Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on May 14th, 2009
British comedy for me has always been big hit or big miss for me. There really is no between. Monty Python & The Holy Grail – big hit. This movie makes me laugh from the first second until the closing credits. But some of the Monty Python sketches or all of Meaning of Life – big miss. Same thing with television, the Black Adder is simply awesome. Absolutely Fabulous? I never got it and found it completely droll. So I was eager to see Gavin & Stacey and find another wonderful British hit. I was totally pleased.
Gavin (played by Mathew Horne) and Stacey (played by Joanna Page) quite like each other. There is one problem though, they haven’t really met each other in person. They have a budding phone romance and have decided that they finally need to meet. Each of them takes a bud along. Gavin takes Smithy (played by James Corden), a large friendly guy who loves beer and food. Stacey takes along Nessa (played by Ruth Jones), a large not so friendly girl who loves beer, food and apparently tattoos.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 14th, 2009
Taking Chance gives audiences another perspective into the Iraq war. Lt. Colonel Michael Strobl (Kevin Bacon) volunteers to escort the remains of a recently deceased Lance Corporal Chance Phelps. During the trip across America’s heartland, Strobl gets to see how the Iraq war is implicating not just the families involved, but the nation as a whole. The film is also based on true events, which adds to the stories levity. The film manages to give alternative perspectives on the war and also manages to be objective at the same time.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 12th, 2009
“When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born. It never forgives. It never forgets. The curse gathers in that place of death. Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury.”
Here we go again with the American remake of the Asian classic. To be fair, The Grudge was one of the first after the great success of The Ring. There are some significant differences between this effort and the countless remakes we’ve encountered over the last decade or so. This film retained its Japanese location, which does provide for a more exotic atmosphere. The location shoots are actually pretty well done. The film was also directed by the same man who directed the Asian original, Takashi Shimizu. He’s become quite prolific in the genre, having now directed both versions and the sequels to both versions. The Grudge also doesn’t figure into the technology aspect that many of these Asian ghost stories appear to populate. The most high tech haunt here is a stainless steel bathtub. I bet that gets cold in the winter. Sarah Michelle Gellar brings in the core American audience thirsting for more Buffy. But, if you’re turning on to this film to see Buffy kick some supernatural rear, you’re better off with the Scooby Doo films. And that’s bad.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 12th, 2009
The Caller is a film starring Frank Langella and Elliott Gould. It is a tense thriller about corporate foul play and voyeurism, wait, what year is it? With the recent critical acclaim of Langella, it seems only fitting to market his name on a low-budget film. Unfortunately for the film, Langella’s performance is one of the only shining moments. Langella plays an aging VP of an energy company that decides to blow the whistle on the corporate wrong doings that are going on. Understanding that he’s written his own death certificate, Langella hires a private investigator (Gould) to follow him to help catch his eventual killer.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 11th, 2009
“Your life is defined by its opportunities... even the ones you miss.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of those great American writers from the classic age. In school most of us were required to read various works from the writer. For many students those works included The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. The original work is a mere 20 page short story. For the last 15 years Hollywood has made one attempt or another to bring the classic story to the screen. The closest anyone got was Ron Howard who expected to bring in John Travolta as Benjamin Button. The one reason or another these attempts never made it past screenplay drafts. Along comes one of the best and most diverse directors, David Fincher. Fincher’s work needs little introduction and spans the genre spectrum from Se7en to Fight Club. The original short story would be adapted by Eric Roth. That left many, myself included, to expect a remake of Forrest Gump. When you consider that Roth wrote both screen adaptations and that he was once again working with a character spanning many years of history, the concerns were not unfounded. Would Roth take Benjamin Button on a journey through the 20th Century that would find him present at crucial moments in history as he did with Gump? Fortunately, Roth resisted such temptations and delivered a story relatively faithful to the original work, where the main character was a silent witness only to the major events of his life. Of course, I say relatively faithful because Roth also turned that 20 page story into an epic 3 hour film.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on May 11th, 2009
Based on a play by Wallace Shawn (who also co-wrote the screenplay), this film is a day in the life of an unhappily married couple, played by Juliane Moore and Matthew Broderick, who don't know what to do about said unhappiness. The story is simple but the paths each character take is not. After a bitter breakfast scene, they separately go about their day before meeting at a party in the evening where Marie may or may not leave Bruce once and for all.
The dialogue is very reminiscent of a meta-theatrical stage production as the characters are able to freely address the audience in narration or monologues. When speaking to each other, they are terribly open and leave no feeling hidden as they express every thought in a highly unnatural and stylized manner. This leads to some very biting humour as Marie explains her disdain without mercy towards either Bruce or anyone he associates with, while Bruce feels no qualms about detailing the state of is genitals after a one night stand he had 11 years prior. At the same time, this strange and often venomous dialogue is peppered with the persistent use of endearing terms such as “darling” when one of the two addresses the other, which turns into a nice device used by the writers to squeeze out more of a satirical view of decaying, modern couplehood.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 10th, 2009
Bob Dylan: Never Ending Tour Diaries outlines the five year journey of tour drummer Winston Watson. The documentary is limited to Watson’s perspective with great super 8 tour footage spliced into his interviews. Watson toured with Bob Dylan for over 400 shows and helped Dylan launch his “Never Ending Tour” which continues to this day. Winston Watson’s charisma and originality make him very likeable, which is crucial when chronicling an unheard perspective. This is not a typical rock documentary; there is very little music and no music videos at all. However, what this film lacks in typical form, it makes up with entertaining stories and great footage.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 7th, 2009
Talk about your hit show running out of steam. The Waltons is the perfect example of a show that outstayed its welcome. When it first took television audiences by storm in 1971, it became a cultural phenomenon. But by the show’s ninth and final year as a regular series it was 1980 and the country, the world, for that matter, had changed. It didn’t help matters that Richard Thomas had left the show, and his popular John Boy character, behind. The show’s core fans remained, but America’s love affair with The Waltons was clearly over. The show continued with 6 specials, often around holidays that brought the now scattered family back to Walton’s Mountain and our television screens. The last of these reunion films aired in 1997. They are not included in this final season set. I would expect they are awaiting their own release, much as the Columbo series has done.
John (Waite) and Olivia (Learned) Walton lived on the Walton land high atop Walton’s Mountain. The land had been in their family for generations. They shared their home with Grandpa (Geer) and Grandma (Corby) Walton and 8 children. At first we found the family in the heart of the Great Depression. They series had a Little House On The Prairie feel to it. The stories took place mostly in that small town where they all lived. The family would suffer one hardship or another and overcome weekly obstacles by sticking together as a family. As the years moved on, the series entered the World War II era and some of the boys would end up fighting in the conflict. By far the breakout character became John Boy, who was first played by and made famous by Richard Thomas. In the last season the character was covered as a recurring character by Robert Wrightman. It would never be the same.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 6th, 2009
“Symbols are a language that helps us to understand our past. As the saying goes, a picture says a thousand words, but which words? Understanding our past determines actively our ability to understand the present. So, how do we sift truth from belief? How do we write our own histories, personally and culturally, and thereby define ourselves? How do we penetrate years, centuries of historical distortion to find the original truth? Tonight, that will be our quest.”
Conspiracies can be fun. We all buy into them to one degree or another. I’m not talking about the paranoid nutjob who sees a conspiracy behind every closed door, and even a few open ones. Of course, there is something to the old axiom that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you. Of course, we’re not talking about the persecution complex style conspiracy here. We’re talking about the old fashioned cover-up. It’s what made The X-Files so famous for so many years. It’s why JFK’s death is so much more interesting than anything he did in his remarkable life. There are still some crazy people out there that believe George W. Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, or at the very least was complacent in them. Everywhere from Super Bowl outcomes to manned missions to the moon, someone somewhere thinks it was all a big lie. So, you might as well cop to it now. We all love a good conspiracy theory. In his second Robert Langdon novel, The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown writes about what would be the mother of all cover-ups. As one character put it so well in both the novel and film, “What if the greatest story ever told was a lie?”
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 6th, 2009
Two And A Half Men reached their 100th episode in the 5th year. That’s the milestone when a series becomes viable in syndication to local market stations. That’s the kind of show you see once, twice, a hundred times a day on those local stations either just before primetime or late at night. This is also the year that the writers of CSI and Two And A Half Men switched shows for an episode. It’s one of those cross-over ideas that I don’t think had been done before. I’d love to see the South Park and Family Guy staffs do something like this. That would be pay per view worthy. So, here on 3 discs is that milestone season for you to enjoy at home.
Charlie Sheen is an unlikely actor to star in a television sit-com. Even after watching the show, I’m not sure how anyone came up with the idea in the first place. He has little to no comedic timing, and he’s about as funny as a funeral. The thing that works here, however, is that he really doesn’t need to be all that funny to make this show work. Sheen pretty much deadpans his entire performance, which generously enough works rather well teamed with the more manic comedy of Jon Cryer. Throw into the mix a rather extraordinary young child actor in Angus T. Jones, and suddenly a show that looks terrible on paper turns out to be pretty dang funny. We’re not talking Fred Sanford funny, but I caught myself laughing far more often than I expected to. I had only caught the show before in bits and pieces and was never all that fond of what I saw. Watching these DVD episodes from the third season shed some new light on the show for me.
![The Grudge [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/the-grudge-blu-ray-large.jpg)
![The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/the-curious-case-of-benjamin-button-large.jpg)
![The Da Vinci Code (Two-Disc Extended Cut + BD Live) [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/the-da-vinci-code-two-disc-extende-large.jpg)
