Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 2nd, 2015
The town of McFarland, California is North of Los Angeles and South of San Jose. More specifically, it is near Bakersfield and not too far south of Fresno. San Diego is practically spitting distance from Tijuana. I say this because much of California is alien to me. The movie McFarland, USA is about delving into the realities of California. Forget that this is a feel-good sports movie for a minute. This is a movie about the Latino experience from a true story about a coach from 1987, but the film updates some of the changes that have taken place since then.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 29th, 2015
"You do know the combination, don't you?"
It's a Taken film, and the third one in the series. You should have the ingredients down by now. Let's run through the checklist, shall we? You've got your daring escapes, check. You have some awesome car chases with a lot of mashed-up metal, check. You've got some torture, of course. Waterboarding is in these days. You have the standard carnage level, check. And check. It's all there, but credit the folks behind the franchise for finding ways to deliver every last drop of the expected stuff and still turn the third part of a trilogy on its head enough to make it more interesting than the previous two films.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 31st, 2015
Most movies are just not very good. Lots of money goes into turning out boring, repetitive garbage. You watch it and then dispose of it and make room for the next thing. There are some who do more, but the more you do, the greater the risk. Most filmmakers are not given the freedom to take really big risks, but someone who has been given the opportunity to take the big risk is Christopher Nolan. Interstellar is $165,000,000 gamble shooting for the moon. Actually Nolan is shooting for something way past the moon. He wants to take us to another galaxy.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on January 9th, 2015
Even though in this documentary we may not get to experience T-Rexes chasing after unfortunate paleontologists while running amuck in a theme park, Dinosaur 13 still manages to be an engaging adventure from start to finish. This is a film that reaches out to all the young kids inside all of us who while growing up dreamed about what life was like when dinosaurs once ruled the world. It taps into that adventurous bug that was once inside all of us as kids about exploring and discovering worlds that have not yet been discovered and creatures that now can only survive in our imaginations
Posted in: Disc Reviews by John Delia on November 7th, 2014
Flying into home entertainment, the animated comedy adventure Planes: Fire & Rescue delivers a fun film for the whole family. The film features some of the characters from the original and a whole lot of new ones. Brightly animated, having fine direction and with a new storyline, the film has several good values including heroism and friendship. In this episode we find Dusty Crophopper returning from his around-the-world racing tour and about to participate in annual Corn Festival.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on November 5th, 2014
This has been a review that has taken me a while to get to, not because it’s something I was dreading, but instead it had me revisiting some other Elmore Leonard adaptations to the screen. There have been countless adaptions of Leonard’s work on the big screen as well as television. Whether it’s his westerns 3:10 to Yuma, Justified or Hombre or his work on crime Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, and Get Shorty, there is a good chance at some point you’ve seen Elmore’s work, and those were just a handful of titles I mentioned. I was a teenager when I first discovered Elmore Leonard
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 8th, 2014
"What I am about to tell you sounds crazy. But you have to listen to me. Your very lives depend on it. You see, this isn't the first time."
No, this isn't the first time. Tom Cruise seems to be making a habit of these science fiction action movies of late. There was Oblivion and War Of The Worlds, and quite frankly Edge Of Tomorrow looked to be pretty much more of the same. But there's a huge difference between this film and the previous two. Edge Of Tomorrow is actually good. What looks on the surface to be just Groundhog Day with futuristic toys turns out to be a redemption story that I actually never saw coming.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 7th, 2014
Baseball is huge, and Bollywood is huge, so imagine if you put them together. In many ways, Million Dollar Arm is about Indian culture and what a separate world it is from ours. The film starts out in Los Angeles where J.B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm from Mad Men) is a sports agent who has broken off from a big agency to start his own firm. His partner, Aash (Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show), is very nervous about where their next client is coming from, since they lost a big one right at the start of the film.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on September 1st, 2014
The backwoods flesh-eating disease film Cabin Fever was writer/ director Eli Roth’s first dip into horror and helped establish Roth as one of the “it” guys of the industry despite having a limited film catalog. The film’s cringe-worthy deaths, not to mention the memorable bathtub sequence, made the film an overnight sensation, and when talk of a potential sequel came out, I was more than a little excited. Picking up the reins for Roth would be another young rising star of the horror genre, Ti West.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 11th, 2014
Need for Speed is based on a video game. It caters to people who love the experience of speed. There is a huge audience for this sort of thing. To their credit, the writer and director makes every effort to create an actual story and real characters in this presentation. It is easy to compare it to Fast and Furious, but why bother. That gives these sorts of films too much credit. Fast and Furious and Need for Speed are designed to give people a thrill. If anything, Need for Speed takes things more seriously than the Fast and Furious series.
