Drama

Meet Monica Velour (Blu-ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on August 26th, 2011

“The windows around here are not big enough for you?”

Writer/Director Keith Bearden’s debut film, Meet Monica Velour, seduces you like raunchy 70s porn star, but finishes you off with a happy ending like a cheap masseuse in a roadside massage parlor. Not that this is a sex comedy, nor are the stars particularly sexy (except for Jamie Tisdale who plays young Monica Velour who is very, very hot), but the theme is about sexual illusions.
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Dexter: The Fifth Season (Blu-ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2011

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Dexter Morgan (Hall) is a forensic lab rat for the Miami-Dade Police. He really knows blood splatter. He should, because he moonlights as a killer. It seems that poor old Dex just can’t help himself. His parents were criminals, and he witnessed his mother’s brutal slashing by a chainsaw gang when he was just a young boy. He was adopted by Harry Morgan (Remar), a police officer. Harry saw the killer instinct in Dexter and taught him how to channel the urges for the sake of good.
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NCIS: Los Angeles – The Second Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 25th, 2011

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The series was previewed in a two-part episode of NCIS entitled Legend. A dead Marine in Washington led to a terrorist cell in LA, where Gibbs and McGee join the LA branch to bring down the bad guys. Here we meet the new characters and get a chance to get comfortable with them. However, by the time the show aired its first episode, there were some pretty major changes for the show already. It’s not uncommon, and the Legend episode was really a back-door pilot.
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Gossip Girl: The Complete Fourth Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 25th, 2011

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“Unlike the rest of us, sex, lies, and scandal never take a vacation. Instead they take the Long Island Expressway and head East to the Hamptons. Some would say summer is their busiest season. Think Park Avenue, but with tennis whites and Bain de Soleil. The players change, but the game remains the same.”

With internet blogging becoming such a common trend, we just knew that someone somehow would work it into a clever little plot. It started as a series of adolescent books that appealed mostly to the teen girls.
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NCIS – The Complete Eighth Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 24th, 2011

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NCIS is a spin-off, of sorts, from the popular military lawyer show JAG. You could say that NCIS is the Order to JAG’s Law. The NCIS is a real government agency that deals with criminal activity inside or involving the US Navy or Marine Corps. The series has an incredibly global feel and honestly looks damn good for television. Production values are high, and the location stuff is out of this world, or at least all over it.
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Brothers & Sisters: The Complete Fifth Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 24th, 2011

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“I never thought we’d get back to this table. I can’t tell you how good it felt to have dinner together again. We hadn’t done that since the accident. To be honest, sometimes it felt like we’d never get over it. But somehow we did.”

But will we ever get over the Walker family? This was to be the final season of the series, and the network wasn’t exactly kind in its last days. The budget was slashed so that most of the characters appear in limited episodes. You won’t find near so many of the Walker family gatherings as you did in previous years.
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Be Cool (Blu-Ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 11th, 2011

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Get Shorty was one of the best films of the mid 90’s. I have seen it about five or six times and it is one of those rare movies that you see something new every time you watch it. It had amazing dialog, good action and this style to the whole movie was just uncanny. The movie was a film where one had to think but at the same time could enjoy themselves. So, when the sequel Be Cool dropped on blu-ray, would I be able to enjoy it as much as the original?
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Jumping the Broom (Blu-ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on August 10th, 2011

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“This family thinks they are better than us!”

If you think the wedding “rom com” has been done to death, Jumping the Broom won’t change your mind. It covers much the same ground you’ve seen again and again, but one cannot deny director T.D. Jakes has crafted a charming if clichéd film.
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Trust (Blu-ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 8th, 2011

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Isn’t technology grand? We live in a communication age that is unprecedented in human history. We carry devices, or at least most of us do, that provide the world at our fingertips on machines no larger than our palms. The internet allows us to have a world of information at those same fingertips. We do business over the net. You are reading a movie review over the net. But technology does have its problems. Cell phones mean distracted drivers and more accidents. Teen chat rooms mean that we can no longer guard our homes from the invasion of evil
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Scent of a Woman

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 4th, 2011

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By Natasha Samreny

Scent of a Woman is a rich example of classic storytelling maintaining its power through the years. In this American remake of an Italian tale, Al Pacino, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Chris O’Donnell continue to captivate. If you love the film already and want to make it part of your collection, consider its HD-DVD or Blu-ray versions, released later. It seems neither color nor sound were improved for this film until then. To fans’ dismay, Universal has yet to update any discs with special features beyond the outdated text-centered cast/crew list and bios.
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House of the Rising Sun (Blu-Ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 3rd, 2011

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Dave “The Animal” Bautista has had a fairly interesting life. Most people know him for his wrestling accolades even though his career only lasted about ten years. It is hard to believe that at one time, he was passed on by WCW and said he would never make it in the wrestling business. He would go on to be the six-time World Champion and a four-time Tag Team champion as a part of WWE. However, he departed with the company in 2010 to pursue other avenues including an acting career which made its way to my review door. Let’s explore: House of the Rising Sun.
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United States of Tara: Third Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 27th, 2011

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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.
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My Own Love Song

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 26th, 2011

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Renée Zellweger is Jane, a former country singer who has lost the will to live since an accident left her in a wheelchair. Forest Whitaker is Joey, who can talk to angels and ghosts since he witnessed the death by fire of his family. These two wounded souls bond and bicker, and when Joey finds a letter from Jane’s son, whom she gave up for adoption years ago, he decides that she must see him.
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Women In Prison Triple Feature

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 21st, 2011

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Mr. Skin and Panik House Entertainment have teamed up to provide us with what can only be described as a schlock-o-rama of 1980’s exploitation cinema. After the run of blacksploitation and grindhouse films of the 1970’s, we found ourselves in a cycle where the subject shifted to women behind bars. You could still find the same level of low-budget movie making here but with the added “bonus” of watching hot chicks, for the most part, used and abused while being usually unfairly incarcerated.
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William & Kate

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 19th, 2011

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This is a biopic about two very obscure people whose relationship has escaped the attention of all but a select few. All kidding aside, what we have here is a dramatization of how the heir to the British throne (Nico Evers-Swindell) meets Kate Middleton (Camilla Luddington), and how their romance gradually blossoms. He arrives at university, and every blue-blooded young woman has him in her sights, but it is, naturally, the down-to-earth girl who draws him, the turning point being when she shows that she’s sexy as well as smart during a student fashion show.
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Beastly

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 17th, 2011

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There has been a trend recently that has seen classic fairy tales being adapted, often with new, modern twists. While this is not a bad idea in itself, it seems that this trend is skipping along, arm in arm, with another trend in not only the movie business, but the entertainment industry as a whole: almost everything is being aimed at 13-year old girls. Beastly is the latest product of that union.

Fight Club (10th Anniversary Edition) (Blu-ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on July 16th, 2011

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“The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!”

Now, let me be the millionth critic to break those rules… Back in 1997, David Fincher received a call from his agent, Josh Donen, who’d just finished Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club and tried to talk Fincher into reading it. Even at a brisk 208 pages, Fincher passed on it, protesting being too busy to read books.
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Mannix: Fifth Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 11th, 2011

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It sounds like nothing new. Hard-boiled detective uses computers and other forms of technology to solve cases. It isn’t anything new, except the detective in question is Joe Mannix, and the series started in 1967. The computer that Mannix used took up an entire room and was queried using cardboard punch cards. This wasn’t science fiction. We’re not talking some newly discovered Irwin Allen series. Mannix didn’t go after aliens or robots.
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Dynasty: Season Five Vol. 1

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 11th, 2011

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Oh, how the rich can get into mischief. This DVD set is smack dab in the middle of Dynasty’s successful nine season run. The mudslinging, both literal and figurative, was at its height in this fifth season, and no $200 haircut or $1000 outfit was left unruffled by the various scandals and plots set into the web of these wealthy Denver residents. In fact, this season was the one and only time this series won a Golden Globe for best TV drama.
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New York, New York (Blu-ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 6th, 2011

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World War II has just ended, and the recently discharged Robert De Niro hits New York on the prowl for sex. He runs up against WAC Liza Minnelli, and the more she resists his advances, the more determined he becomes. There is more: he is a saxophonist, and she (of course) is a singer). So begins a tempestuous relationship between two artists whose enormous talents and equally enormous personalities mean they can neither live with nor without each other.
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Happythankyoumoreplease (Blu-Ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 6th, 2011

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Happythankyoumoreplease is centered on a group of twenty something New Yorkers at various levels of transition: love, career, and growing up. The film is written, directed, and also stars Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother). Radnor’s directorial debut showcases a colorful side of New York and a variety of colorful characters. The group of young actors all put together solid performances which is essential for an ensemble cast. This is another festival friendly film with a solid group of actors that is definitely worth a look.
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Unknown (Blu-ray)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 6th, 2011

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Liam Neeson has always been somewhat of a versatile actor. From Oskar Schindler in Spielberg’s moving Schindler’s List to a Jedi master in the rebirth of Star Wars, there don’t appear to be very many types of films he hadn’t tried. Taken introduced us to a tough-guy character that we hadn’t really seen before, even in the film reboot of The A-Team. There he played an intelligence officer trying to rescue his kidnapped daughter. It was a rather powerful performance, so I can’t say I was very surprised to see him play the one-man army role once again in Unknown. It’s another very fine performance by Neeson
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Dear John

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 5th, 2011

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Dear John centers around a soldier, John Tyree (Channing Tatum) who falls in love with a college student, Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) while he is back home on leave. This film is adapted from the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name and directed by the melodramatic romance aficionado Lasse Hallstrom. If you are looking for a romance tale that offers very little surprises, look no further.
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Hijos Del Carnaval

Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on July 4th, 2011

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The story begins with the immediate validation of superstition. Anesi Gebara is the head of an illegal lottery and so numbers are crucially linked to his life, both in his work and in the aforementioned superstitions that haunt his life.
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Medium: The Seventh and Final Season

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 1st, 2011

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And now we enter the final year of The Medium. The final season has several bright spots. On Bring Your Daughter To Work Day, Paulie Walnuts, Tony Sirico, plays a mob guy ghost that keeps haunting Allison. It’s a rather nice episode, and Sirico gets to provide some wonderful moments that remind us of his days with The Sopranos. Scanlon gets to be a ghost, for a short time. Allison has a vision of the future. John Glover even gets to play a devilish character that reminds us of his short-lived days on Brimstone. The final episode is a fitting send-off for the series.
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