2.35:1 Widescreen

Twister (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 2nd, 2008

You probably remember where you were when you saw the trailer for Twister. Hot off the heels of Forrest Gump, which was a nice story with some pretty cool computer effects at the time, Twister simply took the effects to a whole other level. Barns were torn apart, cars were tossed into the air, and that one shot, where the car is driving as a tractor is thrown and slammed into the ground, and the tire from the tractor hurdles through the car window. You wanted to go see that film, whatever the cost might be.

National Treasure 2 – Book of Secrets (Two-Disc Collector’s Edition)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 21st, 2008

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The first National Treasure film took us on a historical journey through the locations that were the birthplaces of The United States. There might not have been a ton of historical accuracy, but there were enough things right that it was an entertaining adventure. For the sequel, the entire canvas was greatly expanded. While we’re once again deep in some arcane American history, the locations span the globe.
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Indiana Jones – The Adventure Collection

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 13th, 2008

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Just in time for the release of one of the most eagerly awaited films in years comes a new box set of the Indiana Jones Adventures. The problem is that these transfers are not upgrades so, aside from squeezing out a few extra bucks, what’s the point? I’m sure that The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull will add hundreds of millions to the Paramount coffers, so this just looks like greed to me.
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Things We Lost in the Fire

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 2nd, 2008

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It’s hard to peg a movie like Things We Lost in the Fire. While people want to slam it and say that it’s not an uplifting movie, I think that upon further review, they might want to examine those behind it, and see that it’s another solid effort from them.

Legend of the Black Scorpion (The Banquet)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on May 1st, 2008

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Retelling of classic tales has been a fodder for movie scripts for years. Take something that has worked for ages, spin it just so and you got a movie that might be gold. They have been doing this with Romeo & Juliet for years. The results can be great or sometimes they are one step of having the creator roll around in his grave with pain and anguish. Take Hamlet for example, the classic Shakespearian tale about a prince who takes revenge on his uncle Claudius who has murdered his father the King and taken the throne and the king’s wife too. It has treachery, corruption and a little good ole fashioned incest to wet the palette. Now take that piece of journalistic tragedy and set it after the fall of the Tang Dynasty in China. Insert popular Asian actors like Ziyi Zhang & Daniel Wu and you might just have something.

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Automaton Transfusion

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 25th, 2008

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A government project goes badly awry, as all government projects do, and, just as inevitably, a plague of zombies is loosed upon the local community. A group of high school students are the only ones able to mount any kind of defense against the flesh-eating ghouls. Sounds reasonable to me.
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Fatal Contact

Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on April 18th, 2008

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As we know by now, Dragon Dynasty is the Criterion of Kung Fu movies. They take any Kung Fu movie, clean up the audio and video where needed and provide a slew of extras for us to enjoy. From featurettes to commentaries with expert Bey Logan, it always provided the Hong Kong kung fu fans with a presentation second to none. However, as with Criterion classics, the movie isn’t always second to none.

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Awake

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 14th, 2008

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Anesthetic Awareness is a phenomenon where a surgical patient is completely aware and able to feel pain while under anesthesia. It occurs in about 5 out of every 1000 patients, with about half of those 5 aware enough to feel excruciating pain. Apparently the condition is not readily noticeable by the surgical team and is only discovered through recounts of the experience after the procedure. Patients are often able to tell doctors details of conversations they had while the patient was supposed to be completely out of it.
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There Will Be Blood (Special Collector’s Edition)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 9th, 2008

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He might not have been “shootin’ at some food” but for Daniel Plainville it’s all about that “bubblin’ crude. Oil that is. Black Gold. Texas Tea”. Our story begins in 1898 before the world would really become so completely addicted to oil. Plainville is a miner looking for silver when an accident that nearly kills him leads to an even more valuable discovery. The film actually begins quite slowly, which doesn’t exactly bode well for a film over two and a half hours long. It will be 10 minutes and 4 years in film time before we witness the significance of Plainville’s chance discovery.
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No Country For Old Men

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on April 3rd, 2008

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So what did we all learn with the Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest opus, an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country For Old Men? Well, suffice to say, along with the creative resurgence of the brothers, we get a film that’s part modern-day Western, part action, part comedy and even perhaps part-horror, but in the adoration and adulation, to want to pin the film down as something is to forget that above all else, the film is a tale about changing times, told by someone who’s seen better days and is nostalgic for them. It’s that story that seems to be ignored to a certain degree by people, which oddly enough is ironic considering the title of the film.

Love Lies Bleeding

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 2nd, 2008

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In 1973 Elton John had his best selling album to that time in the double release Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. From that album came one of the most radio-played non-singles of all time, Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding. What does any of this have to do with the Christian Slater direct to video film? Nothing. It has about as much to do with the film as the title itself does.
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The Kite Runner

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 27th, 2008

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The Kite Runner is one of those films that is extremely hard to pin down. On the surface it’s a moving story about friendship and redemption, but I have to wonder if that is really the collection of themes intended by either the original novel’s writer Khaled Hosseini or the film’s director, Marc Foster. The story begins with two young Afghan children who appear to be friends, but they are from different worlds.
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Undead or Alive

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 21st, 2008

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A tough-as-nails cowboy (James Denton) unwillingly hooks up with a naive greenhorn (Chris Kattan) when they have a run-in with a bent sheriff. They may think they have some problems now, but things are much worse than they think, as the town and the surrounding countryside are in the initial stages of a zombie plague.
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Chaos

Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on March 13th, 2008

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Most people like a good heavy dose of action. Guns a blazing, explosions bursting and people’s dead bodies flying in each and every direction. But most people also want something a little more. Perhaps a little suspense or a little who dun it. Or perhaps they are looking for their favorite actor to make a dramatic on-screen performance that will leave them breathless at the door. This lonely review writer loves action but a good dose of story and a well done gotcha at the end means more than the next building that gets blown up. Chaos would prove to have everything I wanted from an action drama and make me believe that there is at least one semi-original story left in Hollywood today.
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Rendition

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 9th, 2008

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On paper, Rendition looked good. Damn good. It had Reese Witherspoon, hot off her best actress win as June Carter in Walk the Line. It had “it boy” Jake Gyllenhaal from Brokeback Mountain and Zodiac. It also had stalwarts in Alan Arkin and Meryl Streep rounding out the cast. It was directed by acclaimed Tsotsi director Gavin Hood. And it was about post 9/11 hot-button issues such as torture and imprisonment without due process.
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The Apartment

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 8th, 2008

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Jack Lemmon is a rather meek insurance company employee who is slowly working his way up the corporate ladder by lending his apartment to married executives looking for a place to take their girlfriends. Life is rather inconvenient, as he is locked out of his home at all hours, but things become even more complicated when the big boss (Fred McMurray) takes an interest. The good news is that Lemmon gets another promotion. The bad news is that McMurray’s affair is with Shirley MacLaine, the elevator girl for whom Lemmon is carrying a torch.
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Patch Adams (HD DVD)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 28th, 2008

I’m going to be honest with you, I can’t stand the stand up comedy of Robin Williams. Growing up, I used to like it and thought it was pretty hilarious, but two things have changed since then. First off, my voice changed and I grew hair in strange places, but secondly, Williams stopped doing cocaine, which as any artist will tell you, seems to neuter them creatively (Eddie Van Halen, I’m looking at you). But hey, at least in his later years he seems to have mellowed out and Patch Adams seems to be a progression of that.

Beowulf (Unrated Director’s Cut)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 28th, 2008

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Beowulf is one of the oldest written stories known. The story began as a heroic tale passed from generation to generation only by word of mouth. Naturally there’s no way to know how much the story changed during those years of oral tradition. The author of the piece is unknown, and it is likely several persons contributed to the work. By the 8^th Century an epic poem was written that forms the story as it is remembered today.
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Face/Off (HD DVD)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 27th, 2008

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I am a huge John Woo fan, especially his earlier classics like Hard Boiled. I’ll admit it’s been several years since I last seen Face/Off, but I don’t have a reason why, as I remember really liking this movie then. At either rate now I have a copy of the movie to call my own, and a special two disc release at that. Let’s just hope that it is what I remember, but as a big fan of Nick Cage I don’t think I’ll be let down.

In order to catch him, he must become him. I couldn’t put it any better myself, Face/Off tells quite the eccentric story of revenge, devotion, and of course crime.
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Pride and Prejudice (HD DVD)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 25th, 2008

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Written by Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice has been made into a film several times, with varying results. The novel itself is a classic, written by one of the most pioneering woman in literature history. This 2005 film version stars Keira Knightley (Atonement) as Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bennett, one in a family of five sisters, living in Hartfordshire, a small English country town. Lizzie is the second-oldest sister and should already be married, according to her overbearing mother (Brenda Blethyn, Beyond the Sea). However, much like Jane Austen herself, Lizzie wants to marry for love, and not just to please her parents (although her father (Donald Sutherland, JFK) just wants her to be happy). To add to her parents concern, once they die, the girls will have nowhere to live, as back in those days, property and money passed only to males, and in their case it goes to the girls’ cousin, Mr. Collins (Tom Hollander, A Good Year).

Jake’s Booty Call

Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on February 11th, 2008

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The web has a way of delivering some of the most interesting material. Flash animation in particular can produce some very funny shorts. Furthermore, these shorts are unedited and can be downloaded by millions of people on a whim. These viral episodes can be played over and over again, with little care to the quality or the content. But what happens when they take that idea and decide to make into a feature length film? In this case, proof that people will download anything.
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Sunshine (2007)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 10th, 2008

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It’ll be interesting when man travels past the moon to far away places in outer space. The science of it will be reason enough for the rest of the world’s population to pay attention, but I want to find out, more than anything, if every deep space crew in real life runs into the same problems that they do in the movies.

In Sunshine, a movie by director Danny Boyle, I thought that the deep space crew in the film would be relatively free of space movie cliches. This just didn’t seem like one of those movies. But I’ll be damned if at the end of the movie Cillian Murphy wasn’t racing panicked through the corridor of his space ship, determined to detonate a nuclear bomb before a clock reached zero.
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The Brave One (2007)

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 8th, 2008

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Ever find yourself shuffling around your local video store, eyes glazed over at all of typical genre fare studios churn out year after year, longing for something different? You could head over to the independent/festival section for relief, but it might mean straying farther from your usual tastes than you’d like. Enter The Brave One, an intelligent thriller that takes the usual revenge tale and rearranges its DNA. It offers the unusual perspective of director Neil Jordan (The Good Thief) and Jodie Foster’s finest performance since The Silence of the Lambs.

In the Valley of Elah

Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 6th, 2008

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In the Valley of Elah is the second film I’ve seen recently that addresses the condition of soldiers returning from the Iraq war. Unlike Home of the Brave, however, Elah is actually a strong film with impressive performances and a story that hooks you and holds on to the end. It’s a Paul Haggis production – the two-time Oscar winner wrote, directed and produced the film – so Elah has some serious cred right off the bat, thanks to the success of other Haggis projects. Maybe you’ve heard of Crash, best picture winner of 2004, Million Dollar Baby or Letters From Iwo Jima?

Those credits aside, In the Valley of Elah’s best feature is a masterful performance by Tommy Lee Jones (No Country for Old Men), who’s up for a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of an old-school army veteran searching for his son.

An Affair to Remember (50th Anniversary Edition)

Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 29th, 2008

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Fox re-releases this beloved weepie in a new edition with a number of new extras. Beyond those additions, this version is identical to the one reviewed here previously. Therefore, my deathless prose once again: “On a luxury ocean liner, playboy Cary Grant meets singer Deborah Kerr. Each is involved with someone else, but they fall deeply in love with each other. Upon arriving in New York, they decide to part and, if all goes well, reunite in six months at the top of the Empire State Building, by which time their lives should be in order. If you’ve seen Sleepless in Seattle, you know what happens next. Though this is one the most celebrated weepies ever, I found it curiously uninvolving.
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