Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 1st, 2012
“This ain’t a revival, it’s an orphanage.”
It’s the 1970’s and a speeding car screams down the dirt road of an orphanage. A duffel bag is tossed on the doorstep, and Moe, Larry and Curly have arrived. Ten years later we see the beginnings of the familiar routines in the teenage versions of The Three Stooges. They are unadoptable and are causing the nuns who run the joint a ton of headaches.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on July 8th, 2012
“Come on Ryan! These are big existential questions, best left for boring Russian novelists and teenagers on acid. Real people don’t think about this shit!”
As Wilfred: The Complete First Season begins, Ryan Newman (Elijah Wood), a miserably depressed out of work lawyer, just reached the end of his rope. One night, after meticulously composing the final draft of his suicide note, he downs a handful of pills, chugs them back with a bottle of NyQuil and heads off to bed. Nothing happens. He can’t even fall asleep.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by J C on July 3rd, 2012
Mirror mirror on the wall, which is the fairest Snow White movie of them all? (Or at least 2012.) Well, if we’re going by box office receipts and critical reception, the winner is Snow White and the Huntsman, the gothic, snarlier twist on the classic tale starring Kristen Stewart (everything starring Stewart is automatically snarlier), Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth. However, if we’re going by costumes, production design and general shiny-ness, Mirror Mirror easily wins. I realize that sounds like faint praise, but this family-friendly take on Snow White has its quirky charms.
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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.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by J C on April 12th, 2012
– “I have a question for you. You’re some random guy from the city, no one in the zoo community has ever heard of you. You know nothing about animals and you moved into a dump…why did you buy this place?”
– “Why not?”
Following the death of his beloved wife, Benjamin Mee does what any reasonable man would do under the same circumstances: he quits his job and moves his family into a zoo. I suspect you’ll enjoy this movie a lot more if you simply shrug your shoulders and say, “Why not?”
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 12th, 2012
“They’re gonna rock the boat”
The Chipmunks began life oddly enough as a singing group, of sorts. They were the brainchild of struggling songwriter Ross Bagdasarian and were named after the three chief executives at Liberty records. His own alter ego David Seville’s name came from his World War II Army station in Spain. The Chipmunks first appeared in a 1958 record called The Witch Doctor, but wouldn’t officially become The Chipmunks until later that year when The Chipmunks Christmas Song was released. It is for that Christmas music that I most remember the group. They first appeared as puppets on The Ed Sullivan Show.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 6th, 2012
The Killing began life as a Danish television series. We are used to seeing British shows reinvented for American audiences, but it’s rare to find something from Danish television that someone found so compelling they decided to work it for the competitive American television landscape. It’s no surprise that such an effort would find its way on cable rather than network television, where boundaries can really be pushed and explored.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on March 26th, 2012
“Ohh. Oh, Fritz? Fritz, get up for God’s sake! Get up! They’ve killed Fritz! They’ve killed Fritz! Those lousy stinking yellow fairies! Those horrible atrocity-filled vermin! Take that! Take that! They killed Fritz!!!”
Ralph Bakshi is probably best known for his x-rated animated adaptation of R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, the first animated film to receive an x-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America and still turn into the most successful independent animated feature of all time. When his second and also x-rated animated feature, Heavy Traffic, a blacker than coal satirical comedy
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Posted in Disc Reviews by J C on March 22nd, 2012
Even though I’m guilty of doing it myself, I always laugh a little when I hear someone complain that certain actors “just play themselves”: as if you or I actually know these celebrities personally and have the authority to say what they’re like in real life. Of course, what we really mean is most movie stars have found a screen persona that has connected with audiences and — in the spirit of giving people what they want (or laziness) — tend to stick pretty close to that image, adding only a tweak when we catch on to their game. (I mean, do we really want to see Sylvester Stallone tackle Hamlet? Wait, that would be amazing!)
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on March 16th, 2012
Sometimes you just know. As a movie reviewer, I always strive for an open mind. I work for the idea that even if the cover screams snorefest or if the movie has a star I can absolutely not stand, perhaps just perhaps there is a nugget of cinema goodness underneath. Then I received Tooth Fairy 2 on Blu-Ray. After I screamed at the heaven’s above and drank myself into a deep coma, I decided that an open mind was a terrible thing to waste.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 18th, 2012
“I don’t have to worry about how it all happened. It is what it is. We’re genetically engineered to stop aging at 25. The trouble is, we live only one more year unless we can get more time. Time is now currency. We earn it. We spend it. The rich can live forever and the rest of us?”
Well…the rest of us lose a couple of hours by watching films with tremendous potential that end up leaving us disappointed and more than a little bit cheated. Hopefully, you haven’t yet taken the plunge and I’ve gotten to you In Time.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by J C on February 6th, 2012
“I was dumb enough to think I’d be joining some elite police officers here. I don’t know who these people are.”
Those words come from Kathryn Bolkovac (Oscar winner Rachel Weisz), a Nebraska cop who accepts a high-paying gig as a United Nations peacekeeper. The film, inspired by true events in 1999 post-war Bosnia, follows Bolkovac as she discovers a human trafficking/sexual slavery ring with an insidious connection to International Police Task Force personnel, including some from the United States.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 2nd, 2012
Written by Joe Gause
Here we go again! It’s another movie about something dangerous in the water. I’m not gonna lie here, folks, I wasn’t expecting to much out of this one, but to my surprise I enjoyed it quite a bit. So here’s the short and skinny. A bunch of college kids set off to a lake house to enjoy a much-needed vacation. There is a fair amount of drinking and flirting and tomfoolery (always wanted to use that word). Early in the film we discover that Sara (Sara Paxton) has a dark secret with one of the town locals. As the party gets under way, trouble starts to brew in paradise when one of the partygoers gets his arm ripped off by a shark!
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 28th, 2011
When I was a kid, I read a lot of books. The most fond tales of my youth include Sword of Shannara (Terry Brooks), Dear Mr. Henshaw (Beverly Clearly), Charlotte’s Web (EB White) and Mr. Popper’s Penguins (Richard & Florence Atwater). Each one of those books holds special memories and I’ve read each of them at least a few times. Today, we get to explore another one of those treasured books in film form. Enter, Mr. Popper’s Penguins.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 28th, 2011
The longest running show in prime time doesn’t feature cops, doctors, or lawyers. It’s hard to believe that The Simpsons have existed as long as the Fox network. While the series didn’t really begin until Fox’s second year, the characters were part of The Tracey Ullman Show, which did start the first year of Fox. Who could have guessed that an animated short from an otherwise horrible and doomed variety show would explode into such a phenomenon?
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 23rd, 2011
It all started with a very short novel by French author Pierre Boulle. It wasn’t even that much of a hit at first. But a small group of Hollywood moguls led by Arthur P. Jacobs believed in the property and worked hard to get a film made. It wasn’t easy. They had to interest a big star and make a test reel in order to get anyone to bite. Fortunately for us all, Fox did bite. After five films, a television series, and a cartoon run, the franchise ran out of steam by the middle of the 1970’s.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 18th, 2011
The attack on Pearl Harbor and the days leading up to that fateful event are the subject of the 1970 effort. The narrative jumps back and forth between the Japanese and American perspectives as just enough things go both wrong and right on both sides (the ascendancy of the militant army faction over the reluctant navy in Japan, crucial intelligence always arriving just a bit too late to the right people in States) to make the surprise attack inevitable.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 14th, 2011
“Within our lifetimes, we’ve marveled as biologists have managed to look at ever smaller and smaller things. And astronomers have looked further and further into the dark night sky, back in time and out in space. But maybe the most mysterious of all is neither the small nor the large: it’s us, up close.”
Another Earth has all the earmarks of a first feature film for director Mike Cahill. It’s also quite obvious that the director is far more comfortable in the documentary style of filmmaking.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 20th, 2011
Deep inside most people’s hearts lies a layer of curiosity. Many of us could go that one step farther and say it boils down to perversion. Whether it involves a spectacular car crash or two lovers in the throws of passion, there are uninhibited moments that we want to see. But what happens when those moments go beyond curiosity and straight into voyeurism? Worse yet, perhaps straight into a very dangerous situation? Well then one might be feeling much like Jeffery Beaumont in Blue Velvet, one of David Lynch’s best movies.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 3rd, 2011
“We have 182 patients. Most are horribly deformed, due to inbreeding and birth defects.”
If you’re a horror fan at all, then you have more than a passing familiarity with three of those patients. Back in 2003 we were introduced to Three-Finger, Saw-Tooth and One-Eye in the sleeper horror film Wrong Turn starring Buffy and Angel favorite actress Eliza Dushku in her first staring role, capitalizing on her television fame. She was good in the movie, but our three deformed cannibals were something that we just haven’t been able to forget.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 27th, 2011
I can’t help it. Whenever I see David Boreanaz I can’t stop seeing the brooding vampire Angel. It’s not really his fault. This character couldn’t be farther from the Angel character, but that’s what I see. It’s also true that Bones, now entering its sixth season, has been around longer than Angel. It’s also very likely that he now has fans that aren’t even aware of that previous character. It has been quite a few years. I’m usually better at letting go of a character once the show has ended and the actor has moved on.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 11th, 2011
“Cal Lightman sees the truth. It’s written all over your face. It’s also in your voice, your posture, the words you choose. Give him five minutes and 20 questions and he’ll know whether you went off to Argentina to cheat on your wife, lied about a well-timed stock sale, or murdered a one-night stand.”
I spent quite a few years as a detective. My specialty turned out to be in the interview room. When some of my fellow detectives had a suspect they couldn’t break, they often called me in.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 6th, 2011
We all remember Ed O’Neill as Al Bundy from Married With Children. It’s an iconic role that he’ll never be able to shake no matter what he does for the rest of his life. After that series ended its 11-year run, he even attempted to get out of comedy and take more dramatic roles. I’m sure there was a deliberate intent to try to distance himself from Al. It’s not that he likely didn’t love playing the role. He just wanted to avoid getting forever typecast in the mold.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 27th, 2011
Ever wonder what the kids of South Park might be like if they ever made it to adulthood? While I’ve not seen that many episodes of the FX series It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, that was the first observation that came to mind. These are the South Park kids all grown up. They’re crude, raunchy, mean, and most importantly, they are as politically incorrect as ever. If you need an example, I can offer one right from one episode. The guys have a Christmas tradition that dates back to their childhood of throwing rocks at moving trains.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on September 16th, 2011
“Listen, I know you’ve been playing for Luke all year, but for this game… I want you to play for you. You’ve earned it. I want you to take the burden of this family off your shoulders and I want you to go out there and I want you to have a ball. I want you to hit someone haaard! I want you to play for the joy of playing the game… or the love of playing for the CHAMPIONSHIP!”
Luke (Stefan Guy), a rising star at lacrosse and football in high school and seems destined for a bright future until he climbs in the car with a reckless teenage driver.
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