Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 31st, 2006
Synopsis
An item of secret desire for geeks like me was to get Spike Jonze’s videos on DVD. In the mid ‘90s, Jonze arguably was THE director to go to if you wanted your MTV submission to be memorable, talked about, and perhaps most importantly, spur record sales. If you remember the wacky video you saw on MTV that one time, chances are Spike directed it. Even after the critical success in Hollywood with an Oscar nomination for directing Being John Malkovich and before working on Adaptation, he...still managed to come back recently and direct a music video with a dancing Christopher Walken, proving he still has the touch.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 31st, 2006
“Who you gonna call?” By now everyone knows the answer. Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson are the Ghostbusters. As their ad proclaims, they’re ready to believe you. Ghostbusters was originally conceived by Aykroyd as a vehicle for John Belushi and himself. When Belushi died, reportedly from a drug overdose, the project sat on the shelf a few years. Harold Ramis would eventually team up with Aykroyd and finish the script. It’s been said that “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Leave it to these ...wo knuckleheads to combine the two and create a phenomenon. Like pretty much anyone else, I’ve seen Ghostbusters many times in the last 20 years. And just like all of you, I’m still not tired of it. I am, however, done with the repetitive theme song. This release marks at least the third time Ghostbusters has appeared on DVD. This version appears to be identical to the double package release of both films about a year ago.
Ghostbusters pioneered the big budget comedy. Not since “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” have the genres of comedy and horror combined in such masterful form. Ghostbusters had the quality f/x of a blockbuster sci-fi epic. The casting was nothing short of genius. Each cast member brought a distinctive and integral element to the film. Murray provided the used car salesman aspect. Aykroyd perfected the common wide-eyed man with just enough knowledge to be dangerously funny. Ramis played the 50’s style scientist with the stoicism made famous in films like This Island Earth. Hudson was brilliant as the Joe six-pack, obviously intended to represent us, the audience, on this adventure. Sigourney Weaver weaves in just the right amount of sultry and unintended villainy to complete the palette of colors necessary to pull this all off. The supporting cast features actors destined to become stars themselves in the likes of Rick Moranis and William Atherton. While many of the f/x don’t quite meet today’s exploding expectations, they were state of the art in 1984. Forget Kong. Who can resist the giant Sta-Puft Man?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 31st, 2006
Arnold Clasen reenters society after time away in a Nazi prison camp, and returns to Hamburg and a life of quiet solitary resistance, in the 1981 war-time drama Your Unknown Brother. Clasen immediately reconnects with his old love Renate, and embarks on a turbulent, dangerous friendship with resistance leader Walter, a man of ulterior motives, who is also in bed with the Nazi regime. Clasen starts to suspect Walter when many of his old comrades are seized by authorities. It seems everyone in the resistance, wh... comes into contact with Walter soon become property of the State, yet he remains suspiciously unscathed.
The film deals with themes of stark isolation and hopelessness, as well as an individual’s efforts in facing widespread fascism. It’s always at the top of its craft, but the action lacks that extra something to make it all seem interesting. On paper, the film will have foreign drama buffs salivating, but in execution, it fails to make its premise as intriguing as it sounds. With that said, I am hard-pressed to find any fault in the performances, and Director Ulrich Weiss really does know how to use camera, lighting, and sound effects, to his advantage. It just seems like the intangibles are missing – those unexplainable qualities, which pack all the emotional power, and allow a movie to transcend the average film within its genre.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 29th, 2006
With the original Controversial Classics Collection from Warner Brothers, the studio pulled seven films from their classic film archive that were controversial in their day. Topics included government corruption, racism, troubled youth and the wrongfully accused. Instead of following that set with more classic films based on the same themes, Warner Brothers has done something interesting and varied the focus of their theme. The films this time around, as the title suggests, deal with the role of the news media...in modern society. Instead of including seven different films, they have focused on newly re-mastered, double disc versions of three films from the 70's; Network, All the President's Men and Dog Day Afternoon. Each film is available individually, or as part of this box set.
Network is a film that rates at number 66 on the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films of All Time list. As fate would have it, it is also my least favorite film of the three. Each film in this set takes a different approach to examining the nature of the news media. This film is probably the most on point with the nature of modern news. In Network, the role of the news media is to make money for the broadcast networks. The story, justice and reporting the truth behind the events are all seen as tools to be manipulated to obtain ratings, and ultimately money. This is one of those films that probably seemed like sensationalism at the time, but it is certainly right on point in the new millennium.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 29th, 2006
Synopsis
One year after causing a destructive panic because he believed the sky was falling, Chicken Little is still living down the embarrassment, and is desperate for his father to be proud of him. Miraculous success at baseball seems mark the turnaround in his life, but then he is bonked on the head by another piece of the sky, and discovers that this fragment is in fact a tile from a flying saucer. Now he and his group of misfits must save the town from possible alien invasion, despite the fact t...at no one but them believes in the danger.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 29th, 2006
John Carpenter can be hit or miss on some of the things he’s done in his career. Vampires may be a good case in point. In his version of The Thing, remade from Howard Hawks’ 1950’s classic, he doesn’t focus on the creature as much as the relationship between the men in the camp, and how the paranoia starts to creep in the group, as they try to figure out who may or may not be infected by the creature. I might have jumped ahead of some people who haven’t seen it, but just to briefly recap for those few w...o have missed this:
An American crew working in the Arctic circle encounter a Norwegian crew who are frantically shooting at a dog that is running to the camp. The Americans defends themselves as soon as one of the men is hit, and the Norwegians are killed. The Americans take the dog in, but they also go out to the Norwegian camp to find out just what exactly spooked them so much. They find a camp littered with bodies, along with something that was thawed out by the group before they were brutally killed. From that point, various members of the group get infected and plucked off one at a time. But what made this one maybe a bit scarier than most was Carpenter’s ability to create enough of a dynamic between the men, and that most of them were fleshed out enough to the point where you understand how they work together. And the cast is very able, from older members Blair and Copper (Wilford Brimley and Richard Dysart, respectively), to younger members Childs (Keith David, Armageddon) and Palmer (David Clennon, From the Earth to the Moon), all held together by the film’s star (and frequent Carpenter leading man) Kurt Russell (Dark Blue), who plays MacReady.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 29th, 2006
Synopsis
Growing up as the oldest son in an upper-middle class neighborhood outside of Washington, DC, I am familiar with rap as much as, or even more than, KRS One, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Public Enemy or NWA. I come from dem hard streets, where I can kill a muhvuggah! Well, maybe not exactly, and in the age where lame musicians become lame actors (or vice versa in the case of Jennifer Lopez), anyone who tries to be the entertainment “double threat” deserves to be subjected to any and all s...orn and ridicule. Surprisingly though, some of the musicians who have started appearing in movies have employed the easy strategy of appearing as themselves (or dramatically licensed clones of themselves), and some of them have surprisingly interesting stories to tell, such as Eminem in 8 Mile.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 28th, 2006
Synopsis
Clive Owen is a man approaching the end of his tether. His marriage is becoming stagnant, his job at an advertising firm is no better, and he is worried about his daughter, who has type 1 diabetes. He and his wife have set aside a lot of money to pay for an experimental drug for her. One day, on a train, he meets Jennifer Aniston. A friendship is sparked, and then an affair begins, only to be violently disrupted by Vincent Cassel. He brutalizes both, and begins to blackmail Owen for ever-inc...easing sums of money.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 28th, 2006
Brokeback Mountain tells the story of star-crossed lovers Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). Both are young men, not even twenty, working in the year of 1963. They meet and fall in love on a sheep-herding job in Signal, Wyoming. The film chronicles the next 20 years of their lives from Ennis marrying Alma Beers (Michelle Williams) to Jack marrying Laureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway). The 20 years that the film takes place over show Ennis and Jack trying to lead a normal life without see...ng each other, but shortly before realizing that they both have a deep connection to one another.
There’s a scene in Brokeback Mountain where Ennis tells Jack about something he saw as a boy. Ennis tells Jack that there were two old guys who were shacked up together. The whole town knew of this. Then one day, they were found beaten to death. Ennis’s father made sure Ennis and his brother saw this possibly as an idea that this is what may occur if you chose this type of life. This scene is quite important because it really shapes and defines the kind of character that Ennis is. Ennis is the kind of character that wants to let his emotions for Jack out but we learn that he was taught to hate his own feelings. Years after first meeting Jack, Ennis tells Jack “Why don’t you let me be? It’s because of you, Jack, that I’m like this—nothing, and nobody.” Ennis blames Jack for his problems, but the center of his problem is that Ennis loves Jack but can’t find a way to deal with that fact.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 28th, 2006
Where is Chuck Norris when you need him? The Rangers alluded to in this Babylon 5 film aren’t anything like Walker’s bad boys. These Rangers talk tough but are pretty much dull when it comes to action. The problem with Babylon 5 has always been the convoluted and complicated mythology of the show. I’m a huge science fiction fan who has always wanted to get into this show but just couldn’t wrap my mind around the premise. The Rangers are no exception to this flaw. These guys are charged with basically protecting the...helpless in the Galaxy. Instead they mostly spill out Yoda-like nuggets of wisdom. Die hard fans will probably get most of this, but apparently there weren’t enough of them. This was intended to serve as a pilot for a Babylon 5 spin-off that never got off the ground. Check out this film and you’ll understand why.
It appears the most important element in the Ranger code is to never retreat. Echoes of Galaxy Quest’s “Never give up. Never surrender” abound. It’s almost as comical. Captain Martel (Neal) has broken this sacred oath when he retreated with a crippled ship from an imposing enemy. He’s now out of favor with the council. When Ambassador S’Ka speaks up for him his career is spared. Still… Hell hath no fury like a council scorned. Martel is given command of a cursed ship that isn’t even ready to launch. His duty is to escort the Ambassador to a mysterious meeting about a new threat in the Galaxy. Of course, things go wrong, but the hopelessly outgunned Martel manages to save the day. What an original plot that was. And they all lived happily ever after in cancellation land.
