Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on December 12th, 2010
Bryce and Juli first meet in the second grade. Juli is convinced that Bryce is walking around with her first kiss, while Bryce is not returning any sense of being similarly infatuated with Juli. As the years pass by, Bryce manages to keep her at bay, until things “flip” (as it were) and it is Juli who may be veering away from Bryce.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 10th, 2010
A suave Tom Cruise and a flustered Cameron Diaz (wow, what a stretch for both actors) bump into each other at Wichita airport, and a few minutes later do so again. Diaz thinks she might be on to something with the charming hunk, but she is more accurately into something, and in far out of her depth, as the plain flight turns into a gun battle and forced landing. Before she knows it, she doesn’t know where to turn and whom to trust: the various menacing government officials (headed up by a sinister Peter Sarsgaard), or the cheery but possibly psychotic rogue Cruise. There will be many a narrow escape and an international location visited before she knows the answer.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 9th, 2010
“The war between sorcerers was fought in the shadows of history, and the fate of mankind rested with the just and powerful Merlin. He taught his secrets to three trusted apprentices, Balthazar, Veronica and Horvath. He should have trusted only two.”
It was one of the most memorable Walt Disney moments in the long history of animation. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment in Fantasia would become the most recognizable piece of the film.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 9th, 2010
“Nobody thinks of it from the whale’s point of you.”
I think this is the very first film I’ve ever seen that was made in Iceland. Of course, Iceland isn’t one of those movie-making meccas known throughout the world for their movie magic. The truth is, there haven’t been too many films set in Iceland and even fewer shot on location there. Now that Harpoon has come along, I don’t expect that is going to change any time soon.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 8th, 2010
And the George Lucas Award for the filmmaker who has mined the most out of his movie this year….the envelope please. It’s James Cameron for releasing not one, not two, not three, but four different versions of Avatar in less than a year. But I’ll have to give him a pass, just this once. This 3-disc collection offers enough goodies that it will tempt you to trade in your still-new version for this complete collection. Better yet … put it at the top of your Christmas list. The film comes in three versions. One with 8 minutes added. Another with 16. What’s the point of having the new version if not to see the most extensive edit?
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 8th, 2010
I grew up on the Peanuts creations of Charles M. Schulz. Most of us have, in some way or another. His newspaper comic strip is one of the longest running and most successful strips of all time. The work has been translated into every language currently spoken on the planet. The images of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and the rest of the Peanuts gang have appeared on just about any kind of product imaginable. Our pop culture contains too many references to the strip to mention briefly. For me, it was the television specials starting in the mid 1960’s that brought the gang into my life. The classics are running annually, still after nearly 50 years.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 8th, 2010
“September 19th. Dear Diary, as I sit here thinking about picking up the pieces of what used to be my life, I realized something. Every room in this house holds a painful memory for me. Even though he’s suffering, something somewhere in me wants him to suffer more. A few months and a divorce can take you through just as many emotions as 18 years in a marriage. And I’m starting to feel all of them at once. But the one that is clear is rage. Signed, a Mad Black Woman.”
Lately I’ve had an opportunity to watch a ton of Madea on Blu-ray.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 3rd, 2010
Truth is I don’t do very well with Christmas movies. Most of them reek of bad acting and a whole mess of clichés. One of my least favorite movies of all time is A Christmas Story, a masterpiece of absolutely awful movie making. So, needless to say when I received Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, I wasn’t exactly abundant with anticipation. Let’s just hope that we don’t want to shoot our eye out over it or anything.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 2nd, 2010
“How do you do? My name is Deems Taylor, and it’s my very pleasant duty to welcome you here on behalf of Walt Disney, Leopold Stokowski, and all the other artists and musicians whose combined talents went into the creation of this new form of entertainment, Fantasia. What you’re going to see are the designs and pictures and stories that music inspired in the minds and imaginations of a group of artists. In other words, these are not going to be the interpretations of trained musicians, which I think is all to the good.”
Just three years after Walt Disney introduced the world to the animated feature in 1937, Uncle Walt was already experimenting with the idea.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 2nd, 2010
“Well when you gettin’ “got” and somebody done “got” you and you go “get” them, when you get ’em everybody’s gon’ get got.”
When Tyler Perry started writing his small plays, he probably never had a clue just how far it might all go from there. The plays had a solid audience, but there was always concern that the appeal would be too narrow. That didn’t stop Perry from putting together a few relatively low-budget films located in his adopted film hometown of Atlanta. For the most part the studio got pretty much what it expected.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 1st, 2010
Most of the huge names of Broadway are gone. Certainly there are young talents that have created some memorable shows. Perhaps one day they will build up the mountain of classics that we received from the likes of Rodgers, Hammerstein, Bernstein, and others. There are even a couple of writers out there that have amassed that kind of a career. Andrew Lloyd Weber absolutely comes to mind as a fine example. But Stephen Sondheim is the last of a dying breed.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 1st, 2010
The axiom in Hollywood these days is that more is better. Every year we get inundated with blockbuster films sporting $200 million budgets, groundbreaking f/x, epic journeys and casts of thousands. Enter first-time director J. Blakeson and his intimate and quite claustrophobic thriller, The Disappearance Of Alice Creed. Right from the start we know that we’re in for something completely different. There are no opening credits of any kind. There isn’t even a title screen.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 1st, 2010
Most people remember the Bee Gees from their disco days and Saturday Night Fever. They sold a lot of records and achieved more fame than at any time in their careers. But the Brothers Gibb had been performing since the 1950’s as children. They would headline automobile races and appear on local radio and television shows. They would quickly gain attention for their harmonies and eventually for their own songs. By 1967 they had begun to gain international attention, appearing on the national rock-and-roll shows. The brothers would become known then for their power ballads and love songs.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 30th, 2010
Tyler Perry burst on the scene in 2005 with Diary of a Mad Black Woman. It was one of the worst-reviewed movies of the year, but when it raked in over $50 million dollars at the box office, Tyler Perry silenced critics and became a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood. Before his movie-making career, Perry was already a huge success in the African-American community, having written several Christian and family-oriented plays upon which many of his movies are based.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 30th, 2010
Tyler Perry once again dons multiple costumes to incarnate several characters, most prominently Madea, the no-nonsense but mischievous matriarch of a very fractious family. She is ordered by the court to take in a runaway as a foster child, and that project of reclamation joins that of helping out her nieces. They have a mother from hell. One sister is struggling to learn how to love again, while the other is being forced into marriage with the hideously abusive Blair Underwood.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 29th, 2010
My wife is known as a very big Madea fan. She’s watched most of the Madea films and often quotes lines at random. So, naturally when I saw I was receiving a Tyler Perry film, I thought I might be able to slide the movie into my wife’s direction. However, Tyler is trying to expand his repertoire into something more than a one-trick pony and I kinda got left holding the bag (or the disc in this case). This should be quite the adventure staring Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard, let us begin.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 27th, 2010
As one could expect, I read a lot of books when I was a kid. I stuck with the classics from Ronald Dahl, Tolkien, and even Charles Dickens . But among all of the male authors in this boy’s life, I also read a few female ones too. One stands out in particular, Beverly Cleary. From Henry Huggins to Runaway Ralph and the beloved Dear Mr. Henshaw , I clearly enjoyed her work. But I must confess, I even read the beloved Ramona books, so naturally I was delighted to see Ramona and Beezus on my doorstep.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 24th, 2010
“Man, we’ll die with you. Just don’t ask us to do it twice.”
Remember the old days of the action movie? Those films where someone like Stallone or Schwarzenegger would run around and take out armies of bad guys while barely breaking a sweat. You know the kind of movie I’m talking about. The ones where the hero goes up against a hail of bullets and explosions and manages to pick off the bad guys without catching a single slug himself.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 24th, 2010
When Peter Gabriel left the band Genesis to pursue his own solo career, it was the break of a lifetime for the band’s drummer, Phil Collins. He took over the front-man duties with style, and before long Genesis was enjoying the most commercial success of their lives. Collins provided the smooth, easy-to-listen-to voice that Gabriel really never had. The tunes were instantly more recognizable and stuck with you for a long time. Of course, that meant that Collins would go out and work on that solo career as well
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 23rd, 2010
“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead — your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”
Image follows up its great Blu-ray release of season 1 with a second season that continues to impress. You are getting the best image possible with some of the most comprehensive bonus features you’re apt to find with any classic television series.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by BABY on November 23rd, 2010
“Sometimes you just gotta let a dog do his thing.”
Hey everybody. Baby back again to bring you yet another dog movie from a dog’s point of view, which is the floor, in case anybody out there really wants to know. You see, Gino won’t let me on the furniture in the theater. He says that just because the seats look like chew toys, and smell like chew toys, doesn’t mean they actually are chew toys. I mean, really, people. You wanna talk about your special effects,
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 23rd, 2010
“Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings. What if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? And if so, what if there were clues left behind, something hiding in plain sight? What if we could find that evidence?”
Ever since Eric von Daniken released his speculative book and its subsequent 1970 film Chariots of the Gods, there has been an entire field of study created around something commonly called Ancient Astronaut Theory.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 22nd, 2010
Imagine a world where Winston Churchill battles deadly machines from space intent on dominating the universe, a place where Santa is a deadly menace, and a rather eccentric fellow travels about in a police call box with a rather deceptively spacious interior. To Dr. Who fans of all ages, this is all very familiar territory. I fell in love with Dr. Who as played by Tom Baker from 1974 – 1981. He was the fourth actor to portray the Doctor and arguably the most popular. With a pocket full of jelly babies and a trusty sonic screwdriver, the Doctor rather muddled his way about with a massive wool scarf around his neck,
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 22nd, 2010
In 1887, readers of the popular periodical Beeton’s Christmas Annual were to receive quite a special treat. There wasn’t much fanfare or hype to the event. Inside the pages of the magazine was a story called A Study In Scarlet. It was a detective story, perhaps like many published before, except for the detective himself, a certain Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Together with his faithful companion and chronicler Dr. Watson, Holmes would win the hearts of those holiday readers.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 22nd, 2010
Some of you might know that even though I couldn’t fight my way through a sturdy paper bag, I am an avid fan of all types of martial arts and combat sports. There is something about the grittiness of two men pounding each other into submission that keeps me riveted to my seat. My curiosity was peaked when I saw a copy of Human Weapon, Season One appear on my doorstep. Hopefully this History Channel show would help me appreciate martial art combat that much more.
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