Category: External Movie DVDs (Page 7 of 74)

Back to “Back to the Future”

October 26, 2010 / Bob Westal

It’s the 25th anniversary of the science fiction comedy from Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. As you might also expect, a 3-disc Blu-Ray set is also hitting stores today featuring the original film and it’s two-sequels.

So, to go with Will Harris’s interview with Gale which includes some more interesting casting details in addition to the ones you’ve probably already heard about, Universal has made available a series of short clips from yesterday’s press conference at New York’s Waldorf Hotel featuring a lot of the cast — Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, and Mary Steenburgen (from “Back to the Future 3”) but not Crispin Glover — as well as Gale and Zemeckis. A lot of them are very brief and I would have been happier if they’d edited it into one clip, but you take what you can get.

We’ve got a bunch of more these after the flip for you diehard “Future” fans.

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The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms

October 25, 2010 / Bob Westal

Don’t let the title fool you. While some of the actors from the earlier “Five Deadly Venoms” do indeed turn up in this bit of vintage 1978 Hong Kong action cinema from the Shaw Brothers — the Warner Brothers of Eastern exploitation cinema — this movie is not a sequel and was originally titled “Crippled Avengers,” which was more accurate but also a bit politically incorrect for the current market. I’m sure “Disabled Avengers” or “Differently Abled Avengers” didn’t have quite the same ring. Still, differently abled our heroes truly are as one by one they are wantonly dismembered, blinded, rendered deaf and dumb and, in one bit of impressive kung fu, deprived of roughly 50 IQ points. Naturally, working as a team, these avengers are able to overcome their disabilities for, really, the only good reason there is to overcome one’s disabilities — avenging! The action here doesn’t have quite the finesse and artistry of the Bruce Lee films or the great costume extravaganzas of the late 80s and early 90s, and director Chang Cheh allows the often comically melodramatic story to lose a lot of steam, but the action is consistently well staged and delivers the ass-kicking goods. The main bad guy — himself a disabled avenger of sorts — even sports some kung fu gadgetry that appears to have come out of the 19th century Chinese equivalent of Q branch.

Click to buy “The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms”

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Chang Cheh Crippled Avengers Shaw Brothers The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms review

Beauty and the Beast: Diamond Edition

October 5, 2010 / David Medsker

They have made many phenomenally successful movies since its release, but “Beauty and the Beast” remains Disney’s last true masterpiece. The combination of story, design, songbook, performance and technical achievement is unparalleled by any animated film of its time or since. The computer animation, a very dodgy art form in the early ’90s, still looks spectacular today. We’d challenge anyone to take modern-day equipment and a better-looking ballroom scene than the one here.

Disney’s Diamond Edition of the film is absolutely worth the upgrade, both for the hi-def transfer and the bushels of new extras. The audio commentary is held over from the original DVD release, but all-new interviews were shot for the featurettes, even roping in Jeffrey Katzenberg to go on the record. Alan Menken sits down at the piano with producer Don Hahn and discusses the origins of several of the movie’s songs, even admitting that the final music for “Be Our Guest” was a throwaway track for lyricist Howard Ashman to use as a base until he came up with a “real” track. Menken also includes his original score that he wrote just before Beast’s transformation, and the studio adds the original opening to the movie, a 20-minute (!) piece where Belle has a younger sister and a cat, and Gaston is a wig-wearing fop. It’s fascinating to watch in retrospect, because the studio was right to scrap this opening and start from scratch. There is also a pencil sketch version of “Be Our Guest,” as sung to Belle’s father. A fitting tribute to a truly game-changing film.

Click to buy “Beauty and the Beast: Diamond Edition”

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Killers

September 8, 2010 / Jason Zingale

When the ads for Robert Luketic’s “Killers” started appearing in theaters, a lot of people were quick to notice the similarities to another husband-wife action comedy, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.” But while it certainly sounds like a clone of the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie film on the surface, “Killers” should be so lucky to be considered in the same company. Katherine Heigl stars as Jen Kornfeldt, a recently single woman on vacation in France with her parents when she meets the seemingly ordinary Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher) and the pair get hitched. What Spencer fails to tell her is that he used to be an assassin for the CIA, and although he’s since walked away from the job in order to lead a normal life, a bounty has been put on his head that sends a sleeper unit of contract killers posing as their neighbors and co-workers to take him out.

Unfortunately, Heigl and Kutcher just don’t have the chemistry needed to make a movie like this work, and I would have loved to have seen what other actors (like maybe real-life couple Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson) could have done in the roles. Of course, that wouldn’t change the fact that the film’s biggest flaw is the explanation as to why the bounty has been put on Spencer’s head in the first place – a twist ending so absurd that it makes the rest of the movie seem even dumber than it is. “Killers” still has a few good moments (including a cameo by a certain bestselling R&B musician that’s so out of left field it’s actually pretty funny), but they’re not enough to save it from the film’s own half-baked plot.

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Angelina Jolie Ashton Kutcher Brad Pitt Katherine Heigl Killers Killers review Mr. & Mrs. Smith Robert Luketic

Hard days at the office #5: Business language and Ms. Brockovich

September 6, 2010 / Bob Westal

I could have gone in a lot of different and rather obvious directions for the last entry in this series of clips from work-related movies, “Office Space” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” being but two of the more obvious possibilities. However, when it comes to productions that really capture the feeling of struggling to get a job in the real world, and then keeping it and balancing it with other commitments, Steven Soderbergh’s deceptively modest “Erin Brockovich” is one of the very few that really seems to get it.

I would have edited this series of clips a lot differently, but it does give a feeling for the movie. (If you remember “Erin Brockovich” at all you’ll know this is NSFW. Actually, if you put up a camera in most offices and then ran it on YouTube, it would probably be NSFW.)