Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 16th, 2004
Synopsis
Efficiency expert Clifton Webb is the pater familias of 12 children. He runs his family ratherlike an industry, and is simultaneously loving, stern, eccentric, pompous and goofy. He moves hisbrood from Rhode Island to New Jersey, and we follow the family as they adapt to their newsurroundings, and the new surroundings adapt to them. The film is about as family-friendly asyou could possibly imagine, and is so determinedly warm-hearted it pursues the audience withthe implacab...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 16th, 2004
Synopsis
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 16th, 2004
Synopsis
The tale is told in flashback as Myrna Loy witnesses the graduation of her youngest daughter.In this flashback, we see Loy, now recently widowed, struggling to keep her family together,even as various forces try to separate the twelve children. The sequel is even more sentimentalthan the original, and so even harder to take. So heartwarming, it makes The BradyBunch look like The Wages of Fear.
Audio
Urgh! Nasty audio. Not only do we ha...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 16th, 2004
Synopsis
In 1920s Australia, Father Richard Chamberlain (the king of mini-series) is lusted over byBarbara Stanwyck. He isn’t interested, but not because he is above temptation. Instead, he isfalling for Stanwyck’s niece, who grows up to be Rachel Ward. Love, lust, vengeance andVatican power politics mesh together into a pretty heady brew.
Granted, there's nothing very subtle about any of this. Right from the get-go, every line delivered is in the servide of graphically mappi...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 15th, 2004
Synopsis
Danny (Greg Kinnear) and his wife Jennifer (Lauren Holly) are a happily married couple. They have reached the point in their marriage that they are now ready to start a family. The only problem is that for whatever reason, they are unable to conceive. Jennifer goes to her physician for a work up and is found to be healthy and able to conceive. Therefore she concludes that the couple problems are due to Danny. She tricks Danny into going a fertilization clinic to be examined. It turns out tha...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 15th, 2004
Synopsis
TV-verité as we travel about with police officers, witnessing various arrests, gunfights, carchases, and whatnot. The broadly themed discs have self-explanatory titles, and focus on (youguessed it) female misbehaviour, criminals being caught red-handed, and violent confrontations.A curious piece of pop-culture flotsam, which should push your cynical, voyeuristic anddepressed buttons. Not that this is a recommendation.
Audio
A 2.0 track, here, most n...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 15th, 2004
Synopsis
Years ago, a tormented teen at Rogers High School committed suicide after stabbing a younggirl to death, or so the story goes. In the present, the jocks on the football team are slipping intocomas after having visions of the ghost of the teen. The put-upon goths and geeks at the schoolare summoning the ghost of Abel Frye and cursing the bullies. Or so it seems. Called in toinvestigate is the Veritas Team, a mom-and-pop-and-two-teenagers outfit whose job is toinvestigate pos...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 15th, 2004
A number of great films have come out of Ireland over the past decade (or so). A few titles that come to mind are In the name of the Father (1993), My Left Foot (1989), In America (2002), The Boxer (1997), and definitely The Commitments (1991). The one factor that differentiates The Commitments from the rest of these great films is that it centers around music rather then turmoil (whether it be personal, family, or country turmoil). The Commitments is a great tale t...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 15th, 2004
“I’ll Be There” is different from most romantic comedies in that the main relationship is between a father and his daughter….wait a minute, that didn’t come out quite right.
The story revolves around Paul Kerr, an aging rock star who ends up in a hospital following a drunken ride on a motorcycle inside his own mansion. There is a concern that he may have thoughts of taking his own life. And then to top it off Paul learns about a daughter that he sired during a relationship that he had with a groupie 16 ye...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 14th, 2004
If Sofia Coppola hasn’t redeemed herself from the whole The Godfather, Part III debacle by now, then it simply can’t be done. Lost in Translation is a beautiful film, the likes of which are rarely seen on this side of the Atlantic. (Of course, to be fair, the film was filmed entirely on location in Tokyo.)
Shot on a shoestring budget, Coppola has definitely made a mountain out of a molehill with this film, taking her small story of two ships that cross in the night, and making that night as br...
On The Web
Sponsors
