Disc Reviews

Everybody has their favorite Looney Tunes character and particular cartoon shorts. That’s the largest obstacle facing Warner Brothers in this ambitious project to restore and release these shorts on DVD. The first collection features 56 all time great shorts plus a ton of extras. If your favorites were not included, take heart. This is only the first of many promised releases. All in all it would take a Dickens’ Scrooge not to find something to love about this collection. It doesn’t matter if you’re 5 or 105, these cartoons have been a vital part of growing up for all of us.

Synopsis

Love him or hate him, you have to admire his freakishly sponge-like brain. Dennis Miller has an amazing gift of recall, creating references so obscure that ABC Sports actually offered an on-line translator on the Tuesday mornings following his stint in the booth for Monday Night Football.

His rants are mostly easy to follow during this one-hour stand up performance, however. In fact, he even pokes fun at his own gift for the obscure early in the show, essentially acknowledging that he may have been too hig...-brow in the past, and he’s going to make it a little more mainstream this time around. There are a few truly big laughs here, but the majority of his material leans more toward mildly humorous and incredibly insightful. His conservative views come across as common sense when presented in his signature witty style. While the material is quite topical (and may be completely irrelevant in just a few years), it is dead on for its time. This is a great opportunity to witness free speech in action, carried out by a man that is completely unconcerned with whom he offends. Miller has strong beliefs, and he is not afraid to share them, a trait far too many of us have forgotten somewhere along the way.

No movie can be all bad.

This is a motto that I have lived by for many years. I believe that nothing can be completely bad… that some good can be found in everything. As bad as Spice World was, it had some great moments. Its sarcastic look at the music business was often clever, even if its stars weren’t. Tomcats was a horrible film with major continuity issues. Having said that, it did have some genuine laugh-out-loud moments.

X2:X Men United is the follow-up film to the original X-men film from 2000. The original film did a good job of setting up the universe of the X-men and introducing us to the core characters that the comic books have always centered around. This film expands on this universe and brings along some of the coolest characters from the comics, this being Pyro, a brief glimpse of Juggernaut and lets not forget Nightcrawler. In this film we see the good and band mutants joining forces to defeat a common enemy. This is a little disappointing as we get to see cool new good characters but not really any super new baddies, but it also keeps the storyline fresh instead of it just being the good mutants versus the bad mutants.

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dc Talk mixed up the formula on their “Supernatural” album, trading in their signature hip-hop for a much more progressive sound. The result is what I consider to be their best album to date. While they are not afraid to continue to sprinkle some hip-hop into their work, the majority of the songs are more modern pop and rock based tunes. Their stage show has also come up to date, complete with a sleek stripped down look to the sets.

This disc captures some of the songs performed on the tour, mixed in with i...terview segments and music videos. The result is an “all in one” approach to a DVD title, as the feature and the extras are mixed together to form one major presentation. The result is something easy to watch, yet entirely unique. It is a documentary, of sorts, capturing the band during one short season of their artistic journey. This is the best of the numerous dc Talk DVDs on the market today.

TBS Superstation presents…

When it comes to DVD, these are frightening words. They conjure up images of bad acting, bad sets, and terrible scripts. Unfortunately, all of this proves true in the “action” film “Counterstrike”, staring Rob Estes (Silk Stalkings) and Joe Lando (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman). The plot is tired and familiar; two bothers are the only ones that can stop terrorists from holding the President of the United States hostage, and stealing China’s nuclear codes. Ho-Hum.< ...p>

DC Talk made the jump from playing small churches and clubs to playing arenas following their Dove and Grammy award winning album, “Free At Last”. Though some of the songs sound a bit cheesy and dated now, they were right on target when released in the mid nineties, as evidenced by the packed arenas shown during the performances on this disc. The band was getting so big, in fact, that they decided to release a concert video/documentary to major movie houses nationwide. The footage was shot, the project was edited, t...ailers were assembled and sent out to the marketplace, and… nothing happened. For reasons not fully examined on this set, the artists, labels and studios never saw eye-to-eye, and the project was shelved in its nearly-complete form.

On the 10 year anniversary of this groundbreaking project, ForeFront Records returned to their archives, re-mastering and re-releasing the album and dusting off the old film project for new life on DVD. This two-disc set contains both the re-mastered CD and its DVD film counterpart. For better or for worse, the film is Free at Last.

“All I Want” is a decent film that could have been great. Elijah Wood plays Jones Dylan (a quintessential Hollywood character name), a seventeen-year-old college freshman that decides that life has more to offer than formal education. Dropping out of college without attending a single class, he rents a nearby apartment and begins to get to know his neighbors. Before long, the underage Jones in enraptured in a tangled romance with two of his fellow boarders.

The plot of this film is interesting, but unfort...nately, the actors are not. Mandy Moore does a bit of overacting in her role as a… well… as an actress. Co-star Franka Potente gives a mediocre performance as a modern-day Ally Sheedy. Sadly, the constantly wonderful Elizabeth Perkins is not enough to save the overall poor acting in this film.