Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 12th, 2007
When Lost began its third season last fall I was beginning to feel a lot like the castaways must have felt; namely I was getting pretty lost watching Lost. There’s been a lot of mostly fair criticism about how ABC has handled the show last year. The first mistake was to air a small portion of episodes in the first couple of months and finish the season after the New Year. While this broken season plan works well for some cable shows like Monk, it does a serious disservice to Lost.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 11th, 2007
Belgian filmmaker Olivier Smolders, after a successful run of gorgeous and disturbing shorts, here makes a feature debut that is just as gorgeous and disturbing. Strongly reminiscent of the works of David Lynch, but far darker overall, the film is set at a time when the world is shrouded in the night of a perpetual eclipse. Day only comes for 15 seconds at 12:23 pm each day. Oscar (Fabrice Rodriguez) is a museum entomologist haunted by traumatic dreams involving the death of a sister who might or might not have every existed. He returns home one night to find a dying and pregnant African woman in his bed, a woman who is somehow linked to his father’s colonial past.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 7th, 2007
Dr. Mark Sloan first appeared in The It Never Entered My Mind episode of Jake And The Fat Man. In that episode Sloan was accused of a murder, and it was up to Jake and Jason to prove his innocence. The character had a certain charm that appeared to carry with audiences, and two years later Sloan had his own show, Diagnosis Murder. Dick Van Dyke did for doctors what his good friend Andy Griffith did for lawyers as Matlock. Both traded on their earlier careers in trademark comedies to reimagine dramatic roles in their twilight years.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 7th, 2007
Olivier Smolders is a Belgian filmmaker with a sensibility as distinctive and challenging as his artistry is developed. Cult Epics has done North American audiences a huge service by bringing his films to Region 1 DVD release. This disc has ten short films. Each piece has its own distinct identity, yet they are all very clearly the work of a singular creative talent. The frequently disturbing shorts range from a tale of murder and cannibalism in “Adoration” (previously available on the Cinema of Death collection), to the heartbreaking “Mort à Vignole” (where Smolders narrates a family tragedy filtered through home movies made by his and his wife’s parents, along with his own family footage), to an extended yet elegantly filmed practical joke (“Point de Fuite”) to a most unusual adaptation of Sade with “La Philosophie dans le Boudoir.” The films are invariably gorgeous and clinical in the precision of their observations. The blurbs on the case invoke Lynch, Greenaway and Bergman, and the comparisons are apt, though Smolders is also very much his own man.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 6th, 2007
Malcolm McDowell’s second collaboration with director Lindsay Anderson, after their triumph with If..., sees McDowell as an enthusiastic new coffee salesmen sent off to make his company’s fortune in an ever widening area of the Britain. In true picaresque style, he has one strange adventure and encounter after another, each more bizarre than the last, and the whole is intercut with studio performances of Alan Price’s songs that comment on the whole enterprise.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 1st, 2007
Who says horror can’t be the cinema of personal expression? Director Tim Sullivan follows up his comic horror 2001 Maniacs with this heartfelt ghost story. Raviv Ullman plays David, a teenager whose depression and death-fixation following the demise of his older brother prompts his desperate parents to ship him off to an “Attitude Adjustment Camp.” Basically a brutal cross between boot camp and prison, this is a private institution (inspired by actual places) designed to transform any insipient Columbine-copycats. Once there, David must contend not only with the sadistic Captain Kennedy (Diamond Dallas Page) who runs the place, but also with visions of a ghost who clearly wants a buried truth revealed.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 19th, 2007
It was in the second year that the format of
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 15th, 2007
You would think that after seven years, CSI would begin to show a little wear and tear around the edges. When you factor in the dilution of the two other versions of the franchise with a combined 8 years of episodes, you end up with 15 years and over 250 episodes of CSI total. Certainly even the best of shows with the most imaginative writers can’t stay fresh for that long. Still, somehow, the gang at CSI continues to crank out compelling drama, rarely repeating itself. Every year I go into a new season of CSI expecting to find it starting to show its age a bit, and every year I continue to be amazed.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 12th, 2007
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Five years ago, Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme were riding high with the best drama on Television, The West Wing, which is hands-down my favourite show ever. When word got out about a new Sorkin/Schlamme project set for the '06-'07 season, I was more excited than a monkey at the banana harvest. Expectations — mine and everyone else's — were sky-high for this new series, a behind-the-scenes drama about an SNL-type sketch comedy show. It would be the finest new show since The West Wing debuted in '99, Sorkin would once again raise the bar in prime-time entertainment and the collective intelligence of the human race would be elevated to the stratosphere.
Ok, not so much. While Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip premiered with much fanfare and critical praise, the series quickly slumped and never recovered. That made me angry, like a monkey whose monkey-mom made him stay home from the banana harvest. It's just not fair! So this review is about a good show killed by hype. Alas, Studio 60, you died too young.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 12th, 2007
The premise of Day Night Day Night is relatively simple; a young woman decides to be a suicide bomber in Times Square. The motivations for her doing this, as in the outside forces who convince her to do it, aren’t really explained at all, so what makes it unique is that it focuses on the preparation the girl makes. She is portrayed by Luisa Williams, who appears in the film in her first role.
