The Ultimate DVD Geek By Douglas PrattPratt@moviecitynews.com
Batman: The Movie
The more time that passes, the more the 1966Batman The Movie begins to seem like a comical masterpiece, or perhaps a masterpiece in a category all of its own. Originally a summertime knock-off of the enormously successful winter replacement first season of the television series starring Adam Westand Burt Ward, the 105-minute feature concocted a serviceable…
Read the full article »Rambo
Running just 80 minutes (the end credits take it to 91),Sylvester Stallone’s 2008 Rambo effectively has no third act, but the first two are more than enough. With CG-enhanced gore littering the screen with body parts, and a basic go-in-and-rescue-the-missionaries plot, the film is not just ideal for endless repeat viewings by action fans, it raises…
Read the full article »The Andromeda Strain
Although there is never a moment in the 2008 miniseries adaptation of The Andromeda Strain from Universal that provokes laughter or eye-rolling incredulity, the script is not very good and the film is generally unsatisfying. While the show follows the basic outline of the Michael Crichton bestseller and the entertaining 1971 Robert Wise film adaptation, whenever it tries…
Read the full article »Youth Without Youth
Francis Ford Coppola’s lovely intellectual comic book fantasy, Youth without Youth, is presented as a captivating DVD release by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. To begin with, the 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound is fantastic. Its hyper-dimensionality and directional effects significantly enhance a viewer’s involvement with the film’s atmosphere and environment. The sound is then supported by Mihai Malaimare,…
Read the full article »The Golden Compass: Lost Bearings
When was the last time a movie broke your heart? It happened to me 45 seconds into the New Line Home Entertainment Widescreen release, The Golden Compass , as a voiceover narration proceeded to explain in itemized fashion almost every mystery the narrative holds. Yes, the 2007 film was co-produced with Scholastic and comes in a…
Read the full article »Superbad
..MCN DVD Wrap ..The DVD Page Except that the heroes act much more like high school sophomores than seniors, even nerdy seniors,Superbad, doesn’t cop out the way the other 2007 comedy that shared a number of creators and cast members, Knocked Up did, and is a riotously amusing nighttown adventure, similar in a lot of ways…
Read the full article »National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets
Only a grouch could seriously dislike the high-energy adventure fantasy, National Treasure 2 Book of Secrets, released by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment (UPC#786936735390, $30). Nicolas Cage, whose often eccentric screen persona fits perfectly with the 2007 film’s fanciful alterations of government institutions and monuments, stars in the tone-perfect follow up to the first National Treasurefeature, with his…
Read the full article »Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Anxiety over the fallout from a botched jewelry store robbery is the engine turning the emotional grinder inSidney Lumet’s fine 2007 drama, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a ThinkFilm Image Entertainment release. Philip Seymour Hoffmanand Ethan Hawke are brothers, frantically trying to cover their tracks and deal with the absence of the cash flow they thought would…
Read the full article »Fall of the Roman Empire
Remove the handful of action and battle scenes, andAnthony Mann’s epic-styled 1964 take on The Fall of the Roman Empire would seem to work perfectly well as a stageplay. There is an awful lot of talking in the movie, and its sluggish pace, combined with its relatively dark atmosphere, led not only to the film’s financial…
Read the full article »Into the Wild
As an actor, Sean Penn has exhibited an appreciable range in the characters he has portrayed, but as a director, he seems permanently locked into one emotional aesthetic, that of the sophomoric adolescent male. Each of his movies has been gratingly obvious and whiny, striving so hard and with such tunnel vision to achieve certain emotional…
Read the full article »Bonnie and Clyde
In the throes of my adolescence, I loved Bullitt madly, and the company that had produced and distributed the film, Warner Bros., also produced and distributed Bonnie and Clyde, a movie that I saw when it first came out and greatly admired. In those days, there was no such thing as home video and successful…
Read the full article »Beowulf
When the camera was invented, painters had to move away from realism to compete, but the camera’s rule may turn out to be short-lived. Since 1937, when Walt Disney created Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – or perhaps even earlier, when Winsor McKay depicted the sinking of the Lusitania-artists and painters have been working to represent reality…
Read the full article »American Gangster
Denzel Washington gives one of his increasingly appealing, wise, movie star performances as a successful drug kingpin in the Universal 2-DiscUnrated Special Edition, American Gangster. As Washington’s stardom is sustained, he seems to be drifting away a little bit from acting – from trying to find the real emotional truth in every moment – but…
Read the full article »Across the Universe
2007 turned out to be a great year for quality movies, and Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe was one of the crown jewels of the group. It is a musical depiction of life and culture across the Sixties that uses Beatles songs to define the emotional and spiritual states of the characters and to evoke, with a comprehensive…
Read the full article »Shoot ’em Up
Outrageous on purpose, Shoot ‘Em Up, from New Line Home Entertainment, is a serious 2007 spoof on action films that are forever trying to top what came out the month before, but it works because it uses story and character logic to push its way from one set piece to the next. The hero is sitting…
Read the full article »Cruising
Few movie making careers have crashed and burned as resoundingly as William Friedkin’s. It began to skid out of control beforehand, and it is still smoldering in mediocrity today, but the flames of disaster reached their apex with Friedkin’s head-scratchingly stupid 1980 story of an undercover cop, played by Al Pacino, trying to solve a series of…
Read the full article »DVDs: The First Decade
2007 marked the end of the first decade of DVDs and represented a profound change in the motion picture business. Where previously, home video was an ancillary market, with the full penetration of the inexpensively manufactured 5-inch (actually, 12cm) format (and while artists and film executives-and television producers-are not entirely willing to admit it yet),…
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