Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 15th, 2006
Tommy Lee Jones makes his directorial debut with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a new take on the western genre. Set in modern times, this is a unique revenge picture with a more positive message than most. Jones also stars as Pete Perkins, an old cowboy, who embodies all the classic western ideals. Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo) is his Spanish-speaking friend and ranch hand, who falls victim to an unfortunate shooting at the barrel of trigger-happy border patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper). After a...failed attempt at cover-up, spearheaded by crooked police officer Belmont - a masterful portrayal by country music star Dwight Yoakam - Estrada's body finds itself in Perkins' possession, and a journey for a proper burial begins. But Perkins isn't going back to Mexico alone. He kidnaps Norton and forces the man into the role of Estrada. Jones does a great job of walking that line between insanity and friendship, nowhere more apparent than the scene, where he proudly boasts of his triumph to slow his old friend's decomposition. (I'll never look at antifreeze the same way again.)
Shot from Guillermo Arriaga's literary script, Jones' interpretation of time and place is stunning. The film begins in a strange place and jumps around with great frequency. Pete and Estrada's relationship contains not a word of English. One minute, the title character is alive. The next, he's dead. Then, he's alive again. It would have been too easy for the film to crumble under its own structural weight, if not for Jones' seamless direction, which keeps the film's nomadic tendencies surprisingly clear. By excluding English (and subtitles) from the scenes with Pete and Estrada, the audience realizes just how special the young immigrant was to Perkins. Their relationship was something exclusive, and it seems as if it was the closest Pete ever came to loving another human being. Unfortunately, there will probably be a few snickers if I don't clarify; but for the record, it's a non-sexual love. It's friendship, plain and simple. And the fact the audience doesn't even get to invade that bond tells all the more what Estrada meant to Perkins.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 10th, 2006
On paper, The Ringer must sound like the most un-PC movie in the history of cinema. After all, Johnny Knoxville from MTV’s Jackass plays a character in need of some cash, so he pretends to be “Jeffy” -- a mentally challenged athlete -- in order to fix the Special Olympics.
However, this movie is produced by the Farrelly Brothers, and as they have done in their past films (There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal), the Farrellys treat mentally and physically challenged people with resp...ct -- casting them in large supporting roles -- which allows The Ringer to become an endearing film, rather than the offensive and insulting piece of crap it could have easily become.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 10th, 2006
A lot has been said about Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer. Ebert has been called the most famous film critic this side of Pauline Kael (he certainly is the most informative one since I've started becoming a wee critic myself), and Meyer certainly found a niche audience directing and producing films with large-breasted women. So when Fox got the two of them together and had them come up with a script that would be a pseudo-followup to The Valley of the Dolls, one would be interested to see what became of it.
The big misconception about Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is that it's a sequel to the Sharon Tate film before it. It's actually more of an homage to the first film (as the introductory title cards discuss), and goes in a different direction, rather than extending the current storylines. Pet (Marcia McBroom, Jesus Christ Superstar), Casey (Cynthia Myers, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) and Kelly (Dolly Read, That Tender Touch) comprise a band that comes to Los Angeles looking for stardom. They run into their fair share of unique California characters, including Emerson Thorne (Harrison Page, Lionheart), Lance Rocke (Michael Blodgett, Catalina Caper) and perhaps most uniquely, Ronnie Barzell, a.k.a. the Z Man (John La Zar, Over the Wire).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 10th, 2006
Career criminal Ray Milland shows up at the ranch of Korean vet Anthony Quinn, looking for his old flame, Debra Paget. She is now married to Quinn, but she hasn't adapted well to country life, still carries a torch for Milland, and is in the very process of leaving Quinn. She and Milland rekindle their romance, and are planning to leave town with the million dollars Milland has just scored. When Milland runs over a state trooper, he forces Quinn to guide them through the wilderness to the Mexican border. A struggle for both survival and Paget's love ensues.A welcome reminder of when thrillers didn't have to be two-and-a-half hours long, this is a tight, swiftly paced peace of work. Despite the great physical difference between them, Milland comes across as a worthy adversary for Quinn, there's a great cynical anger to the characters, and the violence is pretty brutal for its era. The location settings tend to make the studio exteriors all the more obvious, but this is a minor quibble This is a fine western noir, worthy of rediscovery.
Audio
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 1st, 2006
God bless producer Irwin Allen for aiming high in just about everything he did. He would make large scale productions, some focused on disasters (like his next film after this, The Towering Inferno), but he also produced Lost in Space for TV and made other contributions like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and an incarnation of The Lost World. He may not have had a DeMille-like grip on his project because the studios had so much control still in the early '70s, but he sure dreamt big, which is always a good thing.
In The Poseidon Adventure, based on the novel from Paul Gallico, the S.S. Poseidon has set sail and its cast and crew will be celebrating New Year's Eve on the water. When captain Leslie Nielsen (Airplane!) receives a notice about a tidal wave from an earthquake, he prepares for the worst. The wave hits the ship and turns it over, and it leaves a handful of passengers left to try and reach the water's surface before the ship sinks. Among those are Reverend Frank Scott (Gene Hackman, fresh off The French Connection), Mike and Linda Rongo (Ernest Borgnine (From Here to Eternity) and Stella Stevens (The Ballad of Cable Hogue), respectively), Belle and Manny Rosen (Shelly Winters, (Lolita) and Jack Albertson (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), respectively, Acres (Roddy MacDowall, Planet of the Apes) James Martin (Red Buttons, The Longest Day) and Susan Shelby (Pamela Sue Martin, Dynasty).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 28th, 2006
Synopsis
The ironically named Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan) is a hitman whose lifestyle of promiscuous sex, exotic locales and contract killings is catching up with him. As he approaches meltdown, he runs into Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear), a businessman who has had a long run of bad luck. The two strike up a friendship in Mexico city, and toward the end of their stay there, something happens. Six months later, Noble, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, turns uup on Wright’s doorstep.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 26th, 2006
Once in awhile, a film comes along that really catches you by surprise. Little Manhattan is one of those films. At first glance, it appears to be an updated take on a coming of age film that warms the cockles of your heart and leaves you smiling, but it's actually a bit of a romantic comedy that is timeless and memorable.
Written by Jennifer Flackett and directed by Mark Levin, who are a married writing team whose most notable work was Wimbledon, the focus of Little Manhattan is Gabe (Josh Hutcherson, Kicking and Screaming), who also narrates the film. At first the film starts with Gabe, sitting on his bed with a broken arm, crying over someone named Rosemary (Charlie Ray, in her first acting role). From there, Gabe tells the story of how happy he was before he met Rosemary. He was a happy 10 year old boy, knowing that girls were gross and he was going to be a placekicker with the help of his father (played by Bradley Whitford, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). Gabe has known Rosemary for awhile, since kindergarten, but they bump into each other again in a karate class. Gabe suddenly realizes that he has feelings for Rosemary, and wants to be around her as much as possible.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 25th, 2006
For better or worse, Hugh Grant has carved out a niche in Hollywood as the nervous, awkward, charming, British romantic leading man. He's tried doing other things, paired with Gene Hackman as the protagonist in the thriller Extreme Measures. But attempts such as these are few and far between, and haven't seemed to work. For better or worse, he'll always be the stodgy British guy trying to bed an American chick over the objection of her parents, or some other convoluted romantic comedy plot. To his credit, he has been playing against that stereotype lately, to a lesser degree in Bridget Jones's Diary, but to a larger scale in About a Boy, recently nominated for a Golden Globe in Comedy.
Will (Grant) is the son of a man who recorded a famous, but fictional, Christmas song in the late 1950's, and literally does nothing all day, living off of the royalties of that song. He's a bachelor who likes to avoid any responsibility or relationships, and has an epiphany: relationships with single mothers. He believes that they'll jump on top of you, but they'll always compare you to the guy who gave her the kid/kids that she's trying to raise, and they'll end the relationship first, so Will avoids any unpleasantness in breaking up now. He becomes such a firm believer in this theory, he creates an imaginary son, going as far as buying a childseat to put in his silver Audi sportscar, and uses this to attend support group meetings of other single parents, looking to hook up, and finds success.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 23rd, 2006
Synopsis
The Waodani tribe of the Amazon is, we are told, so violent that they have almost hunted each other to extinction. Oops. Anyway, in 1956 a group of missionaries and their families arrive to live with the Waodani and do the missionary thing. A misunderstanding leads to the missionaries being slaughtered, but their wives decide to stay. The film follows the journey of the son of one of the five men, and the whole thing is all about forgiveness.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 21st, 2006
The world of politically charged films has certainly grown in the past few years. Films like Farhenheit 911 have seen big success, while other films like Rupert Murdoch’s OutFoxed have seen more of a critical success. Both of these films had extreme media attention, one obviously more than the other, prior and after their releases. Both asked questions and demanded answers to topics and issues we, as people, wondered about but never really asked about as a simple person can’t really enact a high success...rate in terms of results. However, if you have a name like Michael Moore or Rupert Murdoch attached to the bill, people will probably pay attention. A similar note is given to the recent political thriller Syriana starring George Clooney. Even though Syriana had actors like Matt Damon and George Clooney attached to the bill, would this be enough to make the film’s questions seem important enough to make an impact?
Syriana, to sum up the film in three words, is about oil and money. The film begins with one of the Gulf States agreeing to supply the up and coming China with some of its oil. Texas based company Connex, views this deal as a huge defeat. At the exact same time as this deal is happening with Connex, another company, Killen, has signed a deal to drill for oil in Kazakhstan. Connex, obviously, announces an immediate merger with Killen, thus giving them the oil. Wait one second. This sounds pretty familiar doesn’t it? Naturally the Justice Department intervenes and the movie starts to accelerate.
![Syriana [HD DVD] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/syriana-hd-dvd-large.jpg)
