05/01/08
The hard part about drafting a
film concept around cyber-crime fighters is their job doesn't translate well to the screen. These people peck away in front of a computer day in and day out, hardly the eye candy a filmgoer wants to fixate on for two straight hours. There needs to be a viable excuse for them to get up from their desk and stretch their legs until the credits roll. Otherwise their roles should be restricted to that of the geeky tech nerd dishing out comic....
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04/29/08
David Lean was one of the few filmmakers
who could successfully balance the epic with the intimate. Be it The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, or Dr. Zhivago, Lean's epics gave us breathtaking widescreen visions of far away places while at the same time never losing sight of what really drove his films: character and plot. His winning ways stumbled a bit in 1970 with the Irish epic Ryan's Daughter, a film where....
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04/26/08
It seems like the entire movie-going
world is awaiting the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the latest and likely final chapter in the Indiana Jones series. Ironically, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment is leading up to that movie's May 22 release with a Blu-ray iteration of Indy's spiritual successor, the National Treasure movies. Although nobody would ever mistake Nicolas Cage for Harrison Ford, the National....
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04/22/08
As the Blu-ray format continues to introduce
new features such as BD-Live, Picture-in-Picture and D-Box Motion Code support, it's funny to see so many older movies appear in high definition. Films like Commando and Predator make sense on Blu-ray, with their action-packed scenes and cult-like followings, but quirkier titles seem a bit less obvious. Case in point: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a Terry Gilliam film with Eric Idle, a cameo....
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04/15/08
It's ironic that at a time when the
entire world feels at war, when guns and rescue operations make regular appearances on the nightly news, that home-movie audiences are seeing a resurgence of 1980s action films. Never did movie studios spend more on machine guns, blank rounds, near-nuclear explosions and gratuitous violence than in the mid to late 80s, so maybe it's par for the now-desensitized course that these action films are....
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04/11/08
It used to be that the independent
film scene consisted of small, struggling studios that had no association with the Tinseltown fat cats. In the late 80s and early 90s, that all began to change. The separate universes of independent and mainstream American cinema began to slowly edge closer to one another thanks mainly to Miramax Pictures. Despite a few bumps here and there, other mini-majors have begun to echo Miramax's....
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04/08/08
No Country for Old Men is a lot 
of things. An Academy Award-winning movie. A Coen Brothers film. A recent release on Blu-ray Disc. But more important, at least from an artistic point of view, No Country for Old Men is the closest anyone has come to re-creating a piece of literature since Pete Jackson did with his The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Based on the novel "The Road," by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men is a film by medium alone. Its plot....
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04/06/08
If Sainte-Chapelle's physics-defying
stained-glass walls are considered Gothic church design's greatest achievement, then Matrix's (Arnold Schwarzenegger) impossible retrieval of his kidnapped daughter in 1985's Commando embodies the '80s indestructible action hero. You've never seen anything so real yet simultaneously surreal like either one, and you probably never will again. Only in Commando can a lone man facing....
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04/04/08
The road to Pixar curves through a
range of neighborhoods, a metaphor not lost on those familiar with the Animation Studio itself. After taking the highway off-ramp, visitors to Pixar's Emeryville, California, headquarters pass into a sleepy part of town, an area where a black Chevy with 14 stuffed animals wedged between its cab and bed seems right at home outside the local market. A place where the 30-something woman walking in bedazzled....
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04/01/08
The initial draw to a second Aliens
vs. Predator film was to discover what the PredAlien, born in the final shot of the first Alien vs. Predator, would look like in its adult stage. Then effects wizards The Brothers Strause signed on as a directing duo, an odd move by Fox entrusting a beloved franchise to first-time feature-length film directors. Expectations immediately hit rock bottom for improvement from the first Aliens vs.....
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03/25/08
Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium intrigued 
me from the first time I saw its movie trailer. Dustin Hoffman playing a quirky old coot in a somewhat fantastical setting? Sounded a lot like "Hook" to me, and I enjoyed that one, so I figured Magorium would be up to snuff as well. And to top it off, you're going to put Hoffman alongside Natalie Portman and Jason Bateman? Sure, I'll check out that film. Apparently, I was alone. To say Mr. Magorium's Wonder....
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03/12/08
I Am Legend, the third and latest cinematic embodiment of
Richard Matheson's 1954 science fiction/horror novel of the same name (the first two being 1964's The Last Man on Earth and 1971's The Omega Man), was a project that had been laying around Hollywood almost as long as its lead, Will Smith, has had a film career. Over the past two decades, directors among the likes of Ridley Scott, Michael Bay, Guillermo Del Torro and....
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03/11/08
In Twentieth Century Fox Home
Entertainment's unrated version of Hitman on Blu-ray Disc, Agent 47's entire back story is told through a quick-cutting montage during the opening title sequence. It's learned he's been raised to fight until he escapes those who trained and brandished his neck with a barcode, but not much else. In the blink of an eye, Agent 47 is already an accomplished killer for hire knee deep in a nefarious international plot against....
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03/10/08
A funny thing happened on the way to the
Forum: The 40 Year Old Virgin became a father of three. Dan in Real Life, which releases on Blu-ray Disc Tuesday, March 11, is a pleasantly surprising experience for three reasons. First, seeing Steve Carrell in a complex role after watching him wax his chest in The 40 Year Old Virgin is an eye-opener, to say the least. Who knew he had it in him? Second, watching a story unfold about a single father....
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02/27/08
Never before has the "circle of life" been
more applicable to a home video release than it is to Paramount Home Entertainment's Beowulf Director's Cut. The high-profile HD DVD title comes at the end of the format's short run, and it will likely be one of the final films released in "red." But in HD DVD's death, a new life sprouts with the commercially successful use of new motion-capture techniques applied to animation that the director....
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02/27/08
It's not often you encounter a film that conflicts
you almost as much as its main character is conflicted, much less a film that leaves you in that state for well over a week. I purposefully took time away after watching The Brave One, a Jodie Foster film that just released on Blu-ray Disc, to see if the time away would give me some clarity about my opinion of it. On the one hand, the majority of The Brave One was a total chore to watch, mostly....
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02/21/08
Quentin Tarantino is the poster-child
of polarizing movie personas, because with him there's never a middle ground: people either love him or hate him. But while Tarantino may be the poster child, Monty Python is the originator of all things polarizing. The British comedy troupe -- Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin -- never met a topic it didn't want to ridicule, and the results were....
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02/20/08
With the box-office success of 
3:10 to Yuma and a leading role played by Brad Pitt, the producers of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford were warranted in their enthusiasm. Jesse James, always a hot commodity in Western American lore, being played by Brad Pitt? What's not to like about that? Judging by box-office sales, quite a bit. But with the film's recent release on Blu-ray Disc, the home-movie crowd....
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02/05/08
You might be able to smell what The
Rock is cookin', but if you're like most members of the movie-going public, you probably never smelled a touching family comedy headed for Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's resume. Yet here we are, having just watched The Rock's latest outing, The Game Plan, courtesy of Disney Home Entertainment, a film that's got football and a football star at its core but that manages to make The Rock....
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01/30/08
Western movies are an interesting bunch,
if for no other reason than their inconsistency. The most obvious of these is release dates; Westerns have hit theaters with such irregularity that, save for Unforgiven, you'd be hard-pressed to name many good Westerns since the late 1980s. But a funny thing happened on the way to 2008: two Westerns released in close succession, each with big-name actors: The Assassination of Jesse....
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01/22/08
Roman Polanski's The Pianist
is based on the memoirs of Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a winsome Jewish man revered for his piano performances on 1930s Polish public radio who lives with his close-knit family in an upscale flat in central Warsaw. The idyllic lifestyle of Wladyslaw and his family dramatically changes when Poland is invaded by Germany. Germany's constant bombing on Warsaw....
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01/21/08
Over the years, Denzel Washington has tackled
every fathomable emotion in film. The man has an innate gift to flip a switch and go from a smiling chum to a raving lunatic in the blink of an eye. It wasn't until Tony Scott's 2004 thriller Man on Fire when Denzel was required to express his full range and push his skills through the eyes of one solitary and extremely well written character. Denzel plays Creasy, an ex-special-ops agent dependent....
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01/15/08
Raunchy comedies are all the rage these
days thanks to There's Something About Mary, American Pie, and any project with Judd Apatow's thumbprint smeared on it. And with any successful moneymaking formula, there's bound to be copycats and wannabes craving a slice of the profits. At some undefined point, "new and improved" successors degrade into juvenile "mine is bigger than yours" desperate stags to top their....
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01/14/08
My first exposure to RENT came in college
. At the time, many people my age were discovering the suddenly modern world of musical theater courtesy of writer/composer Jonathan Larson. My discovery came at the hands of a dorm mate's obsession with the show's soundtrack, which mixed powerful lyrics with modern rock. I'd seen Phantom of the Opera and other musicals, but never had I heard a show tackle such complex topics....
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01/08/08
Considering the filmmaking past of Danny Boyle
, I went into Sunshine with some serious jitters. Semi-niche films like Trainspotting and The Beach can be forgiven for slight missteps, while horror films like 28 Days Later aren't expected to be masterpieces. But taking on the world of science fiction, with heavyweight films lurking in every corner? If Boyle screwed up even one iota with Sunshine, the film would fall apart fast. To....
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01/08/08
I've had an unusual interest in The Kingdom
since it began production. Many of the outdoor scenes set at a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia were filmed roughly a mile from my home in Arizona, and a key highway action sequence was filmed a few miles from there. Although I never set foot on the set, I felt as if I had an intimate knowledge of how the U.S. base was being depicted and shot. Going into the finished film, I feared familiarity would....
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01/03/08
Three high profile television shows have
debuted on high definition home video this holiday season. In November, Paramount's Star Trek The Original Series: Season One HD DVD set broke banks but put a smile on fan's faces heading towards season two sometime next year. Earlier this month Universal, the other HD DVD exclusive studio, finally released the long-rumored first season of Battlestar Galactica to an....
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12/31/07
Musical movies come and go, each wave
gathering different levels of acclaim. Films like Grease and West Side Story, for instance, remain classics to this day, while Evita and Moulin Rouge, although excellent films, have more of a cult following than anything else. With those heavy-hitters behind it, you'd think Disney's High School Musical would have virtually no fans, no traction and future. Um, no. Not only was High School....
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12/24/07
Matt Groening grew up in my hometown, went
to high school with my aunt and by all accounts is a pretty weird dude. Doesn't matter; his warped cartoon creation called The Simpsons still rocks. For nearly two decades, The Simpsons has parodied, pressed and pandered its way into mainstream audience's hearts with an irreverent mix of political satire, potty humor and skewed family values. Until this year....
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12/24/07
There's a laughable scene in the original 
live-action He-Man and the Masters of the Universe film when villainous Skeletor first warps into our universe and marches his stiff low-budget army down a suburban American street. That once-forgotten imagery is what invaded my mind while watching Korea's most expensive film, Dragon Wars, or D-Wars for short. Marketed as a complex special-effects masterpiece and....
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12/21/07
Competitive athletics spoofs of ESPN
8 "The Ocho" caliber have enjoyed a healthy run in Hollywood over the past few years. Beerfest and Dodgeball mocked their respective sports with honor, dignity and enough blatant cultural stereotypes to push conservatives to tears. The latest, Balls of Fury, thrusts the burgeoning genre into new territory by fusing the obvious spoof of ping pong with a spoof of kung fu, complete with legends....
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12/19/07
Most Americans know Shakira as the
hip-swinging Colombian artist who tore up both Latin and American charts this past year with Hips Don't Lie, featuring Fugees guest artist Wyclef Jean. Beyond that hit, and maybe Whenever, Wherever, Shakira's music has been aimed squarely at the South American audiences she hails from. This hasn't stopped her unique style of primarily Spanish-sung music from stretching out....
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12/12/07
Ron Moore and David Eick's Battlestar Galactica
re-imagining has been around long enough to negate the need to embellish upon its greatness. We all know it rocks. Check that; it frakkin' rocks. It's the best thing to happen to science fiction television since Firefly, and even that pales in comparison. But as much as tuning in for new episodes on Sci-Fi Channel can be the highlight of any given week, peering at them through....
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12/10/07
Let's just get this out of the way: I'm a
huge fan of the Disney theme parks. With that preface, the Pirates of the Caribbean series holds a special place in my heart, but it also makes the admission that Pirates 3 was a disappointment all the more difficult. Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl was an action-film masterpiece, and Dead Man's Chest, while slightly less impressive, was an enjoyable romp. But Pirates of the....
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12/10/07
Earlier this fall we saw what seemed to be an
inordinate amount of Halloween-related Blu-ray and HD-DVD releases. Most holidays inspire multiple appropriately themed movies, but this Halloween seemed especially brutal. Fast-forward two months, though, and 2007's Christmas-related films have been fewer and farther between, almost to the point that The Santa Clause 3 releasing on Blu-ray Disc elicited a response....
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12/09/07
Let's just get this out of the way: I'm a huge fan of the Disney theme parks. With that preface, the Pirates of the Caribbean series holds a special place in my heart, but it also makes the admission that Pirates 3 was a disappointment all the more difficult. Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl was an action-film masterpiece, and Dead Man's Chest, while slightly less impressive, was an enjoyable romp. But Pirates of the Caribbean 3....
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12/05/07
Sometimes, when you hear a film is utter crap, 
you tend to do one of two things: avoid it altogether or see it out of morbid curiosity. When the opportunity arose to review walking drugstore Lindsay Lohan's universally reviled suspense thriller, I Know Who Killed Me, I first declined but soon changed my mind and decided to take on the task. I wanted to see if it truly was as bad as everyone said it was. A few days and 106 minutes later....
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11/29/07
In case you're keeping track of such things
at home, People Magazine recently voted Matt Damon Sexiest Man Alive. His character in Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen, however, exudes everything but machismo, particularly in this latest Las Vegas heist, now available on Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD. Ocean's Thirteen follows the model established in the original Ocean's Eleven with the Rat Pack and resurrected....
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11/28/07
There are many ways to spend your Christmas Eve: 
last-minute shopping, visiting friends and family, assembling gifts for someone while getting drunk on spiked eggnog (try it, it's fun!). But for off-duty New York City detective John McClane (Bruce Willis), who is visiting his estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bediela) and their kids in Los Angeles, he gets to spend Christmas Eve battling a dozen bank robbers posing as terrorists in a sealed....
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11/23/07
I love butt jokes. I love farts. I love the color 
green. I love animation. So what's not to like about Shrek? Not much, really, except the fact that Shrek The Third was hit by the Summer 2007 Trilogy Curse. Like Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Shrek The Third stumbled into and out of theaters like a franchise trying to milk its fans for a few more bucks. Sure, the movie was entertaining, but it lost a bit of the personality, uniqueness and flair....
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11/21/07
December 27, 1977. It was my ninth birthday, and I was
about to become a pariah on the playground. How, you may ask? Simple: after seeing Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind with my friend Eric, I proclaimed that I liked the movie more than another sci-fi epic from 1977: Star Wars. Not the most controversial of statements, but for a nine-year old boy in 1977 to say such "incendiary" things to his fellow....
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11/16/07
We finally have it. The monstrous 10-disc Star Trek
Season One Combo Format HD-DVD set. On the surface it's a beauty: a clear outer plastic shell reminiscent of the previous DVD box set opens to reveal a smaller cardboard box housing the discs in a clear plastic case, along with five plastic "cheat sheets" printed with each disc's contents. Classy. Yet despite how "cool" this set looks sitting on a shelf, it's hard not to....
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11/15/07
Cars is one of a trio of Pixar titles, including 
Ratatouille and The Pixar Shorts Collection Volume 1, marking the simultaneous debut for the fabled animation studio on Blu-ray Disc. Like its counterparts, Cars showcases awe-inspiring visuals and audio -- perhaps the best of the bunch given the subject matter full of revving engines and shiny new coats of paint. Unlike the others, though, Cars offers the most impressive uses of interactive....
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11/15/07
In case you're keeping track of such things at home, People Magazine just voted Matt Damon Sexiest Man Alive. His character in Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen, however, exudes everything but machismo, particularly in this latest Las Vegas heist. Now on DVD, Ocean's Thirteen follows the model established in the original Ocean's Eleven with the Rat Pack and resurrected in the like-named movie starring George Clooney....
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11/13/07
I think of three movies when I hear the name
Kevin Costner: Dances with Wolves, Open Range and Tin Cup. Movie quality aside, Costner himself always seemed a bit on the cardboard side, but after watching Mr. Brooks on Blu-ray Disc, my eyes have been opened to Costner's actual ability when given a truly complex character. Similar to The Talented Mr. Ripley, Mr. Brooks tells the story of a psychotic man with a homicidal addiction....
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11/13/07
I suspect some of you are wondering, "why
Hairspray?" What possible reason could New Line have for choosing a remake-turned-musical as the vehicle for their long-awaited arrival in the high definition home video space? Surely not the box office results slightly north of $100 million, which I'd be hard-pressed to believe contained a noteworthy number of early HD adopters. If New Line's extended high-definition debut resulted from....
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11/13/07
When there is no more profit to be made off of
the standard-definition DVD format, the living dead will begin to populate the next-generation DVDs. Zombies have definitely been getting their due on both Blu-ray and HD-DVD over the past few months. Fans of the horror subgenre have been enjoying 1080p upgrades of such flesh-eating epics as Edgar Wright's hilarious Shaun of the Dead, Danny Boyle's chilling 28 Days Later (as well as its....
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11/07/07
The Pixar Shorts Collection, Volume 1 is one
of a trio of Pixar titles, including Ratatouille and Cars, marking the simultaneous debut for the fabled animation studio on Blu-ray Disc. Like Cars and Ratatouille, you've never seen Pixar's stunning work look as good as it does in 1080p high definition, or sound as good as it does in uncompressed PCM audio. This is, to date, the definitive high-def collection of Pixar's history dating back to....
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11/05/07
The terms "Disney" and "computer-animated" generally
inspire thoughts of Pixar, and rightfully so. But before Toy Story, there was Beauty and the Beast, and before Finding Nemo, there was Aladdin. In other words, Disney on its own isn't a stranger to computer-animated films, and the company's latest in that respect, Meet the Robinsons, shows that Disney can still hold its own on the first-party front when it comes to....
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11/02/07
Back in the mid 1980s, when I was a teenager, I 
knew very little about the toy/cartoon phenomenon that was The Transformers. I never saw the cartoon; never had the toys and I definitely did not see the 1986 animated feature. In fact, the only thing I really knew about it were two things: one was that the feature film was the one in which the late Orson Wells played a planet. The other was that the God-awful '80s song "The Touch"....
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10/31/07
Sometimes, when you delve into a steady diet of a particular
thing, you tend to want its polar opposite after a period of time: if you eat nothing but health food for a month, you may have a desire to sneak in a trip to McDonalds. If you read nothing but classic literature, you may find yourself wanting to pick up a comic book or Harry Potter novel. In my case, after recently watching such lightweight movies like Transformers....
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10/30/07
Disney hasn't been shy about releasing its in-house CGI animation projects on Blu-ray Disc over the past year, as the quick arrival of Dinosaurs and Chicken Little have proven. Both of these titles beat traditional hand-animated classics and Pixar films to disc, and now a third, Meet The Robinsons, is poised to do the same. Meet the Robinsons has been in Disney's pipeline for many years now, first primed as a live-action feature....
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10/26/07
For many critics, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A
Space Odyssey is a boring, drawn out portrait of egotistical filmmaking gone awry. For others, it marks the dawn of a new age of creative photo-realistic special effects and operatic science fiction filmmaking. No matter which side of the fence opinions reside, there's no arguing from either camp that 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most beautifully shot films of all time, deserving....
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10/26/07
Tim Kring's Heroes follows the lives of extraordinary people who
boldly go where no ordinary man has gone before. So it's only fitting that Universal Studios Home Entertainment is boldly taking the HD DVD debut of Heroes: Season One where no home video release has gone before. I, like many self-professed geeks, felt the draw of Heroes from the first moment Hiro Nakamura appeared on-screen. Here is....
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10/25/07
Whether you treat Biblical stories as fact, metaphor
or slight exaggeration, there's no denying their enduring qualities and powerful imagery. Among the most vivid and famous of these tales addresses the ten plagues in Egypt, an Old Testament tale that's been debated for longer than most of us have been alive. Warner Home Entertainment's newest Blu-ray release, The Reaping, provides a thrilling and modern take....
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10/23/07
Always one for quality "edutainment," the BBC
has been on a hot streak since its Planet Earth series and the recent release of Galapagos on Blu-ray Disc. With that as a backdrop, the five-disc special edition DVD of The Blue Planet, a BBC production about life in the ocean, is bound to pique viewers' interest. In some respects this is warranted, as The Blue Planet comes "from the producers of Planet Earth" and includes more than 390 minutes....
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10/19/07
MGM's Robocop has been a holy grail of sorts for Blu-ray adopters
over the past 15 months. Once slated for release through MGM's former distribution partner, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, it was shelved on the heels of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment assuming MGM distribution rights. Robocop's high definition debut would have to wait. While Robocop never marched onto store....
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10/19/07
Wow. Ladies and gentlemen of the high-definition jury, this is what 1080p is supposed
to look like. The BBC has been responsible for some impressive programs lately, most famously "Planet Earth," which the Discovery Channel picked up in North America and tragically dubbed with Sigourney Weaver as narrator. In spite of its high quality, the length of the BBC's own five-disc Planet Earth Blu-ray set can be a bit daunting. Almost as if the BBC realized this, it recently released a....
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10/18/07
A few weeks ago, while I was waiting for a showing of The Bourne
Ultimatum to start at a local theater, I noticed that the Rob Zombie-directed remake of Halloween was playing in the auditorium next door. Despite hearing nothing but damning opinions about Zombie's modern-day update of the 1978 John Carpenter classic, I was curious to see if it was actually as bad as everyone had said it was....
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10/16/07
The film 28 Days Later is intriguing for several reasons, not the 
least of which is because it's one of the best pure horror films of the modern era. Sure, it's got its gore and blood and gotcha moments, but above all else, it plays with viewers' emotions in ways that few horror films can. That ability alone -- to elicit emotion amid blood and guts -- is indicative of the film's genre-busting power. As a Blu-ray Disc....
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10/16/07
The summer 2007 movie season included several high-profile
disappointments, most notably the "big three" trilogy-closers, Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek and Spider-Man. None of the movies was bad, per se, but none really lived up to the hype and hope created by the first two films in its respective series. With the upcoming Blu-ray Disc of Spider-Man 3, Sony Pictures has an opportunity to get Spidey fans' senses tingling once....
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10/08/07
The last time I really got into the horror genre on TV, Tales
from the Crypt was running strong on HBO, and the Crypt Keeper was such a veritable celebrity that he could be found hawking Halloween-themed wares on network stations. Once that series lost its luster, horror as a genre didn't start to go strong again on the small screen until Showtime debuted its Masters of Horror series. Having not seen the series on Showtime, I was....
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10/08/07
In the world of videogames, it's a common cliche that
developers and publishers never met a WWII premise they didn't like. More-recent wars, however, have remained largely off limits. Hollywood has taken a similar approach, although several films have teased modern affairs such as the Gulf War and, more recently, the attacks of September 11. Reign Over Me is one such experiment, a film that tries to inject a story of healing with the....
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10/08/07
With all the attention Disney is paying to the Blu-ray Disc
format (hello, Magical Blu-ray Tour), it'd be easy to think the company would forget about the DVD format. But while there's no denying Disney's investment in the Blu-ray format, the company is still standing staunchly behind its DVD releases, as evidenced by the Jungle Book 40th Anniversary Platinum Edition DVD, which boasts one of the best bonus-feature lineups in recent....
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10/04/07
The first half of the 2007 summer movie season somewhat...well, 
sucked. Insufferable cinematic colostomy bags such as Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Ocean's Thirteen and The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer were about as fresh as month-old bread and as entertaining as a tax audit. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End was an enormous mess as well, but it was one you couldn't take your eyes off of. If anything, I....
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10/02/07
There's a reason films like George Romero's Day of the 
Dead are known as cult classics. Whether it's the crazy special effects, the campy acting or the oddly timeless minor characters, Romero's films have struck such an undead chord that even Bub the zombie, who only has three words of non-grunting dialogue, has his own fans. To fans of Bub and his Day of the Dead brethren, today's Blu-ray Disc release of Day of the Dead is....
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10/01/07
Bram Stoker's Dracula is a fantastic movie filmed
using late 19th-century filmmaking techniques. To understand that sentence is to understand this classic film's anticipated Blu-ray Disc release. Of all the Halloween-themed Blu-ray releases this month, few have been met with the same anticipation and audio/visual controversy as this Francis Ford Coppola classic. The reasons are two-fold: first, because the film....
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09/28/07
There are three things you can count on in life: death, taxes and Anchor Bay
continually issuing new home-video versions of their marquee titles. Whether the lure is a newly produced featurette or heinous smelling latex Necronomicom Ex Mortis replica book cover, fans of the Sam Raimi written/directed cult classic Evil Dead II cannot resist snatching up any new incarnation. In order to snag the fourth version, honorary Deadites....
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09/27/07
The third season of Numb3rs ended just four months
ago, and already fans can re-live the pivotal third outing with the six-disc Numb3rs: The Third Season DVD collection. Last season covered a lot of ground between the months of September and May, and many fans new to the series will appreciate the quick refresher that this compilation provides. From an agent kidnapping to the investigation of a polygamist cult to a standoff with....
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09/26/07
Greetings, Starfighter. Those two words from The Last Starfighter perk
up the ears of any 30-something privy to the 1980s rash of science fiction films in their heyday. They also recall a historical milestone in filmmaking where a small effects company pioneered the use of computers to create near photo-realistic digital effects in a theatrical picture. No film had attempted the feat prior, not even the original Star Wars trilogy. It was a....
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09/25/07
When Babel hit theaters in 2006, it hit the movie-going world 
like a surprising and critically acclaimed storm. The movie's three distinct yet connected stories each told an emotional tale that few people saw coming, and the Golden Globes and Academy Awards both recognized the film with a Best Picture award and nomination, respectively. Yet the movie's original DVD release met with much less acclaim. In a world of....
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09/25/07
It's not often that you encounter a DVD whose name is the first thing
that comes to mind once the credits start rolling. But with Next, which releases on DVD today, that's exactly what you get: an experience that'll have you saying "next, please" once the screen fades to black. With a plot that's cool in concept but poorly executed, a DVD release such as Next had better have some good bonus features. Unfortunately, the release falters there, as....
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09/22/07
With countless catalog performances to choose from, RCA Records wisely 
selected a day-and-date with DVD release of Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds: Live at Radio Music City Hall to kick off their high-definition home video era exclusively on Blu-ray Disc. I saw "wisely," because this is one hell of a show and has acoustics and a grand stage perfectly suited for a premier audio/video presentation. I've always been a casual Dave Matthews....
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09/19/07
First penguins marched across snowy icecaps in March of the 
Penguins. Then they donned dancing shoes in Happy Feet. Now the slippery tuxedo-coated birds are hitting the waves in a bid for the high definition trifecta in Sony Animation Studio's Surf's Up, the first penguin-filled release exclusive in high definition to Blu-ray Disc. Surf's Up is simultaneously a completely unoriginal and groundbreaking film. Anyone who has....
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09/16/07
If a director can get one motion picture out in a year
that is a hit with both critics and the general public, that is considered a great success. But when they manage to get two all-around pleasing blockbusters within a twelve-month period, then that is something really worth noting. Very few have had this type of double whammy: Francis Ford Coppola had a year like that in 1974 with The Conversation and The Godfather Part II, and....
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09/15/07
Next marks Paramount's second HD-DVD exclusive high-definition title following Blades of Glory and last new theatrical release by the studio until the third HD-DVD title destined to trump them all, Transformers. On paper, Next reads like a slam dunk hit: Nicholas Cage playing yet another reluctant hero, Cris, with the ability to see two minutes into his own future; a shimmering wet Jessica Biel in a towel; Julianne Moore trying to be tough....
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08/06/07
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is one of the last 1980's properties 
I expected to be resurrected from the dead, much less in a completely different medium and as a pseudo-sequel to the previous theatrical films. Yet when the first footage of brothers Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello and Michaelangelo hit the Internet in the form of a trailer, I immediately began to salivate at the thought of TMNT coming home in high definition on...
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07/31/07
I've been a space geek for as long as my memory goes back. Space Ghost,
Star Trek, Star Wars, Buck Rogers in the 21st Century, Battlestar Galactica ... really, the list goes on of all the space-based shows I've loved. As a result, Buena Vista Home Entertainment's decision to bring the Roving Mars IMAX film to DVD was a bit of a dream come true. That sounds cliche, I know, but it's true. On this DVD, when the marketing blurb says "you'll feel what it's like to stand on the startling surface of [Mars]," it really...
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