Also, check out my most recent reviews and all the DVDs I’ve reviewed.
| Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas | Reviewed 5/24/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 9 |
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| Perhaps the purest of Thompson’s searches for the American Dream because it is untainted by politics; or perhaps the most pointless for the same reason, and politics have tainted the American Dream since the Adams anti-sedition acts almost as soon as the country was born.
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| The Wizard of Oz | Reviewed 11/27/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 9 |
| This is a wonderful transfer of the 1939 classic musical. If you missed the 1998 re-release to the theaters, you’ve almost certainly never seen this movie this good. And the disk itself is chock full of wonderful extras. MGM’s “The Wizard of Oz” DVD is a great buy.
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| A Star is Born | Reviewed 10/9/2000 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 9 |
| Probably Judy Garland’s best movie, released in 1954 with James Mason, directed by George Cukor (of “Philadelphia Story”) and produced by none other than her husband. Production values are high, acting is top-notch, and the singing is Judy Garland. The DVD has a few nice extras also.
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| Detroit Rock City | Reviewed 3/31/2001 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 9 |
| Four Cleveland high school kids ditch school in 1978 to see KISS at Cobo Hall in Detroit. Along the way they pick up Natasha Lyonne. What a trip!
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| Almost Famous | Reviewed 1/15/2002 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 9 |
| This is the best DVD I’ve seen yet. It has not one, not two, but three discs: the third disc is a CD with music by Stillwater, including the Led Zeppelin-like “Fever Dogs”. Thought the snippets of that song was cool, it was too bad they didn’t write the whole thing? Fret no more, they did write the whole thing, and at least five other songs, all on the CD.
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| Hobbit | Reviewed 5/24/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
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| The Ruling Class | Reviewed 10/24/2002 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| When Jack’s aunt asks him how he knows he’s God, Jack replies, “Simple. When I pray I find I’m talking to myself.”
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| Casablanca | Reviewed 5/29/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| Ah, Play it, Sam! If this isn’t the most-quoted movie outside of Macbeth, you’re in the wrong country. This is a beautiful DVD. The movie is presented in the original full-screen format. Languages are French and English, both spoken and subtitled. It also includes a nice documentary hosted by Lauren Bacall.
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| Pleasantville | Reviewed 6/19/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| Brother and sister fight over a remote control given them by Don Knotts and end up in a fifties black and white television show. Moral: never accept gifts from Barney Fife.
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| The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert | Reviewed 6/22/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| Wild outfits, ping-pong balls, ABBA, and not a single kangaroo in sight. Priscilla involves three drag queens from Sydney driving a huge bus across some great Australian desert to a three-week gig at a tourist trap. Beautiful views of the desert. Wonderful costuming. The DVD is presented in both letterbox (2.35:1) and pan & scan, with English or French dialog and English and Spanish subtitles. The case slides out the bottom instead of opening up, and the DVD is not as easy to remove as it should be. Currently out of print, unfortunately. Hopefully it’ll come back with an Anamorphic transfer and commentary? More... | |||
| Groundhog Day | Reviewed 8/8/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| Bill Murray gets stuck reliving the same day over and over again: Groundhog’s Day in a hick town in Pennsylvania. Every morning at six o’clock he wakes up to the sound of Sonny & Cher, and every day the same things happen over and over again until he takes control.
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| The Matrix | Reviewed 10/15/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| Wow! People are already talking about this movie as the new Star Wars, and they may not be wrong; the future will decide. It has all the right elements: action, story, mythical heroes, perhaps an overemphasis on the messiah bit, but otherwise a kick-ass movie.
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| Halloween | Reviewed 10/12/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| The first really good screamer flick I saw. Jamie Lee Curtis kicks butt! I’ve got this one on order. Note that the unlimited edition is less expensive, and doesn’t include the television presentation and its extra footage. It does contain most of the other extras, if not all of them.
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| The Blues Brothers | Reviewed 10/26/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| The Blues Brothers is a brilliant comedy slash musical with great blues music. Director John Landis set out to include musical numbers--all with blues--covering all the possible musical number ‘types’ that had been used in movies up to that time. The DVD includes longer footage from some of the performances, as well as previously deleted scenes. This is a “collector’s edition”, not a “director’s cut”, and at least one of the scenes that is restored is also ridiculed by the director in the very interesting and detailed “making of” feature. This DVD is presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) with English, Spanish, and French dialog and subtitles. For some reason, the DVD has disabled the ability to mark your place and come back to it later. More... | |||
| The Philadelphia Story | Reviewed 10/8/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn. Suave at its best. James Stewart runs away with it. The movie was originally a play, and Katherine Hepburn got the movie rights and got George Cukor to direct. What’s to tell about the story? Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn play an upper-crust ex-couple, and James Stewart and Ruth Hussey play the working class reporters covering their story. The DVD is presented in the original full-frame format, in English, with English, French, and Spanish subtitles. More... | |||
| Animal House | Reviewed 10/18/1999 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| The most riotous and influential movie of my generation. Geez, but that’s disgusting. This was one of the first movies I ever saw in the theatre, possibly the first movie. My dad took me to see it when I was about fourteen--and after seeing some of the nudity, just said “we don’t need to tell your mom about those scenes”. Me, I didn’t care so much about the nudity. I was hooked on John Belushi’s craziness. The “making of” section of this DVD is fabulous! It combines interviews with director Landis and many of the original cast and really gives us some fun insight into how the movie came about and how it was filmed. The DVD is presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1), with English, Spanish, and French dialog and subtitles. Watching Flounder and Pinto in Spanish in the opening sequence is a cheap thrill worth trying at least once. For some reason, the “remember where you left off” feature doesn’t work on this DVD. More... | |||
| Dead By Dawn | Reviewed 9/16/2000 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| Ash is unable to escape after his first night, and ends up spending another night in the cabin in the woods... along with a strange archaeologist’s daughter. Sam Raimi makes another funny gorefest.
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| The Apostle | Reviewed 8/15/2000 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| Robert Duvall is a “holiness preacher” in Texas and Louisiana. With wonderful performances by Duvall, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Bob Thornton, June Carter Cash, Miranda Richardson, and a number of “found” actors, this movie is not to be missed.
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| Mallrats | Reviewed 8/17/2000 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| This is Kevin Smith’s sequel to “Clerks”, with a massively bigger budget but still tiny compared to other movies. (He wanted to reduce the budget to lower than six million, and the studio told him they weren’t allowed to make a movie for less than that.) I’m not sure why, but it apparently bombed. It’s a funny movie. If you’re a Marvel Comics fan from the eighties, or if you just liked “Clerks”, check it out.
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| This is Spinal Tap | Reviewed 10/8/2000 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| This take-off on bands like Queen worked pretty well, although some of the satirical songs didn’t even go as far overboard as the originals did. Yeah, I know they were supposed to be just ‘bad’, but there’s nothing so pretend bad that you can’t find something worse done for real. But make no mistake: this is a hilarious rock-and-roll send-up, and a great DVD.
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| Blade | Reviewed 4/4/2001 | Purchase | Overall Rating: 8 |
| The best modern vampire movie I’ve seen, this is not a horror movie at all: it’s an adventure, related as much to comic books as to movies. And it’s almost an early “screen test” for “The Matrix”, related to “The Matrix” through “Dark City” and Hong Kong action films. This is an action film. You know right from the first scene that this movie is here to show asses being kicked.
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The rating scale runs from 1 to 10, with 10 being a great movie (or DVD, or feature, or transfer), one being horrible.
There are two sections for the review. A “capsule” review, and then a more in-depth review. The in-depth review may contain spoilers. You are hereby warned.
Recommendation: If the recommendation says “rent”, the link is to NetFlix.Com; if the recommendation says “purchase”, the link is to Amazon.Com. I use NetFlix because they are the only on-line DVD rental place I’ve used, and they are very good. If you know of another on-line DVD rental site, let me know and I’ll check around on Usenet to see how good they are.
I use Amazon because they pretty much guarantee that the links I make will always work. Amazon also pays me every time you buy something by hitting one of my links; this does not affect my recommendation: I do not recommend that you purchase anything that I haven’t already purchased or plan to purchase imminently. I would have to sell about 20 items to break even in this manner, which doesn’t happen. It makes no sense for me to recommend a purchase when I don’t really mean it.
Talk About it: This links to Usenet discussion messages, people talking about the movie on Usenet. Usenet is the major discussion area on the net. Not only are the best and most wide-ranging discussions there, but the best tools exist for reading Usenet. I find that I can easily handle Usenet discussions that are ten, twenty, or even a hundred times more active than e-mail or web-based discussions. This is because the management tools, such as MT Newswatcher on the Macintosh, make it very easy for me to filter the interesting from the uninteresting.
I also provide three other sources for on-line reviews, just because I like reading other people’s reviews, and I think you will too: Usenet reviews, DVDFile reviews, and IMDB Reviews.
Movie Details: The Internet Movie Database is a wonderful resource for movie information. It includes information about the DVDs, about the cast, about the movie itself, and includes reviews from people on the net, and trivia about the movie: goofs, quotes; and it allows you to update the information if you know something about the movie that isn’t listed.
Cast Listing: A direct link to the cast listing for this movie on the Internet Movie Database.
Last Memo Enabled: DVD has the ability to let you watch a movie partway, take it out, and then start from where you left off. On my Pioneer, this is called “Last Memo”. A large number of DVD discs have disabled this feature, which is a shame, and really detracts from the usefulness of DVD. This is, after all, something that VHS does naturally: if you take a VHS tape out, and then put it back in tomorrow, it will start from where it left off. I find that when I get home from the office and start making dinner, I’m much more likely to pop in a DVD that has Last Memo enabled. To make it easier, I’ve listed all the movies that are both enhanced widescreen and last memo enabled.
Features: DVDs often have features besides the movie itself. The trailer is often included; and commentary about the movie, interviews with the cast, etc. I’ve rated these features 1 to 10, with 1 being practically worthless, 10 being a superior feature.
Format: DVDs can play back in a number of formats. The best is “widescreen anamorphic” which will play back on both widescreen and normal televisions. The second best is “letterbox”, which plays back the full theatrical release of the movie. Finally, there is “pan and scan”, which chops off the sides of the movie so that it ‘fits’ on a normal television. With Pan & Scan you are almost always missing important parts of the movie. If you do not have a widescreen TV when watching letter box and widescreen, you’ll see black bars at the top and bottom of your screen. This is simply because movies are wider than televisions, and in order to show you the full movie, the movie has to be shrunk top to bottom to show the full movie left to right. If the black bars bother you, make sure that DVDs you purchase have both letterbox/widescreen and pan & scan. To make it easier, I’ve listed all the movies that are both enhanced widescreen and last memo enabled.
“Widescreen Anamorphic” has the ability to play a pan & scan version as well for those who prefer (perhaps on smaller televisions) to have the picture fill the screen. However, most discs do not enable this feature. If I notice that this feature of Widescreen Anamorphic is enabled, I’ll mention it. It sounds like a great idea that could save a lot of space on DVDs that can then be used to include other features. (It would be even better if widescreen included the full area, and the pan & scan was then able to pan up and down--and we could set our own matting.)
Some older movies were never made in a wide, panoramic version. To differentiate between these movies and chopped movies, I’ll call them “Academy Format”. A movie listed as Academy Format is the full theatrical release; a movie listed as pan and scan is a chopped movie.
Unskippable Openers: Some movies can have annoying openers that they do not let you skip. Sometimes there can be up to three or more of these that you are forced to watch with every movie. On a DVD, this is silly. I can see having a skippable studio opener, but putting an FBI warning, or worse, an FBI warning, a couple of advertisements, a studio opener, and a manufacturer opener is showing a profound lack of understanding about the nature of digital entertainment.
The Obligatory Anti-DIVX Editorial
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