Posted in: Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on June 11th, 2012
“Ugh. How many times do I have to explain this to you? If you see the neighbor's house getting broken into, it's probably Karl high out of his mind thinking he's locked out of our house.”
When it comes to office based slacker comedies, Mike Judge’s Office Space still sets the gold standard. Workaholics wishes it could be as quotable and timeless as Office Space, but settles for goofy, instantly forgettable juvenile ramblings suitable for a stoner’s short term memory. Much like the boy’s prank of choice, involving a dollar bill wrapped around poop, Workaholics looks good on the surface, but is pretty much the same old crap underneath.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 6th, 2012
"Make no mistake. Blood will be spilled. Lives will be lost. Fortunes will be made. Men will be ruined. There will be betrayal and scandal and perfidy of epic proportions."
With a statement like that, how can you not want to check out AMC's newest drama series Hell On Wheels? I've been told the title sounds like it's about motorcycle gangs, and I couldn't agree more. The term refers to the mobile tent city that housed the workers on the Union Pacific Railroad and the support entourage the camp attracted. It was a virtual tent city that had all of the essentials: a church, bar, and whorehouse. It was just after the Civil War, and the American government believed that a railroad connecting the East and West coasts was just the kind of project the country needed to pull back together and heal still-festering wounds. As one of the filmmakers accurately points out, this was the Apollo moon project of the day. Long believed impossible by the brightest engineers of the day, the railroad would cut the time it took to go from coast to coast from six months to just under seven days. It was a truly remarkable feat, and it carried with it more than a fair dosage of corruption and blood. Now AMC has brought those days from 1865 back to our television screen with an ambitious and smartly produced series. It's a must see.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on June 6th, 2012
“When I saw you, I believed it was a sign… that something new can come into this world.”
John Carter first appeared in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom magazine serial nearly a century ago in 1912. The science fiction pioneering Carter stories captured the imagination of masses and inspired countless authors and directors. For example, George Lucas himself has stated there would be no Star Wars without John Carter of Mars. It took nearly a century to get it to screen and in time countless others have mined the series for inspiration. The result is a massive “been there done that” experience.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on June 5th, 2012
A successful writing team, who also happen to be a married couple, are the creators of an award-winning show in the UK that has just completed after four seasons. An American network wishes to create a US version of the show. The couple are flown to LA, put up in a lavish mansion and are introduced to the Hollywood method of creating television...and it nearly destroys them.
Even before they arrive in LA, this pair begins sinking in a quagmire of big-time Hollywood lies and bluffs that drive them to losing their lead actor, a respected, elderly British man, in exchange for Matt LeBlanc, converting their program from the story of a headmaster at a boarding school to that of a handsome hockey coach who is chasing after a sexy librarian, and generally sacrificing all they hold dear (both creative and personally) in order to survive the shoot of a single pilot episode (which, by the way, seems to be the most arduous and lengthy studio shoot I have ever witnessed...it lasts the entire season of Episodes!).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on June 5th, 2012
"I'm yelling for society, for everybody! It's not just me!"
That's Larry David chastising a dog walker who didn't bring along a bag to clean up after her pooch, but that statement also tidily summarizes the premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm. After 11 years, seven seasons and 70 episodes of over-analyzing and kvetching — and after pulling off an incredibly well-received Seinfeld reunion in season 7 — a small part of me wondered if David had anything left to complain about heading into season 8. I should've known better.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 5th, 2012
"Blacks are mentally inferior, by nature subservient, and cowards in the face of danger. They are therefore unfit for combat." - U.S. Army War College Study 1925
Obviously, there's another story to be told here. George Lucas says that he's been wanting to tell this story for over 20 years. It's a story that has often been told in both film and documentary form. In none of those cases has the movie been made into the kind of spectacle film that we find in Red Tails. Lucas gives the legendary air group the Saving Private Ryan treatment, and we get to see these World War II heroes in flight like we've never seen before.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on June 5th, 2012
YouTube had all but killed off the idea of mailing silly home videos to the likes of America's Funniest Home Videos. These days, people prefer to stream dozens of videos on their computers and save themselves from the watered down jokes of Bob Saget or current host Tom Bergeron. Tosh.O takes a similar format of displaying such silly videos, but focuses on things that have gone “viral” online. Like AFHV, Tosh.O adds their own commentary and sketches to the presentation but in a much more crass, cable-savvy manner.
Daniel Tosh makes for a very suitable host, which makes the difference to those who may consider aimlessly surfing through YouTube's channels to be a more valuable way of taking in the latest in mind-numbing entertainment. Tosh not only is capable at delivering edgy quips but often places himself at the butt of self-deprecating and/or harmful sketches where he may partake in the same idiocy he seems to be lambasting at other points in the episodes (a memorable example being his attempt to eat a teaspoon of cinnamon and karate chop a hundred coconuts after smoking Salvia).
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Michael Durr on June 4th, 2012
People tend to place blame on the parents when their children do something wrong. Sometimes this practice is perfectly legit, especially when the behavior is a constant minor disruption or something that is obviously linked to bad parenting. But when the child creates a massive infraction which could include taking a life (or lives), it shouldn’t always fall back on the parents. But yet, the parent will almost always suffer as such the case here with We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Two years ago, Eva (played by Tilda Swinton) had a pretty decent life. She was a successful travel writer, had a loving husband, Franklin (played by John C. Reily) and a peppy daughter, Celia (played by Ashley Gerasimovich). Eva also had a son too named Kevin (played as an adult by Ezra Miller) but Eva’s tranquil life went away the day Kevin created a misdeed too gruesome to ever forget.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 1st, 2012
For most of the last decade or more CBS has dominated the primetime drama market on network television. One of the reasons, of course, has been the prevalence of top-flight crime dramas like the NCIS and CSI franchises. From 2003 until 2009 the Thursday line-up on the eye network included the blockbuster pairing of the original CSI and Without A Trace. Both were products of filmmaker Jerry Bruckheimer's television stable. While CSI focused on the science behind a criminal investigation, Without A Trace took the more traditional route of the human element to the FBI's Missing Persons Unit.
Jack Malone (LaPaglia) was the tough-as-nails head of the unit. He had a degree in psychology and acted very much like a profiler at times. It was his job to direct the investigation unit. The team consisted of Vivian Johnson (Jean-Baptiste). She was a veteran officer and Jack's right hand. Danny Taylor (Muciano) had changed his last name to escape his family roots which included a habitual criminal brother and an abusive father. The unit was his way of starting a new life. Martin Fitzgerald (Close) was the son of a powerful senator and was always fighting to prove himself on his own merits. Samantha Spade (Montgomery) was the young attractive young woman on the team who had already had an affair with the married Jack but also had romantic ties to Martin. Unfortunately, she didn't do much to break the vulnerable female role.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 31st, 2012
At first glance it would be very easy to say that Beyond doesn't really offer us anything terribly new in the crime drama genre. For the most part I would tend to agree with that criticism. I would counter with the argument that a very good film doesn't need to be very original to be good. Sometimes the value in a movie lies in the fact that it does what it does do extremely well. That's how I would describe the sleeper direct-to-video release Beyond.
Jon Voight stars as Detective John Koski. He's a detective in Anchorage, Alaska who specializes in missing children. He's not exactly by the book, and more of his perps end up dead than in the courtroom, but the children usually end up found and alive. Sounds like a win/win to me. Still, he's haunted by that first case where he wasn't able to save a little girl. It turns out he's more haunted by that incident than even he suspects. When 7-year-old Amy (Lesslie) disappears from her bedroom one cold wintry night, Koski, just months from retirement, gets the case. The girl's mother Sarah (Polo) is the sister of the Chief off Police (Mulroney).
