Alvin and The Chipmunks: The Alvinnn!!! Edition
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 25th, 2008
The Alvin Collection is another group of episodes of The Chipmunks from their popular Saturday Morning series,
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Duckman – Seasons One & Two
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 25th, 2008
Duckman began life as an underground comic created by Everett Peck. It gathered to itself quite a cult following, and like all such things caught the attention of
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Brothers and Sisters – The Complete Second Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 25th, 2008
It’s unfortunate that the writers’ strike interrupted the second season of Brothers & Sisters. I was looking forward to finding out if the writers were going to live up to the amazing on camera talent they had speaking their words. What I found was pretty much more of the same, and a quickly eroding patience with the series. I guess the writers had a little more on their mind this year. More’s the pity.
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Dare to Play the Game
Posted in Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on September 24th, 2008
Avatar Rights, The Patch that was the Pub , and Lego Batman, Lego Batman!! – Welcome to the column that is happy to report that we are alive and in one piece (not pieces) known as Dare to Play the Game.
I’m still here. Aren’t you glad? Don’t answer that. After a rather rough two weeks, I hope to return to a fairly normal column with fairly normal jokes and fairly normal news which don’t involve me huddled on the floor with my thumb in my mouth and my body in the fetal position. It’s not a pretty picture and I don’t want to repeat it.
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The Godfather – The Coppola Restoration Giftset
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 24th, 2008
The Godfather films changed storytelling forever. Films before that time, mobster or otherwise, had some very simple but unshakable rules. There was always a fairly clear distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys always win in the end, and the bad guys always succumb to justice before the final credits. For perhaps the very first time, we were given characters that we knew in our souls were evil men. They killed. They broke laws. They manipulated everyone around them through fear and terrorism to bend to their wills. Somehow, now they are the film’s core heroes, if you will. When Vito is shot, we cheer for Michael, who discards his contempt for his family’s criminal image and comes to his father’s aid.
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Made of Honor
Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 22nd, 2008
When I was a kid, I loved Archie comics. Before every family road trip (at least once a year), my mom would head to the grocery store and buy up all of the latest issues of everything from Jughead to Little Archie. We amassed quite the collection, and I read those things over and over for years. Recently, in a moment of nostalgia, I bought a new issue. I was excited to see what my old pals the Riverdale gang were up to — boy, was I disappointed. I knew nearly all of the stories! They barely did anything to hide the fact that they were reruns, simply transplanting plots from summer to winter, or changing from basketball to volleyball. What a crock.
Cashmere Mafia: The Complete Series
Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 22nd, 2008
I’ve got this great idea for a new show: it’s about a group of people stranded on a mysterious island after a plane crash. I’ll call it Where Are We? It’s gonna be the biggest ratings hit ever for whichever network is lucky enough to lavishly reward my creative genius.
On the other hand, it might seem like a complete ripoff of Lost, a rehash, old news that will never live up to the glory of the original. You know, like Cashmere Mafia, the Lucy Liu vehicle modeled gene-by-gene on HBO’s mega-hit Sex and the City. It might only last seven episodes before it’s axed. Now on DVD for the first time, Cashmere Mafia: The Complete Series is further proof that the entertainment industry is all out of fresh ideas.
The Girl Next Door (1953)
Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on September 19th, 2008
Star of song and stage Jeannie Laird (June Haver) returns from a triumphant tour to settle down in her new suburban home. Next door is widowed cartoonist Bill Carter (Dan Dailey), and sparks fly between the glamorous star and the low-key nice guy. The course of true love doesn’t run smoothly, however, due to Bill’s son Joe (Billy Gray, of The Day the Earth Stood Still), who doesn’t take kindly to the new woman in his father’s life.
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Child’s Play 20th Birthday Edition
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 19th, 2008
The 70’s and 80’s were fertile ground for horror films. It was a new era of iconic monsters. Starting with Michael Myers and Jason, the trend that gave us Freddy seemed to be at the end of its run by the late 1980’s. Certainly sequels were still being churned out, but it seemed like we’d seen the last of these maniacal monsters, at least for a while. But before it petered out, the cycle would supply our nightmares with one more notable denizen…Chucky. Today Chucky paces the sidelines here in
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Charlie Chan Collection, Vol. 5
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 19th, 2008
The character of Charlie Chan was created by writer Earl Derr Biggers in 1925 in the book A House Without A Key. He based the character on real life
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Alvin and The Chipmunks: Daytona Jones and the Pearl of Wisdom
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 19th, 2008
The Chipmunks began life oddly enough as a singing group, of sorts. They were the brainchild of struggling songwriter Ross Bagdasarian and were named after the three chief executives at
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Racing In Place
Posted in Brain Blasters by David Annandale on September 19th, 2008
I can’t quite decide how I feel about Paul W. S. Anderson. On the one hand, he clearly has a great deal of affection for his inspirations, and since most of his filmography, as either a director or producer, consists of adaptations, this is to the good. He is, for instance, one of the few filmmakers who actually seems to respect video games, even if his Resident Evil films consciously depart from the games’ story arc in a fairly massive way. Unlike Stephen Sommers, he does not feel the need to trivialize his material by giving up on the suspense and going for the cheap laugh.
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Dare to Play the Game
Posted in Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on September 17th, 2008
Ike sucks, Rockband & Guitar Hero tracklist comparison and did I mention I hate hurricanes? – Welcome to the column that is free and there is no need to stand in line for half an hour known as Dare to Play the Game.
There wasn’t a column last week. I know, I’m sorry. I was too busy deciding what to do about Hurricane Ike. I had parts of it written last week time and time again. But I never could complete it because my heart wasn’t into it. My heart still isn’t 100% into it. You can blame it on Ike, or just hurricanes in general.
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Grey’s Anatomy: The Complete Fourth Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 17th, 2008
There are some significant changes in season 4. The interns now have interns of their own. It’s actually a little fresh to see them struggle with circumstances we only recently watched them deal with from the other perspective. All except George, who is forced to repeat after blowing off his final exam to help Izzie. There are also many cast changes. Gone are
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Medium – The Fourth Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 17th, 2008
Medium was based on a real person with alleged psychic powers who apparently has helped out various law enforcement agencies in some actual cases. If you’ve seen the series, you might find that hard to believe, and the episodes are obviously fictional adventures and not based on the real Allison Dubois’s experiences. At first glance it might be easy to lump Medium in with Ghost Whisperer or The Dead Zone. Actually there are almost no similarities to any of those shows.
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C.S.I. Miami – The Sixth Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 17th, 2008
I love CSI and have been an avid fan from day one. I think it brought a fresh look to the procedural crime dramas that have long ago become just a little stale and predictable. The problem is that the series has gone the Dick Wolf route of branching out so that the final product might be a little diluted. Unlike the Law & Order franchise, each version of CSI has attempted to take on a unique look and style to reflect the location without giving up those elements which are the tradition of the series. CSI:
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Wings – The Seventh Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 17th, 2008
Wings was one of those unusual sitcoms that depended more on the characters than the situations they were in. While the setting was a small
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Argento Wraps Up a Tale Long In The Telling
Posted in Brain Blasters by David Annandale on September 13th, 2008
This is going to be half a review, and half nostalgia.
In 1980, Dario Argento’s Inferno was released, and, bizarrely, it was one of the films profiled on a kid’s SF TV show I watched back then. The scenes on display sent my terrified little self fleeing from the room. But the images I saw stayed with me, as did the spookily elegant poster I saw on Paris theatre marquees in the weeks that followed: a purple-and-blue skull with a single drop of blood forming at the still-fleshy lips.
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Desperate Housewives: The Complete Fourth Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 12th, 2008
I’m going to admit from the beginning that I had a lot of trepidation going into watching Desperate Housewives. I’ve never seen the show on broadcast television, and frankly don’t know anybody who’s a big fan. The closest I ever got to any of this was the famous T.O. Monday Night Football towel incident that featured the woman from the show lusting after Owens while he was with the Philadelphia Eagles. And like Owens’ tenure with the team, Desperate Housewives was just one of those things I figured we just didn’t talk about. Certainly I’ve seen the hype, and believe, me I’m well aware of the show’s popularity.
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Eli Stone: The Complete First Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 12th, 2008
Eli Stone is a typical corporate lawyer. He admits to being totally self-involved and greedy, that is until he begins to see and hear things that aren’t really there… or are they. These visions appear to be connected with events unfolding in Stone’s life and seem to be leading him toward a mission of sorts. It could be helping a mother whose child was stricken by a harmful vaccine or helping a convict fight prison abuse. In the pilot, Stone discovers that he has a brain aneurism, which might account for the vivid visions he is experiencing.
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With a Song In My Heart
Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on September 11th, 2008
A mixture of biopic and musical, this vehicle stars Susan Hayward as Jane Froman, an incredibly popular singing star in the 40s who had to battle back from terrible wounds suffered in a plane crash after her first performance for American troops overseas during WWII. The film begins with Froman’s triumphant comeback, and flashes back to the events leading up to this. The pic is efficiently put together, and Hayward’s lip-synching (Froman dubbed in her own singing) is unusually convincing. But the crash itself is disappointingly undramatic.
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Ghost Whisperer – The Third Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 11th, 2008
The show’s most basic premise remains intact. Melinda Gordon is a newlywed and owns the antique shop in a quaint
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Cheers – The Complete Tenth Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 11th, 2008
“You wanna be where everybody knows your name”
And who wouldn’t want that? In its landmark 10th year Cheers kept on delivering pretty much the same. It’s remarkable that this cast remained almost untouched since the first year a decade ago. Coach passed and Diane left, but the patrons just kept coming back week after week providing that friendly ambiance that Billy Joel likely understood when he wrote Piano Man. Cheers was a simple show with very little fluff.
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Fat Albert’s Halloween Special
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 11th, 2008
“Hey Hey Hey, It’s Fat Albert!”
That’s right, it’s Fat Albert. Bill Cosby invented the portly young Albert for his stand-up and album releases in the 1960’s. The character, like many of Cosby’s stories, is based on elements of his own youth. My parents were huge Cosby fans, so I had heard all about these Cosby Kids long before they hit television in 1972. Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids was an almost instant hit on the Saturday Morning cartoon menu.
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Unintentional Intelligence
Posted in Brain Blasters, Regular Columns by David Annandale on September 6th, 2008
We have all encountered films that are less intelligent than they think they are. My favourite example of this syndrome would probably be Contact, the deeply serious Jodie Foster vehicle, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and adapted from the Carl Sagan novel. The film keeps the novel’s primary weakness (the ending, which, smacks of a writer who hasn’t worked out a full outline before starting) and introduces some unintentionally funny visual elements (the alien-inspired technology looks suspiciously like it was designed by Wile E. Coyote, and the first time out works like was designed by him, too). But the film’s biggest sin was not that it has some very silly aspects, but that it is completely unaware of same, and really seems to believe that it is Important Art. Similarly, M. Night Shyamalan has become the undisputed King of Movies Less Intelligent Than They Think They Are.
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