Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 23rd, 2010
Written by Dave Younger
This is an entertaining and informative biopic of the American icon. Starting with a $600 loan from the bank, he parlays his good fortune of coming across Marilyn Monroe pay-the-rent nudes into an I-gotta-see-this magazine. Along the way he publishes some great fiction – Ray Bradbury says nobody wanted his Fahrenheit 451, so he sells it to Hef for $400 – and non-fiction: groundbreaking interviews with Jimmy Carter, Miles Davis and John Lennon. His road was filled with battles, because America in the 50s was staunchly conservative. And racist, so imagine the shock of seeing blacks and whites mingle on his TV show Playboy’s Penthouse. (Sammy Davis Jr. is given a puppy for Christmas by the eternally suave Hef – “Oh, hi, I didn’t see you come in.”)
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 23rd, 2010
In Macao, a trio of gunmen butcher a family. Only the mother survives (barely), and her father (aging French rocker Johnny Hallyday, looking as hardboiled and grotesque as Mickey Rourke), a restaurateur who knows altogether too much about how to get by in the violent underworld, comes to town and sets out on a mission of vengeance. He hires a trio of hit men, and works with them in tracking down his enemies. They have to do so quickly, though, because Hallyday has been shot before, and the bullet lodged in his brain is gradually stealing his memory away. He wants his revenge while he can still remember why it is necessary.
Johnnie To's crime thriller is as stylized as anything John Woo did in his prime, and shows, post-Woo, that there are still new ways of choreographing violent shoot-outs. A massive showdown in a junkyard is a set-piece of such visual beauty as to be worth the price of admission in and of itself. The mix of gangster film, revenge saga, Memento, and fable will understandably be a bit rich for some palates, but taken in the right spirit, this is intense, deliriously excessive entertainment.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 22nd, 2010
One man. One alien. One choice.
That’s the tag line for Hunter Prey, the latest project from Sandy Collora, idol to fanboys everywhere thanks to his 2003 short film, Batman: Dead End, believed by many to be the best fan film ever made. Well, after a long wait, he has finally made his first full-length feature film, and though it’s clearly hovering around the bottom rung of the budget ladder, there is much to admire here.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 21st, 2010
Monte Walsh and Chet Rollins (Lee Marvin and Jack Palance) are two cowboys in an era where their kind is becoming extinct. After a hard winter in the mountains, they discover that most of the ranches they knew have vanished, the land being bought up by Eastern corporations. They find work on the ranch once owned by Jim Davis, though he now answers to accountants back East. And though life, at first, seems all right, bit by bit they witness the end of their era, as a way of life dies, and the men who lived it are pushed to suicide, desperation, robbery and worse.
There were numerous “death of the west” movies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, films whose subjects also reflected the fact that the Western itself, as a genre, was entering a near-terminal decline from which it has never fully recovered (these days, if one Western per year comes out, that's doing pretty well, and yet there was a time when there were more Westerns pumped out than any other genre). Unlike the blaze of glory tales of Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch being the best example), Monte Walsh is more of a tone poem. There is very little plot. We watch a few seasons in Monte's life, see him at work and play, see the tentative romance between him and prostitute Jeanne Moreau, see his sadness over a vanishing world and disappearing friends. Then, an almost subterranean thread involving the increasingly desperate straights of Mitch Ryan rises to the foreground in the final act as tragedy descends.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 20th, 2010
He's been called the King Of Late-Night. Today when there are so many talk shows on at pretty much every hour of the day, that might not appear to be such a huge distinction. There were talk shows on before Johnny Carson, but there can be no doubt that he invented the modern late-night show. For 30 years Johnny Carson was like a member of the family for millions of Americans. He was a friendly face at the end of a long, stressful day. He was that dependable routine that you could set your biological clock by. You would lie back in bed and let Johnny bring the world to you. You could count on a wide assortment of entertainment experiences. Johnny would deliver a monolog that often touched on the hot topics of the day. The news programs might be depressing, but Johnny always gave you a reason to crack a smile at the worst of times. There were characters like Aunt Blabby and Carnac who became comfortable old friends. The top names in show business competed for precious minutes on his stage, and if you were very lucky you spent some time on the couch and some face time with Johnny and his faithful sidekick Ed McMahon. Johnny could make or break your career in three minutes. He brought you the best of the new comics and musicians while delivering the big stars just as well. When you made it to The Tonight Show, you really made it.
There will never be a complete season or complete series set for Johnny Carson. There are several problems that present themselves almost immediately. Johnny was on nearly every night for thirty years. Do the math and you'll realize there have been thousands of episodes. The sad fact is that many of these moments are lost forever. Footage has either been lost completely or is in such bad shape as to be almost unwatchable. The was so much variety that having a full season would be a logistic nightmare to find those favorite moments. No, there just isn't ever going to be a complete anything when it comes to Johnny Carson. But Respond2 Entertainment has come about as close as I would have believed possible with the extraordinary release of 4 Decades Of The Tonight Show. Now, I hesitate to even call this a comprehensive collection. Again, I'm just convinced that wouldn't be possible. This comes as close as it gets.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 20th, 2010
The setting for Gunsmoke was the by-now-famous Dodge City, circa 1870’s. Phrases like “get out of Dodge” would enter the popular lexicon as a result of this resilient series. Marshall Dillon (Arness) was charged with keeping the peace in Dodge City. The only other character to see the entire 20-year run was kindly Doc Adams (Stone). Star Trek’s own Doc, Leonard McCoy, took many of his traits from Doc Adams. He was the humanitarian of the city, always looking to help someone. Like McCoy, he had a taste for bourbon and a soft heart underneath a rather gruff exterior and was always ready with free advice. Dillon’s love interest throughout most of the series was Miss Kitty Russell (Blake). While there were certainly a few romantic undercurrents, the romance never came to fruition. Miss Kitty was a prostitute on the radio and was likely one here as well, but CBS chose to underplay that aspect of her character as a “saloon girl”. Finally Dillon’s faithful sidekick deputy was Chester (Weaver). Chester often found himself in trouble and was the naïve son figure to Dillon.
Gunsmoke is the longest running scripted live action television show in history. The series ran from 1955 to 1975. At first it was a half-hour black-and-white show that evolved into a color hour by 1967. It actually started before the days of television, premiering on radio in 1952. Then it was William Conrad as the tough-as-nails Marshall Matt Dillon. When television came into its own, Gunsmoke made the jump to the bright living room box and made history. Westerns would ride across our small square screens for the next three decades, making it the most successful genre of that time, and it was Gunsmoke that started it all. The television version of Gunsmoke was originally conceived as a vehicle for John Wayne, who opted to remain in movies. Yet it was Wayne himself who suggested James Arness, and it turned out to be a career for the one-time “carrot” monster from The Thing. Gunsmoke started before all of the big westerns and was around when most of them had departed.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 20th, 2010
This was Lucille Ball’s follow-up to I Love Lucy. Here Ball is a widowed mother of two, sharing her home with best friend Vivian Vance, who is a divorced mother of one. All the other members of household are, of course, faced with the disasters triggered by Lucy. I screened this set immediately after viewing its close contemporary, Petticoat Junction, and the difference between the two was instructive. There are plenty of hokey gags and situations on The Lucy Show, but there is an enormous difference between the shows, thanks to the comic genius of Lucille Ball. Her energy fills each episode, her timing is spot-on, but there is also her commitment to a type of physical comedy that to this day remains pretty much the exclusive domain of male performers. Not only does she make this style her own, she grounds it in a female reality. There is a reason she was so beloved a performer, and why her work still stands up today.
The third season offers up even more laughs. Some highlights of the season include:
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 20th, 2010
Who doesn’t have a soft spot in their heart, if not their DVD collection, for The Andy Griffith Show? The denizens of Mayberry have been with many of us our entire lives. For most of America, The Andy Griffith Show has become the template for any small rural town. The characters stand as prerequisite citizens in any said town. The town drunk, the local barber, the motherly little old lady, and the corner mechanic all look like Otis, Floyd, Aunt Bee, and Goober to most of us now. Griffith himself brought fine qualities to his role of Sheriff Andy Taylor, but it was Don Knotts as the incompetent but lovable deputy Barney Fife who stole the show. And who was that sweet little boy? He grew up to be a first class filmmaker with plenty of Oscars on the shelf. No question that The Andy Griffith Show started something back in 1960.
Sheriff Taylor (Griffith) is a widower with a young son, Opie (Howard). His extended family includes lovable doting Aunt Bee (Bavier). His deputy, Barney (Knotts) appears to be a few trout short of a stocked creek. They live in the small southern town of Mayberry.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 19th, 2010
Written by Dave Younger
A couple, Alex and Kate (Nicholas Shaw, Zoe Richards), has fallen asleep on the couch watching a movie. Kate wakes up muttering, “Don’t open it.” Someone rings the doorbell. You know they shouldn’t open it. It’s only David (Giles Alderson), a good friend, a little freaked out because he’s just discovered his girlfriend is cheating on him. They agree to let him spend the night. Bad idea. He’s more than a little freaked: he can’t sleep, and he sees monsters. We can’t see the monsters too well, but what we do see is reminiscent of the phantasmagoric creatures on The Outer Limits. We’re mostly aware of them through sound – they make spectacularly creepy and eerie sounds – thumping, banging, screeching, and hissing combine with constantly unsettling music.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 16th, 2010
“The name's Brogan, Lieutenant Brogan. For 20 years I was with the NYPD. Now? Well ... let's just say I'm transferring to another precinct.”
That Precinct is the 88th, which serves Demeter City from an orbiting station around the planet Altor. Demeter City is one of the toughest cities in the universe. There's tons of slums and every kind of scumbag criminal you could ever expect to find in the worst of Earth's hoods. The planet is primarily populated by three species, although there are literally hundreds of known species that might be found in one of the darkest corners of the city. Humans make up about a third of the dominant population. The Tarns are a species with a third eye that grants them varying degrees of telepathy and telekinesis. The Creons are the dominant species. They look a little like hammerhead sharks with their bulging eyes extended outward on either side of their face. This species is high on ritual and tradition. The three species are well represented in the officers who serve at the 88th.
