The World’s End Blu-ray Review

Actors: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan

Director: Edgar Wright

Writers: Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright

Producers: Nira Park, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner

Format: Color, Widescreen

Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo), English (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1), Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.1), Spanish (DTS 5.1)

Subtitles: Spanish , English  

Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

Number of discs: 2

Rated: R (Restricted)

Studio: Universal Studios

Release Date: November 19, 2013

Run Time: 218 minutes

 

 

        Apocalypse films have riddled our cinemas in the last decade, but in a surprising turn of events some of the most successful of this summer have been comedies. This is the End was as Hollywood as possible, while the somewhat similarly titled The World’s End is the final film in the extremely popular British films directed by Edgar Wright. The World’s End is the final film in the Cornetto Trilogy (also known as the ‘Blood and Ice Cream’ Trilogy), which began with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

 

        Keeping true to the themes of male friendship paired with a melancholy about youth lost, The World’s End is a fitting end to the trilogy. Simon Pegg serves as our narrator, and the film’s most volatile and unpredictable character, Gary King. Struggling to adjust to the idea of being an adult as he reaches middle-age, King convinces his former cohorts of youth (Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan and Paddy Considine) for a return visit down memory lane. They attempt a pub crawl 20 years after they failed it the first time, and somehow become entangled in a robotic overtaking of sorts.

 

Grabbers DVD Review

Actors: Richard Coyle, Ruth Bradley

Director: Jon Wright

Format: Color, NTSC, Widescreen

Language: English

Number of discs: 1

Rated: Unrated

Studio: MPI HOME VIDEO

DVD Release Date: November 12, 2013

Run Time: 94 minutes

 

 

        Grabbers makes a perfect viewing companion to Edgar Wright’s The World’s End, as both provide a plot that allows its characters to get increasingly drunk as a means of survival from an otherworldly attack. In The World’s End it is done through robots and a body snatcher narrative, whereas Grabbers utilizes the creature feature storyline, with intoxication being the one available means of defense. Horror and comedy are balanced with the use of inebriation, adding more absurdity to a purposefully campy film.

 

        The film takes place on a small fishing village on an island off the coast of Ireland, where police officer Ciaran O’Shea (Richard Coyle) is able to drink himself into a stupor while carrying out his menial tasks within the community. The arrival of a straight-laced officer named Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) only highlights the state in which O’Shea has let himself go. When a mysteriously unidentifiable squid-like creature is discovered in a lobster trap, it is all the reason O’Shea needs to stop drinking. Ironically, it also requires that everyone else starts drinking, for their own safety.

 

Dealin’ with Idiots DVD Review

Actors: Gina Gershon, Jeff Garlin, Steve Agree

Directors: Jeff Garlin

Format: Color, NTSC, Widescreen

Language: English

Number of discs: 1

Rated: Unrated

Studio: MPI HOME VIDEO

DVD Release Date: November 12, 2013

Run Time: 87 minutes

 

 

        Dealin’ with Idiots works as a film because of how much of the material was obviously taken from personal experience. Some people are so strange in their behavior and attitudes that meeting them leaves any sane person in disbelief. This film is filled with characters inspire by these real-life lunatics we all encounter on a daily basis, like it or not.

 

        Jeff Garlin directs this highly improvised comedy about the dysfunctional personality types infecting a children’s little league team. Hilariously enough, the children are hardly more than props in the film’s storyline. This is much more about the over-enthusiastic adults living vicariously through their child’s success on the baseball field. Nearly everyone takes the game far too seriously, counterbalanced by the laid-back comedian protagonist played by Garlin himself.

 

Breaking the Girls DVD Review

Actors: Agnes Bruckner, Madeline Zima

Director: Jamie Babbit

Format: Color, NTSC, Widescreen

Language: English

Number of discs: 1

Rated: Unrated

Studio: MPI HOME VIDEO

DVD Release Date: November 19, 2013

Run Time: 87 minutes

 

 

        I hated this movie. I hated it so much that I repeatedly stopped watching it out of anger at the filmmaker for assuming such a low-level of stupidity from the audience that nearly every sequence is flawed from every possible aspect considered. The basic plot is asinine and unoriginal, the dialogue is atrociously bad, the characters are poorly developed with no continuity to their behavior and actions, and the way every single scene is framed, shot and edited made me want to take the disc out of my player and eat it just so that I would be able to vomit this piece of shit out in a toilet where it belongs. Because it is worth saying one more time; I hated this movie.

 

        The plot hardly seems worth describing, because all logic is thrown out the window in order to make events occur within each scene and in the grander scheme of the narrative. There is hardly a believable moment in the entire film, from the manner with which characters are killed to the absolute lack of police work done by detectives investigating them. This film makes Wild Things look like a masterpiece. Compared to this film, Throw Mama From the Train was a brilliant adaptation of the Strangers on a Train narrative. Even worse is the film’s attempt to cash in on lesbian fantasies, while making villains out of the film’s homosexuals and heroes out of the heterosexuals. Director Jamie Babbit made a humorous profound statement with But I’m Cheerleader, but destroys all of that work with the impressively tactless screenplay by Mark Distefano and Guinevere Turner.

 

New to Blu-ray: The Message (1977)

Director:  Moustapha Akkad

Language: English

Subtitles: Spanish

Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1

Number of discs: 1

Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay

Release Date: November 12, 2013

 

 

        When the backing for The Message vanished mid-production, it was Libyan leader Muammar al Gaddafi who ended up financing the film, as well Moustapha Akkad’s next and final film, Lion of the Desert. Although Lion of the Desert was the bigger failure, The Message was a much bigger risk. It attempts to tell the story of the prophet Mohammed and the birth of the Islamic faith while keeping in accordance with Muslim belief, which does not allow a depiction of the man on film.

 

        The character of Mohammed is often portrayed as the camera, and we are his point-of-view as other discuss issues around him, though a fight sequence is attempted without showing more than a sword. Since not even his wives or sons could be shown onscreen, the character of his uncle, Hamza (Anthony Quinn), became the main character in the film. This actually works quite well, despite the awkwardness of the scenes where actors were forced to pretend to listen to unspoken dialogue, as not even the prophet’s voice was permitted to be imitated.

 

New to Blu-ray: Lion of the Desert (1981)

Director: Moustapha Akkad

Language: English

Subtitles: Spanish

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

Number of discs: 1

Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay

DVD Release Date: November 12, 2013

Run Time: 156 minutes

 

 

        Lion of the Desert is actually a rather good epic, taken in the vein of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and other epics from the 1960s. The biggest problem is that this film doesn’t seem to have grown any in the two decades since epics such as this had passed in popularity, and that may be why it resulted in one of the largest financial disasters in cinematic history. Costing 35 million dollars to make, it only made 1 million worldwide, banked by Libya’s own dictator, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi.

 

        Behind all of the interesting film history is a movie which is often quite entertaining, if not a bit long and over-ambitious. The film’s main focus of the film is the guerilla warfare waged by Omar Mukhtar (Anthony Quinn) and his followers, Bedouin patriots in Libya fighting the Italian colonization in 1929 by Dictator Benito Mussolini. In an effort to get rid of the pesky resistance fighters, General Rodolfo Graziana (Oliver Reed) is appointed as sixth Governor to Libya. Despite an army of men and brilliant minds attempting to stop him, Mukhtar is able to become a menace to the Italian army by evading them in the deserts and mountains.

City Lights Blu-ray Review

Actors: Charlie Chaplin

Directors: Charlie Chaplin

Format: Black & White, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled

Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1

Number of discs: 2

Rated: R

Studio: Criterion Collection

Release Date: November 12, 2013

Run Time: 86 minutes

City Lights

 

        My three-year-old nephew has recently become obsessed with Spider-man, so much that he is now rarely seen without his own costume and mask. My sister-in-law has been adamant about which version of the comic book super-hero her young son is permitted to watch, with only a classic 80s cartoon being non-violent enough for his malleable mind. We are careful about how we expose children to ideas, whether in setting examples as role models or by giving them proper ones for heroes. Not that my nephew is likely to have spider-like abilities in the future, but if he did I am certain that he would choose to wrap bad guys in web rather than harm them.

 

        But how can I be certain that our entertainment can even have that kind of effect on behavior and character? The answer to that question lies in City Lights; a comedic romance in pantomime by Charles Chaplin, made years after silent films had become a thing of the past. City Lights may not be Chaplin’s best film, and it is far from his funniest, but I have it listed as my favorite because of the last five minutes of the film. Even with nearly two decades passing between viewings, I still had those final images burned into my brain. I loved Chaplin as a child. He was my hero, and those final five minutes taught me how to love. Within the deepest fibers of my soul is a tattered bowler hat in search of a rose to be plucked from the gutter.

 

2 Guns Blu-ray Review

Actors: Denzel Washington, Mark Wahlberg, Paula Patton, Bill Paxton, James Marsden

Director: Baltasar Kormakur

Writer: Blake Masters

Producers: Marc Platt, Randall Emmett, Norton Herrick, Adam Siegel, George Furla

Format: Color, Widescreen

Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo), English (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (DTS 5.1), Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.1), Spanish (DTS 5.1)

Subtitles: French, Spanish, English

Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1

Rated: R

Studio: Universal Studios

Release Date: November 19, 2013

Run Time: 220 minutes

 

 

        I can never have enough buddy cop movies, and 2 Guns is easily one of the best to come out of Hollywood in a great long while. It was so perfectly aligned with the formula for the sub-genre that I felt inspired to have a Lethal Weapon marathon after watching 2 Guns. There are few surprises in 2 Guns, but it serves its purpose with expert marksmanship. The jokes land and the bullets fly with tenacity and confidence that can only come from a truly skilled director and a cast so talented that their performances always appear natural.

 

         Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur proved his abilities with suspenseful action with the surprising first-quarter release, Contraband, which has an action hero of sorts (played by Mark Wahlberg) who doesn’t use a gun to accomplish his goals. 2 Guns puts a gun in just about everybody’s hand, and blows up most of the vehicles in the film. There is a great deal of action, predictable twists and turns and very little original. Pair this with the dynamic performances by co-stars Wahlberg and Denzel Washington, practical effects and minimal CGI  and you have the formula for a summer blockbuster better than all of the assortments of super-hero films.

 

Parkland Blu-ray Review

Actors: Zac Efron, Marcia Gay Harden, Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton, Jacki Weaver

Directors: Peter Landesman

Format: Color, NTSC, Widescreen

Language: English

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

Rated: PG-13

Studio: Millennium

Release Date: November 5, 2013

Run Time: 87 minutes

 

 

        I was left with something of a bad taste in my mouth when I realized that the release of Parkland, Peter Landesman’s film about the events following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, happens to coincide with the 50^th Anniversary of the tragic day. The Blu-ray release of this new film is perfectly set up for release in November, the month our departed president took that fateful trip to Texas, as is a Blu-ray special edition release of Oliver Stone’s JFK. I can't commend their ability to cash in on an anniversary to sell more copies of films about a tragedy, though I suppose it doesn't make much difference after half a century.

 

        Landesman takes an approach which could not be much different from Stone’s, making no effort to find any hidden truths about the events of the day, nor make any statements of any significance. The tragedy is diminished to pure melodrama, albeit with characters taken from real events. However accurate, one must wonder what the point of this film is beyond forcing the moment of anguish upon those who weren’t alive to experience it themselves.

 

Throwback Thursday Review: Adventureland

Actors: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds, Kelsey Ford, Michael Zegen

Director: Greg Mottola

Writer: Greg Mottola

Producers: Anne Carey, Bruce Toll, Declan Baldwin, Scott Ferguson, Sidney Kimmel

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

Rated: R (Restricted)

Studio: Miramax Lionsgate

Release Date: 2011

Run Time: 107 minutes

 

 

        Adventureland captures the essence of twenty-something reality in showing the inevitability of compromise and sacrifice of life after college. Hopes, dreams and ideals are endangered species in the real world, and this is apparent in nothing more than a summer job. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) plans on taking a trip to Europe before starting graduate school, but when he discovers that his father has been laid off, the graduate is forced to get a summer job instead, simply with the hope that he will be able to afford further schooling.

 

        Unlike Waiting, the restaurant comedy, Adventureland shows a sweeter and more realistic view of a crappy job. Most of the time it is boring, and what amusement there is to be found can usually be found in co-workers. The theme park is run by enthusiastic couple, Bobby and Paulette (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig), maintained by the heartthrob married handyman, Connell (Ryan Reynolds), though James learns how the amusement park really works through the help of another co-worker (played by Martin Starr) who seems too intelligent to be working fixed games at a glorified carnival.