Given that he spent a good chunk of his last season in captivity being forced to make meth, I can’t blame them for wanting to follow up. As expected, Aaron Paul reprises his role as Pinkman after a six-year separation from the character. Paul, who has gone on to find greater success since the end of the series, clearly still has great love for the character who helped bring him to prominence, and also garnered him several accolades including three Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. Several familiar faces return in order to give the series the proper sendoff, including Krysten Ritter’s Jane Margolis, Jesse Plemons’ Todd Alquist, Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut, and yes, of course, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White.
Picking up directly after the events of the Season 5 finale, Jesse Pinkman has escaped the Aryan Brotherhood’s custody by fleeing in Todd Alquist’s El Camino. Taking refuge with his friends Skinny Pete and Badger, he is well aware that a manhunt is underway for him and needs to disappear. However, having just escaped captivity, he is without resources. Until he remembers a means to get the funds needed to engage the services of a "disappearer." Unfortunately, he is not the only one after the money, and he has to stay one step ahead of everyone who is after him.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Jeremy Butler on November 10th, 2020
Catherine the Great, born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, is one of the most prominent figures in history. She is a woman who managed to overthrow her husband, Peter III, and succeed him as the Empress of Russia, becoming the country's longest-ruling female leader. Under her reign, the country grew larger, its culture was revitalized, and it was recognized as one of the great powers worldwide. Her life has been the subject of many textbooks, as well as being retold on the stage, in film, and on television. Several prominent people have portrayed the character, including Helen Mirren. Have you ever wondered how she did it? How she managed to take away the birthright of her husband and succeed him? Wouldn’t you like to know how it was done? Well, if that is the case, I recommend you pick up a textbook, as the Hulu series, The Great, will not give you a accurate account of that. However, if you want an entertaining and sometimes factual account, I thoroughly recommend you give the series a watch. Elle Fanning portrays a young Catherine as she marries Peter III, played by Nicolas Hoult, and quickly realizes that he will not do as the ruler of Russia. Though not born in that country, she endeavors to save it from the clutches of her immature and incompetent husband.
As previously stated, The Great is only loosely based on the rise of Catherine the Great, there are obvious flourishes to make the series more entertaining, but even so the events still unfold in a manner that makes it believable. When first meeting her husband, Catherine quickly realizes that he is nothing like she imagined a great ruler to be. He has no real interest outside his own gratification, evident by the consummation of their marriage, which is completed without him even pausing a conversation he was previously having with a member of court. He is also engaged in an extramarital affair with that very same member of court’s wife. Peter goes on to show how little he cares for his wife, by burning down a school that he previously consented to allow Catherine to build when he realized her intention to educate women. The final straw comes when he strikes Catherine after she criticizes his treatment of her. Unwilling to resign herself to her fate as conduit for his heirs, Catherine decides to end her life until a servant, an exiled noblewoman, tells her that in absence of an heir, succession would fall to her if Peter was removed from power. Armed with new knowledge, Catherine staves off ending her life and commences plans for a coup.
