In the 1940’s Walt Disney was asked by President Roosevelt to take a good will tour across Latin America as an ambassador of sorts. He declined the invitation, protesting that he wasn’t the handshaking kind and that the cause would be better served using someone else. Not to be deterred, Roosevelt made a counter offer. What if Walt would go to Latin America with a film contingent and then create some kind of a production out of the tour. A government subsidy was even offered. Walt accepted the invite but turned down the subsidy.

A question to ponder before we head into this review. What do you get when you mix anime or japanese animation with a healthy dose of John Woo? Besides a ton of falling gun shell casing and cute characters performing acrobatics in the air while taking down a dozen bad guys? You get a movie that goes full speed for over a hundred minutes and makes you realize that this is truly the perfect avenue for John Woo and style of films. However, just don't expect there to be a completely solid story behind it.

Video Game Gameshows, Vegas is Fixed, and more GTA IV than you can shake a hairy hooker at - Welcome to the column that will get Grand Theft Auto IV as soon as we figure out how to pay for the gas and the case of Mountain Dew known as Dare to Play the Game.

Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. 39&21 in WoW Land. As you can tell from the numbers, I played the heck out of my rogue this weekend. I was questing hard in everywhere from Desolace to Hammerfall. Somewhere around 12k experience away from level 40 and finishing a few Hammerfall quests, I got burnt out.

So here we are again with a third collection of episodes from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series. This final series is called Years Of Change. Most of the episodes and features deal with the span of years between the World Wars. The 20’s were indeed an inventive time when people like Thomas Edison were at their peak. Peace was at hand, and no one really knew for how little time it would last. Most people had extra money and life was one big party. From our 21st Century hindsight, we know it was all doomed to come crashing down before the decade ended

A government project goes badly awry, as all government projects do, and, just as inevitably, a plague of zombies is loosed upon the local community. A group of high school students are the only ones able to mount any kind of defense against the flesh-eating ghouls. Sounds reasonable to me.

Two weeks ago, I proposed that, if remakes were inevitable, the subjects of said remakes might as well be worthy of that treatment. In other words, if the original is mediocre or worse to start with, no harm done. And maybe we’ll finally wind up with a good film. Granted, experience hasn’t given us much cause for optimism in this department, but hope springs eternal, even in the face of terrible odds, otherwise the human race would have committed collective suicide long ago.

If you’re a fan of Perry Mason you need to approach this 50th Anniversary collection with mixed feelings. With no new announcements of future season or half season releases, this set does have the look of finality to it. The last set was the second half of season 2 released November of 2007. With this commorative release you get 12 episodes spread out from the remaining seasons starting with the third. While Paramount has made no such announcement, I get the feeling the powers that be are at least pondering the idea of stopping the run.

Cheers was that kind of place that songs have been written about. Billy Joel’s Piano Man describes such a place where the patrons are, for the most part, regulars and pretty much family. In the days before huge screen televisions and satellite networks, Cheers would likely have been considered a sports bar. In those days the sports was more the talk of the place and not merely gathering to watch 127 games at a time. The bar’s owner was Sam Malone (Danson). Sam was a washed up baseball player for the local Boston Red Sox.

I was just a kid when Laverne and Shirley became a successful spinoff from Happy Days in the 1970’s, and while I remember that it was on often in our home I could not have recited any episodes from memory. Like most of my generation, I remembered the enigmatic opening rhyme from the show’s opening segment, and like most kids then I couldn’t pronounce it and still can’t; don’t even ask me to spell it here.

Does ultra realism make for a better movie? There have certainly been examples of startling realistic moments in cinema that have been quite effective, but mostly because they create an experience for us that actually reaches us in a way that we’ll never be able to forget. The storming of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan was one such incidence. Those of us who have never been to war walked away from that scene feeling like we’ve now experienced the closest thing possible without actually being there.