Blu-ray Review: Friday the 13th, Part 2
Friday the 13th: Part 2 scares up Blu-ray! Buoyed by the success of Friday the 13th, Paramount wanted a sequel and wanted it fast. Friday the 13th, Part 2 hit theaters in May of 1981, less than a year after its predecessor. Having served as an associate-producer on the first film, Steve Miner took over […]
Blu-ray Review: Defiance
Director Edward Zwick seems to enjoy making films featuring difficult moral issues and plots driven on the ambiguity of authority and on individual conscience as the ultimate arbiter of truth. It was during the success of Thirtysomething, a television series he created with friend Marshall Herskovitz, that Zwick had his first big screen success with […]
Blu-ray Review: Grease (Rockin’ Rydell Edition)
Grease is the word, baby. One of the most celebrated movie musicals ever, Grease has managed to find an audience across all gender race and age boundaries and maintain its tremendous popularity some thirty years after the film premiered in the United States on June 16, 1978. The enduring popularity of Grease is fairly easy […]
Blu-ray Review: Gigi
Gigi has finally arrived on Blu-ray, looking better than I’ve ever seen it before. Released in 1958, the film reunited director Vincent Minnelli with producer Arthur Freed, Alan Jay Lerner and actress Leslie Caron. After the success of An American in Paris, Freed and Minnelli were more than happy to put a new twist on […]
DVD Review: Johnny Got His Gun
With credits including Kitty Foyle (1940), Bill of Divorcement (1940), Roman Holiday (1953), (using the name of Ian McLellan Hunter as a front) and Spartacus (1960), Dalton Trumbo is considered by many one of the best screenwriters to ever work in Hollywood. Dalton Trumbo is also widely remembered as being part of the “Hollywood Ten,” […]
Blu-ray Review: High School Musical 3 – Senior Year (Deluxe Extended Edition)
High School Musical is a genuine phenomenon. After a 2006 made-for-TV movie and a 2007 direct-to-video sequel proved to be huge hits, Disney decided to make a third film for the big screen. HSM doesn’t represent any real school of today; heck the students of East High make the kids at Rydell High in Grease […]
DVD Review: Baghead
Mumblecore is an independent film movement generally believed to have its roots in the early 2000’s. It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors. Filmmakers and brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, who gained notoriety with their debut film The […]
Blu-ray Review: The Women
Writer/director Diane English is best known for creating the television series Murphy Brown, which ran from 1988-1998. After years of working in television, English decided to make her big screen directorial debut with The Women. The film is based on Claire Boothe Luce’s 1936 stage success of the same name, and was subsequently made into […]
Blu-ray Review: Tropic Thunder
I’m old enough to remember when the idea of making a satirical movie about the Vietnam War would have been considered to be the height of bad taste. Times have definitely changed. The Vietnam War seems to be in the rearview mirror of many filmmakers, while others aren’t old enough to have any first hand […]
Blu-ray Review: Monster’s Ball
Written by Milo Addica and Will Rokos, under the direction of Marc Forster, Monster’s Ball is a film in which the characters seem to jump off the screen and draw us in to their difficult lives right from the start. Forster uses a slow, mournful tone that accentuates the sorrow in all the characters, without […]