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.
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.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Brent Lorentson on June 5th, 2012
When half your film takes place in one tight location, you are really taking a gamble with your audience. Chances are you’ll either have a suspense-filled set piece, or you’ll lose your audience as they stare at their watches waiting for the credits to roll. To the director’s credit, with 96 Minutes, she was able to pull off an immersive tension-building ride through the inner city that kept me wondering how it would all come to an end.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Brent Lorentson on June 5th, 2012
Hannibal Buress brings his unique voice to this hour-long special and delivers. I have to be honest, I had never heard of this guy when I got the DVD to review, and now I find myself hoping to catch a live performance if he ever brings his tour down south. Once a writer for SNL and doing some work with 30 Rock, this young up-and-comer is sure to make a name for himself and hopefully become a name regarded with the best of the comedy elite.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Brent Lorentson on May 29th, 2012
This movie has everything working for it with the exception of one thing, and that is the execution in which the story is told. The film has a decent cast, a good story, for the most part it looks good on the screen, but what hurts this film was the decision to tell the story in flashback. How can you have a great payoff at the end if in the very beginning we know how the movie is going to end? Why the filmmakers stuck with this edit is a mystery to me, and it’s a shame, because they have all the right pieces to make it work, but instead they shoot themselves in the foot.
