Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 20th, 2005
The great thing about DVDs produced under the Criterion moniker is that they can't really be compared to much else. Usually, I can just whip out a peppy little monologue about the film I have just watched, but Criterion always makes things a bit more difficult... which is great for film fans that have seen it all before.
Naked is, of course, no different. There is no easy summation for this piece of art, which won awards for Best Actor and Best Director at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. This is ...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 19th, 2005
Synopsis
A young boy murders his mother’s abusive lover while his little sister watches the act in a mirror. Years later, the siblings are grown up. The brother is mute, and the sister (Susanna Love) is haunted by nightmares of that night. Seeking to purge the past, she revisits her old home, and sees the lover in the mirror. In terror, she smashes the mirror, thus unleashing the evil contained therein. Wherever fragments of the mirror show up, terrible deaths occur.
Or at least as terrible...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 19th, 2005
Synopsis
Robert Redford is a small-time con man who swindles a runner working for big-time gangster Robert Shaw. When Redford’s partner is killed in retribution, Redford swears revenge, and hooks up with Paul Newman, a veteran at the con game who has fallen on hard times. They put together a veritable army of operators, determined to bring Shaw to his knees in the ultimate con.
A delight when it was first released in 1973, the film is no less a delight now. To call it a masterpiece may be a...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on September 17th, 2005
Synopsis
Seth Brundle (David Goldblum) is on the cusp of perfecting an functioning teleporter, a device that will transform the world. Eager to share his creation with someone, he strikes up an acquaintance with science journalist Geena Davis. She is initially skeptical, but is soon converted, and as the work progresses, the two fall in love. Then, in a fit of misplaced jealousy (he believes that Davis is seeing ex-boyfriend John Goetz), Goldblum teleports while drunk, not knowing a fly is also in th...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 16th, 2005
Fever Pitch is an American-ized version of the Nick Hornby novel and subsequent British Film. American-ized usually means “watered downâ€, and there’s no doubt a lot of the bite from the original source material is missing. But I am a big fan of the movies High Fidelity and About a Boy. Instead of soccer, the protagonist’s obsession, in this Fever Pitch is baseball (in particular the Red Sox). This obsession gets in the way of having healthy relationships. I think the change of...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 15th, 2005
The classics become the classics for a reason. True, this may be a collection of classic cartoons, but they are classics all the same. This disc contains four different cartoons that introduce children to the stories of “The Ugly Duckling”, “Ferdinand the Bull”, “The Country Cousin” and “The Wind in the Willows”. Parents can rest easy by putting their children in front of something like this for an hour, as children will not only be be entertained, but they will learn a little something along the way as well. These s...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 14th, 2005
Synopsis
Val Kilmer is found, shot in the head and near death, outside the middle-of-nowhere desert town of Blackpoint. When he comes to in the hospital, he has total amnesia. But as flashes of his memory return, he becomes convinced that an attempt will be made to kill the President. No one believes him, including Neve Campbell, who shows up claiming to be his fiancee. No one, that is, except perhaps Sheriff Sam Shepard, who wonders if there might not be something to this man’s beliefs after all.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 14th, 2005
Synopsis
John Cusack had done the 80’s adolescent romantic comedy thing to death. In one fashion or another, The Sure Thing, One Crazy Summer, Better Off Dead and Hot Pursuit had some mix of smooching and laughs to them, and Cusack was the main character. So why did he decide to do another in Say Anything, the directing debut for Cameron Crowe?
There was something new to it I suppose. In Lloyd, Cusack found the guy that might not go to an even decent college whe...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 14th, 2005
Synopsis
There was a huge amount of anticipation over the American adaptation of the British sitcom hit of the same name. The original version, with Ricky Gervais as the office manager David Brent, won a series of Emmy equivalents in England and Gervais even won a Golden Globe for his work on the show. And with Steve Carell (Anchorman) appearing in the American version as Brent’s counterpart, expectations were high from more than a few people.
Not having seen the British version of the show...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 14th, 2005
I am a foreign film fan, so I was quite excited to find this disc in my queue of DVDs to review. From the cover, this looked like just the kind of thing that I typically enjoy. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, you shouldn't judge a DVD by it's cover... or something like that. The plot of this film sounds reasonable enough; a couple of documentary filmmakers set out on a quest to try to find out what happened to a beautiful missing girl. Now, this is not a film shot in a “mocumentary” style, it is just a fictional f...
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