Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 14th, 2023
"Streaming services make everything suck."
South Park still hasn't completely recovered from the COVID-era issues. There still has not been a complete 10-episode season, and the slack is still being taken up by specials. Not sure if that's a good thing or not, but at least it's kept us in Cartman and the gang even as other shows have closed down. The longer form also gives Parker and Stone a chance to really let an idea play out. I think they have tended to run out of gas somewhere in the back half of the second part. When you think about it, you're really looking at four episodes in length, and Parker and Stone have a pretty spotty record when they've tried to run an idea for that long. The Streaming Wars Specials suffer from just that affliction, but that doesn't mean there's not a ton of clever South Park to be had here.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 7th, 2023
"It's called the Impossible Mission Force for a reason."
I imagine this is how it happened. It's January of 2019, and Tom Cruise has just popped into the bathroom to shave. He opens up that can of Barbasol just to make sure there isn't any dinosaur DNA left in the can, but as he takes off the cap, an authoritative voice begins to speak: “Good morning, Mr. Cruise. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to make a two part film of the Mission Impossible franchise. It won't be easy. That's why only the IMF team can be counted on to complete this task. There are agents out to stop you before you even get started. In China there is a virus code-name COVID, and this virus will spread to pandemic levels just as you're starting to get your production crew together. Elements within our own government will take measures to shut you down. Delays will cost an extra $100 million and necessitate crucial cast changes. They'll be serious injuries, and your release date will be July of 2021 ... I mean November of 2021 ... Would you believe May of 2022? ... Let's shoot for July 14, 2023. You will have to deal with nefarious crew members who will attempt to sabotage the project by standing closer than two meters apart. You may use over-the-top rants to attempt to intimidate these factions into compliance. Beware that said rants don't end up released by the press to the world. Somehow through all of these challenges you must create a Mission Impossible film that will be bigger and better than anything that came before. And remember, Tom, if your film fails to bring in a billion or more, the studio will disavow your team, and your movie will go straight to streaming ... or worse, get shelved as a tax write-off. Good luck, Tom. This message will self-destruct in 10 seconds.” There's a swoosh of fog, and Tom Cruise is sitting in his bathroom with no shaving cream to complete his original task. I figure that's how it must have gone.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 11th, 2023
"Jack, we have done our jobs and done them well. This fight was passed down to us and will continue with or without us. But we will always be better than the institutions we serve, and that is what matters when it matters most. There are no heroes in our profession. But occasionally there are good men. Men who act on what is right, not simply doing what they are told to do. I have not always lived my life with honor. But perhaps I have done enough to die with it. I hope the same for you."
Witness the birth of -- actually make that rebirth of --one of the most popular action heroes in literature. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan has been a character of many jobs and many faces over the years. Baldwin, Ford, Pine, and Affleck have all stepped into the role of the man who has been a soldier, an analyst, an operative, and a president. What might appear as a clear advantage for this Amazon Prime streaming television show can be just as much a liability. When you throw in the Tom Clancy novels, comic books, and fan fiction, there is a ton of Jack Ryan history that pretty much gives us a story arc from his humble beginnings to extraordinary exploits, and wearing the faces of a few good performers. It's a tall order for the series and perhaps an even taller order for actor John Krasinski, who has created a nice little horror franchise with wife Emily Blunt on the side. I don't really have the time or energy to watch streaming shows and films. There's always a backlog here of discs that need to be watched and reviewed, and I've created a rather comfortable viewing experience with my home theatre I call The Reel World. Our motto: Here there be monsters. So a couple of years ago I had my first experience with this series when Paramount sent the first season on Blu-ray. It was far more of a captivating and compelling series than I expected. Then the second season reached the Blu-ray home platform format, and while I certainly detected a sophomore slump there, there's still enough interesting drama to keep a fan engaged for another year. And what a year it has been. You can find out for yourself with Paramount's release of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Season Three on Blu-ray.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 19th, 2023
“Space … the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.”
Nearly 20 years after the original Star Trek left the network airwaves, Gene Roddenberry set out to discover whether he could catch lightning in a bottle once again. Some say he did an even better job with Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are times I tend to agree. The Star Trek sequel series had a lot more advantages from the moment it was conceived. Star Trek, a series that barely registered on the ratings during its three-year primetime voyage, became a huge sensation in syndication. By the time The Next Generation came on the scene, the original show had been syndicated in over 20 different languages all over the world. It had launched an animated series, and a fifth feature film was already in the early stages of consideration. So it isn’t quite fair to judge the success or quality of The Next Generation over the original series. One thing is inarguable. The second would never have existed if not for the first.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 18th, 2023
"It's always open season on princesses."
Roman Holiday is one of those classic films that had an extremely hard time getting made. Frank Capra had the rights to the story for several years. Most of what he had was based on a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, but that was extremely problematic, as Trumbo was one of the original Hollywood Ten and was blacklisted. They were a group of Hollywood people who refused to answer questions before the Joe McCarthy-led House Un-American Activities Committee that was pretty much rooting out communist with little regard to whether they were there or not. The committee ruined thousands of lives, and in 1947 the group had turned their attention toward Hollywood. Many played along by attending the hearings, and some even passed on names of others to avoid trouble for themselves. The Hollywood Ten stood up to the madness, and it got them blacklisted. They couldn't work for any studio in the country. That meant Trumbo could not be given credit for his screenplay, and it was Ian McLellan Hunter who acted as a beard for Trumbo and took the credit and sold the rights to Frank Capra, who planned on directing the film with Gary Cooper and Elizabeth Taylor in 1949. By then at least eight other writers took shots at revisions, and the piece truly suffered under the "too many cooks" situation. The budget appeared to skyrocket, and Capra ended up selling it to Paramount for $35,000. Paramount also spent too much money and time going through various rewrites. Finally the project ended up with William Wyler, who went back to pretty much the script that Trumbo wrote under Hunter's name, and in 1991, Trumbo's writing credit was deservedly restored.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on July 8th, 2023
For me it’s crazy to see that The Truman Show is turning 25 years old. I was graduating high school when this had come out, and television was just an entirely different landscape back then. In 1998 when this film came out, the only reality shows were pretty much COPS and then The Real World on MTV, I really don’t believe anyone could have expected just how big reality TV would become. The same year in competition for box office dollars was Ed TV. Oddly enough, Ed TV would be a little closer to the mark on what the reality TV landscape would look like, taking a regular guy and making him a star overnight because he was on TV. The Truman Show I always felt was the superior film in just about every aspect. In many ways it is what I had hoped reality TV could be, but unfortunately it seems what viewers wanted in their reality programming was something more scandalous and absurd, more akin to a Jerry Springer episode than someone living in an idyllic world that was out of an episode of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It To Beaver.
Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, an insurance salesman who lives in an idyllic white-picket-fence town and is just living his life. The only the problem is, the world he lives in is not real; it’s all manufactured, and he’s really living in the world’s largest television studio, and everyone around him is acting, all because the reality is Truman is unknowingly the star of the world’s biggest reality show. This was such a departure for Jim Carrey. At the time he was the biggest comedy star on the screen and was known for being over the top and playing larger-than-life characters, but the role of Truman required him to be toned and down and seem even boring. The result is perhaps his most enduring performance to date (or at least tied with his massively underappreciated film, The Majestic).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Jeremy Butler on June 27th, 2023
“How everyone thinks we can solve any problem with magic. There are limits! This isn’t some bedtime story; this is the real world!”
Well not quite, but still very sound advice. Which is what our heroes find out in this adaptation of the popular tabletop game. I’m becoming convinced that there is no such thing as a truly great cinematic adaptation for a tabletop or role-playing games. Think about it? Warcraft, Battleship, the previous Dungeons and Dragons adaptation. All of them failed to hit the mark. When you think about it, it’s not surprising. These games are incredibly nuisance and detailed, it would be more surprising if their entirely was actually able to be encompassed in a matter of hours. In the case of the latest Dungeons and Dragons adaptation, Honor Amongst Thieves, I think it is a case of good movie/decent adaptation. Based on the Forgotten Realms settings, the film follows Chris Pine as Edgin Darvis, a former Harper turned thief. While I do claim to be an expert in the world of D&D, Darvis does appear to have some basis in the game itself. Backing Pine up, we have Michelle Rodriguez as barbarian Holga, Hugh Grant as conman Forge Fitzwilliam, Justice Smith as a fledgling elf sorcerer Simon Aumar, Sophia Lillis as druid Doric, and Rege-Jean Page as paladin Xenk Yendar. I was expecting Page to have a bigger role as he was featured prominently in the film’s promotional materials, but I will go into further detail about that down the road.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 2nd, 2023
When I was a young boy I loved playing with my toys. We didn't have Transformers in those days, but we did have Major Matt Mason, plastic dinosaurs, Hot Wheels, and Creepy Crawlers Thingmaker sets. Yeah, in those days a toy could cause third-degree burns and no one really worried about getting sued. Kind of takes the fun out of being a kid today. You know who else, I bet, loved to play with his toys? Michael Bay. I bet he had the coolest toys in his neighborhood. He probably wasn't the best guy to be friends with, however. He didn't invite the kids over to play with his toys. He likely charged you a nickel to watch him play with them. It's many decades later, and Michael still has the coolest toys on the block. Only now you have to cough up twenty bucks if you want to watch him playing with them. Sadly, that is what the Transformers film franchise has been reduced to. We're all watching the rich kid playing with really cool toys.
I had a decided advantage going into the Michael Bay extravagance that is the Transformers film franchise. Unlike the majority of the film franchise’s target audience, I have had almost no exposure to the other incarnations of Transformers. I was already too old for the toys when Hasbro launched them, and so it was true for the cartoon and comic versions that quickly followed. Like everyone else I had a passing familiarity with the things, but nothing more. How is that an advantage, you might very well ask. Like any film franchise that dares to attempt material often considered sacred by its followers, Transformers had to play the game of expectations. I don’t carry any of the baggage that often keeps an audience from enjoying a film because they already think they know what it should look like. Armed with just the most basic of knowledge, I was able to approach them each freshly and enjoy each as a standalone entity. With that said, I had a pretty rockin’ time of it.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 12th, 2023
"We watched as the bombs shattered the second comet into a million pieces of ice and rock that burned harmlessly in our atmosphere and lit up the sky for an hour. Still, we were left with the devastation of the first. The waters reached as far inland as the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. It washed away farms and towns, forests and skyscrapers. But the waters receded. The wave hit Europe and Africa too. Millions were lost, and countless more left homeless. But the waters receded. Cities fall, but they are rebuilt. And heroes die, but they are remembered. We honor them with every brick we lay, with every field we sow, with every child we comfort, and then teach to rejoice in what we have been re-given. Our planet. Our home. So now, let us begin."
It all started when Steven King wanted to remake the sci-fi cult classic When Worlds Collide. These films must have been favorites to him, as he would indeed go on to remake George Pal's better known film War Of The Worlds and the Robert Wise classic The Day The Earth Stood Still. But it just never really happened for When Worlds Collide, at least not directly. At the same time Spielberg had optioned The Hammer Of God by Arthur C Clarke of 2001 fame. That book dealt with the deflection of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth using thermonuclear rockets. Somewhere in that time he decided to put the plots together, and the result was Deep Impact, with an "original" screenplay by Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin. By then Spielberg wasn't interesting in directing the feature, but acted as one of the film's producers with Mimi Leder in the director's chair. She was somewhat of a risk. Leder had never directed a big-budget film before. In fact, all but one of her previous credits were for television, directing shows like China Beach and L.A. Law. The risk paid off, and she did quite a good job with the film for the most part. There are certainly some pacing issues, but the film was well received as it raced to beat another film with pretty much the same plot to the box office. That other film was Bruce Willis's Armageddon, and Deep Impact beat it by two months.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 25th, 2023
"Space ... the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before."
From 1978 through 2002, 10 Star Trek films were released at the box office. The franchise almost ended with the first, but it was followed up by what I consider the best of the 10. The films are a collection of ups and downs, but you know you want the complete collection up there on your shelf. You already have the first six, starring the original crew. Now your wait for completion is over. The Next Generation films are out from Paramount Home Entertainment, and here they are ...
