Posted in: Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on December 10th, 2008
Saw gets axed, No Aliens for Sigourney Weaver, and Age of Conan tanking - Welcome to the column that is considering slicing its wrists if it has to do any more writeups on remakes of Nintendo 64 games known as Dare to Play the Game.
Finally, I got my 120gb hard drive for my 360 on Monday night. There were a few messups in communication between the third party seller and myself but everything was resolved when I received the package. It was opened, however the hard drive, transfer kit, cd and manual all looked brand new as described on Amazon. I hooked it up to my 360 and started to transfer my files. Took about a little over half an hour. Then when it was finished, it said the curious message of “Some files were not transferred…they have been deleted”. Oh lord. So I replace the old hard drive with the new and power it on.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 10th, 2008
The worst thing about The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is that it followed the most successful fantasy film trilogy of all time. Just two years after Return of the King blew us away in theatres and swept the Oscars, and only one year after the flagship Extended Edition release set a new standard for DVD excellence, ‘Wardrobe promised the return of high fantasy to theatres near us. Unfortunately, it proved to be nowhere near adequate for any Lord of the Rings comparison. It was sweet, non-threatening and even a little campy, where Peter Jackson’s films had been majestic, serious and polished – one fluffy, the other dramatic.
When The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian hit theatres in late 2007, I hoped it would offer a more mature Narnia, but I wasn’t too optimistic (these are supposed to be child-friendly, after all). Imagine my pleasant surprise early on when Trumpkin uttered this to the four child heroes: ”You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember.”
Posted in: Random Fun by Gino Sassani on December 8th, 2008
That’s right, gentle reader, it’s fast approaching Christmas. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, and today it is the single most filmed
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 8th, 2008
Welcome to an all-new way of presenting even more review titles to you.
From time to time we’re given a kind of disc called a “screener”. It’s sometimes the industry’s way of getting review copies without spending a lot of money. Instead of final product, we get a paper slipcase with just a disc. Even the disc is far from final product, the one you would buy in a store. There are often no extras, and the A/V isn’t necessarily the way it will look on the ultimate release. For years we here at Upcomingdiscs have often avoided reviewing those titles because we can’t really comment on the many factors we like to include in our reviews.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 7th, 2008
Most women would consider Matthew McConaughey a hot guy. Hubba, hubba, the whole nine yards. Typically when he stars in a new motion picture, women flock to see the show for him to walk around for ninety minutes preferably with his shirt taken off and speaking romantic to some leading lady. For those ninety minutes, those women wish that they were in his arms, they were in his touch. But what if Matthew was portraying an out of work treasure hunter, broken down on his luck and owing some guy named Bigg Bunny a whole lot of money? I think this will all depend on whether his shirt is coming off or not.
On July 24th, 1715 in celebration of the marriage of King Phillip of Spain, the largest treasure fleet in maritime history set sail from Havana, Cuba. The 500 million dollars worth of gold, silver and jewels came to be known as the Queen's Dowry. Unfortunately, in his eagerness to consummate the marriage, King Philip ordered the fleet to sail at the worst time of the year. And so, the great galleons, heavy with their sparkling cargo, sailed straight into a massive hurricane and were never seen again.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on December 6th, 2008
It must be at least five minutes since I last complained about ill-advised remakes, so it's past time I returned to the subject. It was recently brought to my attention that yet another remake of The Lodger is in the works. The trailer is up on YouTube for those of you with a masochistic bent to examine. Now, far be it from me to prejudge a film based solely on the trailer, but I'm going to do it anyway.
The first version of The Lodger was an early Hitchcock effort from 1927. Lead Ivor Novello would return to the part five years later for the first sound version of the story, but the most prominent incarnation is the John Brahm take from 1944, with Laird Cregar as the titular lodger. Said character is, for those unfamiliar with the tale, Jack the Ripper, who rents a room in a middle-class neighbourhood, and subsequently develops an unhealthy interest in the daughter of the household, even as she, like a moth to a flame, is fascinated by him. Cregar gives us a man driven by his suppressed by raging sexual conflicts to terrible violence, and creates a monster who is nevertheless recognizably human. The audience actually comes very close to sympathizing with the murderer, and we KNOW he's the killer. Thus, Merle Oberon's interest in him (which, in the 1944 film at least, stops short of becoming romantic interest, since police detective George Sanders is on hand to provide that) is all the more understandable, since she doesn't know (though she might suspect) what we do.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2008
Frank Cannon was unlike any detective we’d ever seen on television before, or since. He was known as a high priced PI with a taste for the finer things in life, particularly fine food. His appearance was counter to all of the rules about rock-jawed handsome detectives who ran around shooting it out and beating up the bad guys. Cannon was a big man and wasn’t about to do much running and fighting. He wasn’t totally different, however. Cannon had a lead foot and could run a car chase with the best of them. He was smart and often a bit flashy in his technique if not in his appearance. It was also rare for a series to have a lone regular to carry the … um… weight. Conrad was up to the task and made the show and the character a permanent part of our pop culture.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2008
This is another one of
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 5th, 2008
High art it isn’t, but one thing’s for sure: Dynasty is ass-in-seat television. Launched in 1981, the John Forsythe-Linda Evans-Joan Collins starring vehicle crossed lines and took chances few of its contemporaries were willing to take. For several years Dynasty defied conservative conventions with sordid tales of extramarital affairs, catfights, and the hot-button issue of homosexual parenting. It’s this last issue that is featured so prominently in Dynasty – The Third Season, Volume Two.
Those of you who are uninitiated to the Dynasty saga have nothing to fear, as each script is weighted heavily with expository dialogue sure to catch you up in no time. (“If Blake loves you, Krystle, then why did he humiliate you by castigating you that day we fought in the lily pond” – Alexis Colby) Of course, the show’s quality suffers as a result, offering ridiculous conversations involving participants who should damn well know exactly what just happened to them, especially considering the weight of their experiences, without the need of another character explaining things. In fact, about 40-50% of every conversation is retread from a previous episode. Incidentally, the acting is terrible, but one must wonder if the actors could have done any better with the material they were given. While exposition can certainly be a necessity, especially in an hour-long ongoing series, the convention is best used in very small doses at the beginning of a story, not throughout every segment between the commercial breaks.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2008
Erle Stanley Gardner wrote crime fiction, and while many of his 100 or so works are unknown to most of us, he created a character that has become as identified with criminal lawyers as any other in fiction. It was in these crime novels that Perry Mason first faced a courtroom. He developed a style where he would investigate these terrible crimes his clients were on trial for. He would find the real killer, and in what has become a
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