Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 5th, 2007
The fat lady has sung, taken her bows and waddled off to the after-party. Gilmore Girls, a show loved by many — and abhorred by some — was canceled in May, leaving fans without a true series finale. Here, in this DVD set, lie the final episodes, created without input from series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, who left the show after season six.
This is not a fitting end for our Gilmore Girls, but unless a rumored movie becomes reality, it's all we're going to get. So if you're looking for closure, this ain't the place.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2007
Avast ye mates, Jack’s back, and did ye ever doubt the return of Cap’n Jack Sparrow? Johnny Depp once again transforms himself like no other actor in
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 3rd, 2007
A friend that I work with said that if Hollywood ever ran out of creative and original ideas, and that if a studio managed to make a sequel about pirate zombies that lasted three hours long, it would clean up at the box office. But the fact of the matter is that if we survived a nuclear winter, we would be well prepared about what to do when zombies took over the land, because of the prep we had from guys like George Romero. So even though Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later might have presumably sealed the deal when it came to this particular interpretation, someone decided to dredge it up for whatever reason.
The sequel, appropriately titled 28 Weeks Later was written by several Spaniards, including Enrique Lavigne (Sex and Lucia), who also produced the film, and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intact), who directed. After the viral epidemic and the subsequent pronouncement that “all was well” in England, the U.S. led NATO troops helped to clean and repopulate the London area. That is slightly down the line of the film’s opening, which has Don (Robert Carlyle, The Full Monty) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack, Braveheart) separated when some of the infected invade their countryside cottage, and he manages to get away. Flash forward to the period that shares the film’s title, and Don is a key part of the repopulation effort when his children come back to England. But you know how sequels go, through divine effort or circumstance, London becomes infected again and everything goes straight to hell.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 2nd, 2007
What we have here is an average film based on what I'm told is a great little bestseller, The Nanny Diaries. There's a lot of talent at work in this romantic dramedy, with stars like Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation), Laura Linney (Kinsey) and Paul Giamatti (Sideways), and the directing talents of husband-and-wife team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (American Splendor), so I expected more.
But are there any disappointments lurking on this widescreen DVD? Read on to find out.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 1st, 2007
Who says horror can’t be the cinema of personal expression? Director Tim Sullivan follows up his comic horror 2001 Maniacs with this heartfelt ghost story. Raviv Ullman plays David, a teenager whose depression and death-fixation following the demise of his older brother prompts his desperate parents to ship him off to an “Attitude Adjustment Camp.” Basically a brutal cross between boot camp and prison, this is a private institution (inspired by actual places) designed to transform any insipient Columbine-copycats. Once there, David must contend not only with the sadistic Captain Kennedy (Diamond Dallas Page) who runs the place, but also with visions of a ghost who clearly wants a buried truth revealed.
There’s more than a touch of The Devil’s Backbone here, what with the ghost-story-in-an-institution premise and the emphatic socio-political overtones. Sullivan isn’t quite Guillermo Del Toro yet – the spookiness is workmanlike but hardly heart-pounding, and many of the adult performances are pitched far too broadly – but there is a seriousness of purpose here that is admirable, a refreshing (and justified) anger, and the teen members of the cast are believably natural.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 30th, 2007
I love some Adult Swim. There are some real standouts shown that have fun plots, edgy animation, and a whole lot of outlandish humor. Venture Bros, Robot Chicken and Aqua Teen Hunger Force immediately come to mind. Heck, I've even gave smaller shows like The Boondocks and Metalocalypse a try and liked them on some level. So needless to say, I was interested when I received Squidbillies Volume 1. Twenty episodes staring a Georgia-based hick squid family. How bad could it be?
The story goes something like this. Early Cuyler (voiced by Stuart Daniel Baker) is a backwoods Georgia hick squid (yes, calamari) that has sex with a rather overweight white girl named Krystal. In the process, he robbed a liquor store for cassettes and booze and was caught by the Sheriff. Convicted for 15 years of hard labor, he had no idea that he had got Krystal pregnant. Krystal gave birth to Rusty, a little green squid. Krystal leaves him on Lil's (Early's sister) doorstep where the squid spends the next 15 years. At that point, Rusty finds his dad working on the chain gang and the Sheriff takes pity on the two. He decides to release Early which is where this story really begins. The mis-adventures of Early bringing up his illegitimate child Rusty serve as fodder for the rest of the twenty episodes.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 28th, 2007
Have you ever watched a recent Robin Williams film and yearned for the days when the actor wasn’t so full of himself and stealing every scene he was in? Well, you’re out of luck, because there was never such a time for Williams; however, you can journey to a time when at least he was hungry and wasn’t so over the top. OK. Even in the days of Mork and Mindy Williams was never capable of reining himself in. Still, I thought I would look back on these episodes with that warm nostalgic feeling I tend to get and just remember the good times. And yes, there were good times. But the more I watched this third year of Mork and Mindy I was becoming all too aware that in 35 years nothing has changed except that the routine has gotten old. Watching Williams prance around with his silly voices and wide eyed faces might have been fresh in the 1970’s, but honestly, haven’t we all had just a little too much of it by now? A television film about the show didn’t present either of the stars in a very positive light, and perhaps it is that image that has tainted the show for me. Whatever the reason, I just didn’t find this stuff nearly as funny as I did 30 plus years ago. Somebody’s matured, and it wasn’t Robin Williams.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 26th, 2007
In 1988 the original Land Before Time animated feature enjoyed moderate success at the box office. This is the 12th direct to video sequel in what Universal describes as a billion dollar franchise. A lot has changed since the original film. None of the voice actors from the feature remain. The animation is really Saturday morning cartoon quality and has none of the detail work that Don Bluth gave to the first film. It seems these little gems have been coming out about once a year since around 1994.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 26th, 2007
Remember Aquaman? You know, that guy who lived underwater and fought people who would dump hazardous waste in the ocean or people with big helmets named the Black Manta. No, not Charlie the Tuna. Let's try this description. He's King of Atlantis and has giant muscles and was a very popular super hero. Namor, the Sub-Mariner? *sigh* He's the one who sat behind the desk feeding the Justice League information cause simply he had nothing else better to do. Oh Aquaman, quite right. Well he had his own cartoon show in the late 60's that ran for a couple of years with the Superman/Aquaman hour of Adventure (which incidentally only ran half an hour). It featured Aquaman, Aqualad, and a vast array of exciting characters like Tusky the Walrus. I'm not making this up.
Ever sit in a cartoon show and wonder why you keep having a sense of deja vu? The series wasn't so bad, it was quirky and sported the classic 60's superhero feel. The good guys are just spending another day at the office which happens to be the ocean and the evil guys come and mess it up. Biff, bang, boom the bad guys are defeated and the world is good again. But it suffers heavily from using the same frame of animation over and over again. It's no Batfink but it's not very far off. Another thing that Aquaman did was borrow heavily from Batman, the live action show. If I hear "Holy Haddock" one more time or watch as Aqualad act as a complete copy of Robin complete with rather homo-erotic tendencies, I think I might scream. Outside of that, the stories while simple aren't so bad and it is one of those things that is fun; just in small doses.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 24th, 2007
In the vein of Underworld, here is another tale of warring supernatural societies. In this case, both sides are werewolves (the “skinwalkers” of the title). The good guys seek to protect a 13-year-old boy who represents a cure for lycanthropy. The bad guys, who like turning into monsters, want to kill him to protect themselves. The weapons of choice in this battle? Fangs, you guess. Nuh-uh. Guns.
Yep, also in the vein of Underworld, gunplay is much more popular than monster mashes, but this effort makes its inspiration look like a masterpiece. The big showpiece gun battle (anatomized at length in one of the features) is a spectacular example of unintentional camp, whose highlight is the Sergio Leone-style drawdown between chief nasty Jason Behr and the boy’s grandmother. You read that right. In a stunning bit of blazing originality, the boy is also asthmatic. Sigh. Add in painfully expository dialogue and an almost total absence of transformed werewolves (who, when they do show up, are in no way worth the wait), and what you have here is a waste of time, which, fortunately, only robs you of just under 90 minutes, and not the 110 threatened on the case.
