Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 24th, 2023
Every family has their holiday traditions. Christmas is probably the king of family traditions. We all have our favorite Christmas songs and our favorite foods and methods of celebrating. A part of that has long been the Christmas movie. I'm talking about those films that somehow represent the spirit of the time of year, and not merely movies that take place during Christmas time. Yeah, John McClain, I'm talking about you. For me it's been A Christmas Story since its release in 1983. There are others high on the list for me. The Man Who Invented Christmas and It's A Wonderful Life along with almost every version of the Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol all have a special place in my heart. But none of them come close to Ralphie's quest for a Red Ryder air rifle. Jean Shepherd's In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash is as classic a slice of Americana as Norman Rockwell paintings or summer picnics and fireworks. The tale told in A Christmas Story is only a small part of that book, but it's just Christmas to me and always shall be.
It's 1973, and the boy who wanted that Red Ryder air rifle has grown with children of his own. It's been a big year for the adult Ralphie (Billingsly) who has been given a year by his wife Sandy (Hayes) to quit his job and write that great American novel. As Christmas approaches, his year is nearly up. If he can get the novel picked up before the year ends, he can keep writing. If not, it's back to the salt mines he goes. What he's written is a too-long science fiction nightmare, and he's on his final publisher. He remains the same Ralphie who once brought his teacher a huge fruit basket to bribe her to reward his theme with a good grade and hopefully align herself in the pro-air-rifle brigade. This time it's premium bottles of booze, but the results haven't changed. Ralphie has been foiled again, and time is running out. It sure seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 22nd, 2023
"I would like to play a game."
I heard it everywhere. When I would mention that I'd be reviewing the 10th entry in the Saw franchise, almost everyone thought I had miscounted. It's hard for anyone to believe that the franchise has gotten into the double digits, and there's more. Next October should be the release of Saw XI. I think what confuses folks is that the numbers stopped with Saw VII. The 8th film was called Jigsaw, and the 9th was called Spiral: From The Book Of Saw. Before you know it, numbers don't mean a heck of a lot. We keep going to see the films and buying them for our home entertainment collections. A movie here. A movie there. Before you know it you have 10 films. Now you can add the 10th film to your library on UHD Blu-ray in 4K. Just remember that it goes next to Spiral on the shelf.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on December 14th, 2023
“Let’s go get the s**t kicked out of us by love.”
It’s hard for me to accept that Love Actually is really 20 years old already. I remember being a projectionist when this came out and splicing the film together back when movies were actually shown on film. When I first saw the film, it was after hours in the movie theater, and we had to screen the movies the day before release to make sure it was put together properly, and I was with my girlfriend at the time, so it was just us in the auditorium, and from that moment on I was in love with this film. I’ve seen the film well over a dozen times through different phases of my life, and each experience it hits a little differently, but I still come away from this film feeling a bit schmaltzy and in the Christmas spirit. For those of you who have missed out on this classic and are wondering just what is so great about this sentimental British love fest, the movie is written and directed by Richard Curtis; this would be his first time directing, but he had previously made a name for himself after writing Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones Diary. These were a trio of films that American audiences were ravenous about and basically set up Love Actually to become an instant success, but I don’t think anyone was ready for just how charming and heartwarming this film would actually turn out to be.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 11th, 2023
As I have mentioned numerous times, I am not a fan of horror movies. In particular, my number one pet peeve is jump scares. Now, for certain scary movies, I'll allow one good jump scare; it almost goes with the territory. But if the director has to use one every fifteen minutes, my heart does not need that much of a workout, and I am going to avoid it very quickly. This is mostly reserved for American movies, quite often on their fifth sequel. However, Korean horror flicks know how not to use the jump scare and instead focus on making things as gruesome and disturbing as humanly possible. Or inhumanly, perhaps. Today, we take on a modern horror classic in the 2016 film, The Wailing as it makes its way on 4K UHD disc. Let's take a look and see if the ol' ticker can handle this one.
We get a Bible passage to start out this movie, it's from Luke 24:37-39 and basically describes the resurrection of Jesus. The important part of this passage is two fold, in that the people had doubts that he was resurrected and that he resurrected physically as opposed to as a spirit. Let's continue.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 9th, 2023
"Space...the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before!"
Since the relaunch of Star Trek on television via the Paramount+ streaming service, I must admit to being a little underwhelmed. It's truly bad when Alex Kurtzman makes me pine for the days of Rick Berman. There have been some pretty good moments in the various new Trek shows. Picard has shown promise and has improved with a third season that looks very exciting. Lower Decks is just too campy for my taste, and Discovery has so many ups and downs I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster. So along comes Strange New Worlds, and this is the Star Trek I've been waiting for these last decades.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on December 8th, 2023
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
It is hard to ignore the hype around the film Oppenheimer. Any time a Christopher Nolan film has come out, it has become a pretty big deal for cinema fans, whether it was for his The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Inception, or Tenet, his films carry the same kind of respect alongside the names of Stanley Kubrick and James Cameron, and his films can be just as divisive. But the anticipation for the release of Oppenheimer feels like a different beast entirely. The release coming out the same day as Barbie has created such a stir on the internet that the term Barbenheimer has become a part of the zeitgeist of modern day. Then another aspect is how the film was literally shot on 70mm film, which is unheard of in today’s digital-hungry climate, and the film is being released in certain theaters on 70mm prints that reportedly weigh around 600lbs. And now with critics finally getting to see the film, I can’t scroll through my news feed without seeing headlines that tout the film as not just being the most important film of the century, but the best film of the century as well. So what’s my take on all this hype, and is it worth it? Is Oppenheimer the film that will save cinema?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 5th, 2023
Most people, when asked to provide the best Korean film in modern times, would probably answer Oldboy or Parasite. Others might respond Memories of Murder or Train to Busan. Maybe A Tale of Two Sisters or The Wailing. I, on the other hand, always respond with the same title, The Man from Nowhere, which to this point in the US has only been released on Blu-ray from Well Go. That Blu-ray was also the victim of a bunch of discs from Well Go that came away with a quick dose of rot, infecting my copy as well as many others. For the last couple of years, I've been working with a bootleg, which I'm not exactly proud of, but felt necessary because I loved this film so much. However, that changed, as Well Go has released a 4Kcopy of this sensational film (and also of The Wailing, which I will get to later in the week). I thankfully received it a little bit earlier than expected and took it for a spin. Let's see how it does.
Kim Chi-Gon (played by Kim Tae-hoon) lights a cigarette and calls his squad into position. The crew of police detectives and squad members wake up and talk about their plan. They have been at this stakeout for two months and can't afford to mess this up.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2023
"Is that the biggest one you got?"
Remember the old days of the action movie? Those films where someone like Stallone or Schwarzenegger would run around and take out armies of bad guys while barely breaking a sweat. You know the kind of movie I'm talking about. The ones where the hero goes up against a hail of bullets and explosions and manages to pick off the bad guys without catching a single slug himself. Those were the days when a guy like Bruce Willis could fall thirty floors, get a spike impaled in his ribcage, have a ton of concrete wall fall on his head, and get run over by a truck, but still manage to take out the bad guy while muttering some witty little catchphrase that we would all be repeating, because if we could deliver the line just right, that meant we were tough guys too, and we didn't even have to fall out of an airplane to prove it. Well, you won't have to remember. You just have to watch Sly Stallone's love letters to the action movie fans. The franchise is called The Expendables and along the way we got to relive some glorious moments with our favorite action stars from the 70's to the 90's.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2023
"I don't know about you, but it always makes me sore when I see those war pictures ... all about flying leathernecks and submarine patrols and frogmen and guerillas in the Philippines. What gets me is that there never w-was a movie about POWs - about prisoners of war. Now, my name is Clarence Harvey Cook; they call me Cookie. I was shot down over Magdeburg, Germany, back in '43; that's why I stammer a little once in a while, 'specially when I get excited. I spent two and a half years in Stalag 17. "Stalag" is the German word for prison camp, and Number 17 was somewhere on the Danube. There were about 40,000 POWs there, if you bothered to count the Russians, and the Poles, and the Czechs. In our compound there were about 630 of us, all American airmen: radio operators, gunners, and engineers. All sergeants. Now, you put 630 sergeants together, and, oh mother, you've got yourself a situation. There was more fireworks shooting off around that joint ... take for instance the story about the spy we had in our barracks ..."
Stop me if you've heard this before. The premise is we're in World War II, but not where all of the action is. There aren't any big firefights, and you won't see or hear any of those big guns raining Armageddon down on some poor hapless pinned-down soldiers. Instead we're inside of a German POW camp, which they called Stalags. This one is run by a self-important commandant who takes pride in the fact that there has never been an escape from his Stalag. The prisoners themselves are always trying to find a way to outwit the camp Sergeant, a rather rotund officer named Shultz. Of course, I'm talking about Hogan's Heroes. But I'm not. 12 years before the CBS comedy would hit the airwaves, iconic film director Billy Wilder gave us a quasi-serious version of that particular scenario in the film Stalag 17. The film was based on a contemporary Broadway production written by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski based on their own actual experiences at the real Stalag 17. The film was originally planned as a vehicle for Charlton Heston, but when Wilder came on to direct, he immediately dismissed the idea, believing that it would become a Charlton Heston film more than a film about its own actual elements, and he was likely correct. Heston was big at the time, coming off larger-than-life parts like Moses and Ben Hur. The role went to William Holden, and the casting would become one of those lightning-in-a-bottle kind of things that can elevate a film from good to classic. And by the way, Wilder and gang sued Hogan's Heroes when it did arrive on the scene but were not successful.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Jeremy Butler on December 1st, 2023
“He was raised in the swamp. In the back of a slough. He grew up eatin’ rattlesnake meat and drinkin’ homemade brew. Now, folks here about call him Gator. And everybody knows him well. Meanest man ever to hit the swamp. Folks swear he come straight outta hell.”
Quite the catchy little ditty. One-word-title movies intrigue, especially those named after a specific character. It suggests that the titular character has or should have significant presence. And when you have a whole song dedicated to you, you certainly need to walk the walk. And who better to walk that walk than Burt Reynolds, as he reprises his role of Bobby “Gator” McKlusky in this sequel to White Lightning. Reynolds even decided to up the ante this time by making this film his directorial debut.
