If Brent's name looks familiar to you, that's because he's been a major contributor here at Upcomingdiscs for going on 2 years. If you don't know Brent's name, you aren't coming here often enough. Brent's been a great find and we're looking forward to the next 200 reviews. Take the time to check out what he's had to say.

We're all lucky to have him on board.

When you are first getting into a relationship those first few weeks can be pretty awkward at times as the two of you get to know one another.  The decision to go on a road trip early on in a relationship is simply one of those gambles that can go either way, but if the trip goes well, then of course the future of this budding romance is all the more promising.  In Fear follows a couple that bravely decides to take a road trip together so they can see a concert; unfortunately for them, it’s the road trip from hell.

Joel and Ethan Coen have been churning out hits for decades.  From Raising Arizona to Fargo and No Country For Old Men as well as many cult hits in between, the Coen brothers have a unique voice that has led to their long success in the Hollywood system.  With their new release, the Coens delve into the Greenwich Village Folk scene in the winter of 1961.  It’s a time that most audiences (myself included) may not be very knowledgeable about. The Coens take on this niche genre of music and present an engaging tale about a struggling musician and his journey to find success in an industry that at the time had a deaf ear to Folk.

Gone With The Wind is the most popular film of all time still to this day if you talk about adjusted dollars. The Birth of a Nation was the most popular film of all time for a considerable time prior to that. Both films could be said to have a benign view of slavery and white supremacy, although it would be easy to use much stronger language than that. In most circles, both films have been considerably discredited due to this myopic view. Both films almost completely ignore or disregard the incredible cruelty of using human beings as a commodity for commerce.

Instead of featuring episodes from this season in consecutive order this DVD set takes episodes of a similar theme from each of its three seasons and bundles them together. As the title ever so subtly suggests, these episodes all feature animals. Along with sharing a theme, these episodes all follow the same formula that Bubble Guppies has had all along.

Paul Walker built his career on playing tarnished golden boys (Varsity Blues, The Skulls) before breaking out with the Fast & Furious franchise. He wasn’t as decorated as fellow recently-departed colleagues like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Peter O’Toole, James Gandolfini and Harold Ramis, but Walker was unequivocally a Hollywood success. Hours is one of the last films the actor completed before his November death in a single-car accident. The film quickly loses its way after a promising start, but Walker is easily the best thing in it. His work here is a bittersweet glimpse at the sort of roles he might’ve taken on as he progressed through his 40’s.

Long before Clint Eastwood was making our day as Dirty Harry or even roaming the badlands without a name for Sergio Leone, he was working the cattle drive on Rawhide. Rawhide was created to take advantage of the huge Western film and television wave that Hollywood had been riding for nearly a decade. With huge ratings for Gunsmoke and Bonanza among others, Rawhide was a bit of an unlikely success. Here the show explored the West on an endless cattle drive to get a few thousand steer to market.

This is the third stab at making an animated series about these radical reptiles. This particular DVD set is the lfirst half of the show’s second season. We are privy to a wide array of toys…er, I mean, characters whose stories are firmly established at this point.

The key to making any good romance work is that you have to be able to root for the couple, that no matter what these characters may face, you have to be on board and believe this cinematic love affair is meant to be.  In the case of Twice Born, I have to say it does such a good job at getting me to root for this couple that I want to punch the film in the face for what it puts them through.  Yes, you read that correctly.  This film managed to get me so wrapped up in the characters that I found myself cursing at the screen simply because what Gemma (Penelope Cruz) and Diego (Emile Hirsch) endure is heart-wrenching to the extremes

There’s a pretty good, southern gothic tale buried somewhere in Wicked Blood. Unfortunately, writer/director Mark Young isn’t quite able to extract it. Instead, we get a somewhat overqualified cast acting out Young’s down-and-dirty story of meth, chess and bikers that is exactly as messy, baffling and oddly intriguing as that description makes it sound. The film opens with a literal bang: we see the explosion of a shabby trailer. We don’t know who is inside, but we see a young girl stoically watching the flames from the outside.