Every winter, especially ones as rough as this past one, you are bouyed by the thought that Spring is just around the corner when you hear that it is time for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training. As a kid, I just couldn’t wait for the start of spring training and the start of the baseball season. In fact, I still can’t. With the season now upon us, what better film can there be to make its debut on Blu-ray than The Natural, which is the subject of today’s review. Read the full story

The original The Stepfather was an early favorite of mine, featuring an amazing performance by Terry O’ Quinn as a man struggling to find the perfect family. He is so determined in his quest that he has no problem killing anyone who stands in his way. I heard news of a remake awhile ago and was rather discouraged by the news, especially after I heard it was being made by the same people, director Nelson McCormick and writer J.S. Cardone, who brought us last year’s unremarkable and ultimately forgettable Prom Night remake. Still, I decided to watch it with an open mind.

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As I may have mentioned in previous reviews, I feel chills up and down my spine when the official wife of this movie reviewer picks up a disc and says “This looks good!”  As an eternal lover of formulatic movies (especially rom-coms), the official wife’s tastes are diametrically different than mine. 

Worst part is, this movie stars two of my least favourite actors in the world.  Sarah Jessica Parker (she of the huge head) always seems to play high strung, loud and needy characters.  I avoid these people like the plague in real life.  And although Hugh Grant appears to be a genial sort, is there any discernable difference between any of the different characters he has played in a number of different rom-coms?

So, in reviewing this movie, I had a few challenges in front of me.  I needed to watch the whole movie, stay awake, go in to it with an open mind, and not loudly predict what was going to happen (or face censure from the official wife). Read the full story

The old joke about The History channel was that the H stood for Hitler, as it seemed that every time you turned on the channel, there was a show about World War II. Recently, the History Channel has changed its focus, from actual history to what I will charitably refer to as pseudo-history. One of the staples of that “pseudo-history” is the fixation with end of the world prophecies, and in particular, the claim that the Mayan calender ends on 12/21/2102 and that somehow, this fact portends the end of the world. Read the full story

After Arnold Schwarzenegger was greeted with tremendous success outside of the action genre with comedies like Twins and Kindergarten Cop, it only seemed natural for Sylvester Stallone to follow suit. The results were two of the most unpopular films of his career; Oscar and Stop! Or my Mom will shoot. Playing it safe Stallone returned to his comfort zone with Cliffhanger, a film he co-wrote, that was directed by Renny Harlin, the man behind Die Hard 2. Was it a return to form for Stallone? Read the full story

Being a kid around 1993 definitely had its perks; Jurassic Park terrified us, beanie babies came out, Ms. Doubtfire terrified us, CERN created the World Wide Web. However, there were also some drawbacks and Last Action Hero starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was definitely one of them. We’re we wrong to think that? Read the full story

District 9 was not a film I had the chance to see in the theater. However, it had a really interesting premise, that of an alien spaceship hovering motionless over Johannesburg, South Africa of all places, for months and the inhabitants of the ship finally removed and placed into what can only be described as a ghetto, away from the human population and forced to submit to humiliating treatment and scientific experimentation. Knowing that it was produced by Peter Jackson, I was expecting a good film with excellent video and audio presentations. Were my expectations met? Read on! Read the full story

We have been very lucky in the past couple years to have complete and brilliantly done re-dos of some excellent movie franchises, like Star Trek and Batman. Back in 1998, we saw a similar remaking of an old movie and TV franchise, Zorro, with the release of the excellent The Mask of Zorro. This was an excellent title on DVD and the sequel, The Legend of Zorro looked and sounded great on Blu-ray. Would The Mask of Zorro fare as well on its initial Blu-ray release? Read the full story

When people think of Godzilla, they think of a scary monster of epic proportions, when I think of 1998′s Godzilla, my memory triggers similar thoughts. Godzilla is a terribly made (to the point of it being scary) film of epic proportions (AKA a running time of 139 minutes which is scary as well). Read the full story

Often times, turning an extremely popular book into a film is a daunting task. The book is often times filled with so much detail that to include most of it will lead to a rather slow and ponderous film. I am amazed at how well they have been able to translate the Harry Potter books into so many successful films given how dense the books are. Another author of extremely dense books is Dan Brown. Read the full story

I can’t really say that I am a fan of your typical chick flick. Occasionally, you come across one that is funny enough to enjoy. However, I can’t really recall ever having seen a chick flick with an aggressive and somewhat nasty edge until I had a chance to see the subject of today’s review, The Ugly Truth, which takes chick flicks to a new and thankfully, higher level. Read the full story

The Taking of Pelham 123 is a remake of the 1974 film that starred Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw based on the 1973 novel by Morton Freedgood under the name John Godey. The title of the novel and films comes from the identity of the train which is the subject of the heist and ransom. it is the subway train leaving Pelham, New York at 1:23 p.m., hence the name Pelham 123. The 2009 incarnation of the film directed by Tony Scott is billed as an action -packed thriller and stars Denzel Washington and John Travolta. Those of you who actually saw the original film as I did a long time ago, probably don’t recall the film as an action packed thriller and for good reason, it wasn’t. The original film was a thriller but based mostly on the dialogue between the two lead characters. Given the advancements in film making, The Taking of Pelham 123 seemed like a very logical choice for some 21st Century updating. And the result? Well, read on. Read the full story

“Things never happen the same way twice.”

C.S. Lewis created an incredibly imaginative world when he wrote his Chronicles Of Narnia. The stories were an escape, of sorts, from a war torn Europe. They integrated elements of Christianity in an effort to provide a semblance of hope in the form of a children’s fairy tale. And like all such tales, the world of Narnia was first and foremost a place of magic and bewilderment. Read the full story

Back in 2005, Sin City was one of those DVD movies I bought as a blind purchase, and coincidentally, the first movie I ever watched on my brand new 50” Sony LCD rear projection HDTV at the time. I remember just being completely mesmerized by the movie’s unique, and at the time, revolutionary coloring process. The majority of the film is rendered in black and white but contains certain color palettes to emphasize specific objects and scenes. I was really taken aback by this as I am usually just into the cookie-cutter kind of traditional color looking films and not often moved by artistic attempts at being different. Read the full story

The Mummy franchise spins off into what is clearly meant to be the first of another franchise, with The Rock as an Ancient Egypt version of Conan. Many a bloody swath is cut in this action fest. If you thought The Mummy and The Mummy Returns were cheesy… wait until you see this masterpiece. The action is over-the-top and the acting is weak – sounds like two key elements to any modern day action films.  While some might like this film from an entertainment value point of view (especially if you are a fan of The Rock), it did not live up to the original Mummy films that preceded it.

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It seems every time you look for a new movie in the theaters, one of them is a remake from a TV show. Just recently, we had the release of Get Smart. We have also had The Brady Bunch, Mission Impossible and numerous others. Some of them worked, while others just fell flat. One of the latest Blu-ray imports I watched just so happened to be a TV show previously, and that being Starsky and Hutch. This, thankfully, worked out very well and is an entertaining watch. Read the full story

What do we know about Dragon War that the layman might not be familiar with? Well, Hyung-rae Shim, who wrote and directed the film, was a popular Korean comedian who really, really wanted to make a film about this longtime native tale of dragons, so much so that he spent several years getting it made. And yet when it comes to filmmaking, it appears that Dragon War borrows heavily from a lot of other films in the process and winds up underwhelming a lot of people.

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