Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 27th, 2004
Synopsis
Jane (Renee Stahl) drifts through contemporary LA. She wants to be a writer, but is reluctantto share her uncompleted work in her writing class. She makes a living typing up term papers.She has a model boyfriend, who is off doing a shoot in Italy and misses her terribly, but she isn’tsure what she feels about him (if anything at all). Then there’s the memory of a car crash thattorments her. Enter an young artist, with whom she begins an affair...
This is very much a...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 27th, 2004
Synopsis
A young married couple (Nathan Fillion and Chandra West) move to a cabin in thewilderness. This is not a happy getaway. They have lost their daughter, they are broke, theirmarriage is hanging by a thread, and the wife is suicidal. As if they didn’t have enough on theirhands, Fillion comes across a bad scene in the woods: the sheriff about to murder a youngwoman with a rock. Fillion kills the sheriff, rescues the woman, and then the problems reallybegin as nothing is what it...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 26th, 2004
For years different TV shows and movies have speculated not as too whether there is life on other planets but, what are they doing on earth. Some shows like the X-files play out that the powers that be have sold us down the river to ensure their survival with a hostile alien race, or like in ID-4 and the Alien series are here to kill everyone and use the planet for their own will.
Director Steven Spielberg has looked at aliens and their involvement with the human race in a number of his films and with the...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 21st, 2004
Synopsis
David Hemmings is a jaded photographer plying his trade in Swinging Sixties’ London. Outtaking pictures in a park, he shoots a series of pictures of a couple apparently having anargument. The woman in the pictures (Vanessa Redgrave) subsequently turns up at Hemmings’studio, wanting the pictures back. Even more mysterious is a shot Hemmings took sometimelater, after the argument. Is there a body in the picture? The more he blows up the picture,seeking the answer, the grainie...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 18th, 2004
MTV is getting used to productions about provocative love affairs. Just look at Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson at this year’s MTV produced Super Bowl. So in their production of a modern updating of Emily Bronte’s novel “Wuthering Heights”, MTV throws in everything but the nipple.
“Wuthering Heights” is a benchmark of Gothic Romantic literature. It tells the tale of a doomed and frenzied love between the two protagonists, Heathcliff and Cathy. “Wuthering Heights” has been adapted for film and tel...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 16th, 2004
I generally don’t care for those hour long Teen Sci-Fi Romantic Dramas that are so prevalent on the WB. They all just seem a little too “I’m 18, and I’m mad at my parents” for my tastes. While there’s no doubt that Roswell certainly has a measure of that teen angst, there is just enough X Files included, too. Most of the melodrama in this show is tied in with the sci-fi aspects of the story, which makes the show not only watchable, but a bit of a guilty pleasure.
The basic premise of this show...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 15th, 2004
Synopsis
Years ago, a tormented teen at Rogers High School committed suicide after stabbing a younggirl to death, or so the story goes. In the present, the jocks on the football team are slipping intocomas after having visions of the ghost of the teen. The put-upon goths and geeks at the schoolare summoning the ghost of Abel Frye and cursing the bullies. Or so it seems. Called in toinvestigate is the Veritas Team, a mom-and-pop-and-two-teenagers outfit whose job is toinvestigate pos...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 1st, 2004
Synopsis
Extremely small-time con Greg Kinnear is caught and sentenced to a year of employment,which turns out to be in the Dead Letter Office of the post office. Opening a letter addressed toGod, Kinnear accidentally winds up answering the letter-writer’s prayers, thus setting off a chainof events that see his reformation and many people helping other people.
The flick is supposed to be some kind of heart-warming comedy of the human spirit, but it’sreally just flat and irri...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 31st, 2004
Synopsis
Once Upon a Time in Mexico (OUTM) is the third film in the conceptual trilogy of El Mariachi, Desperado, and OUTM. Its not a direct sequel, but you’ll recognize a lot of characters and imagery from the prior movies.
Plot: Without posting any spoilers, this is the story of CIA agent “Sands” (Depp) attempting to manipulate a military coup planned by a Mexican drug lord (Dafoe). El Mariachi (Banderas) gets caught up in the middle of after being hired by Sands, but as it turns out he’s...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 30th, 2004
Timothy Olyphant, in the movie Go, refers to the comic strip The Family Circus in this manner: “it’s always there, in the lower right hand corner, just waiting to suck.” This is one of my all-time favorite movie quotes, and it applies quite nicely when discussing Marci X. Completed in 2000, this is the film that the studio put on the shelf, all the while knowing that eventually they would have to do something with it, because there it was, looming in the corner, waiting to suck.
Finally...
