DVD's and Blu-ray's are Our Passion

Archive for November, 2008

DVD Review: Kung Fu Panda / Secrets of the Furious Five

Hollywood has enjoyed a long and storied lineage of animals in lead roles. Old Yeller, Lassie, Babe, and even Remmy the Rat from last year’s Ratatouille effortlessly capture the hearts of audiences everywhere with their often human-like personas, showing a range of emotion and stirring the soul through the good times and the bad. DreamWorks’ [...]

Blu-ray Review: Kung Fu Panda

Hollywood has enjoyed a long and storied lineage of animals in lead roles. Old Yeller, Lassie, Babe, and even Remmy the Rat from last year’s Ratatouille effortlessly capture the hearts of audiences everywhere with their often human-like persona’s, showing a range of emotion and stirring the soul through the good times and the bad. DreamWorks’ [...]

Black Friday Deals on Hundreds of Blu-ray and DVDs

First, 223 low priced Blu-ray titles including Sleeping Beauty, 300 and Band of Brothers will be on sale from now until December 2nd. Shop Blu-ray sale » Amazon.com will also have “Early Bird Deals” on Friday. They write: We’ll be offering great Black Friday deals all week long, but for those of you who can’t [...]

Blu-ray Review: Black Christmas – Special Edition

Writer/director Bob Clark is probably best known to movie audiences as the writer/director of Porky’s (1982) and as the director of A Christmas Story (1983), for which he also wrote the screenplay with Jean Shepherd. Despite these forays into teenage sex comedy’s and sweet Christmas classics, Clark actually got his start in the movie business [...]

DVD Review: High Noon – 2-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition

A bonafide movie star for over thirty years of his working life, Gary Cooper is considered by most film historians to one of the more iconic movie stars. Fans loved him because they felt they could relate to him. As fellow film legend Clint Eastwood said of Cooper in the 1991 documentary, Gary Cooper: American [...]

Blu-ray Review: Fred Claus

Every year, Hollywood cranks out two or three Christmas movies in hopes of making a classic that will stand the test of time. You know what I mean; become a move like It’s a Wonderful Life or the 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street starring Natalie Wood–Films that become so identified with the Christmas [...]

DVD Review: Noëlle

With the holiday season fast approaching, lots of Christmas specials and Christmas themed movies are showing up at my door. Noëlle is a film that received a limited theatrical release last year, and carries the Dove Family-approved seal. David Wall–who looks exactly like a cross between Robert Redford and Owen Wilson–writes, directs, and stars in [...]

DVD Review: Futurama – Bender’s Game

Futurama was an animated sitcom created by The Simpsons Matt Groening, and developed by Groening and David X. Cohen for the Fox network. The series followed the adventures of a former New York pizza delivery boy, Philip J. Fry, after he was cryogenically frozen seconds before the start of the year 2000, and thawed out [...]

Blu-ray Review: Standard Operating Procedure

Documentaries have long been overlooked by much of the movie going public. I’m not really sure why, but I’ve always felt most people go to the movies to escape reality, and documentaries tend to bring us right back into the real world we’re trying so hard to escape with a visit to our local Cineplex. [...]

DVD Review: Journey to the Center of the Earth

Note: This double-sided DVD includes the movie in three formats: a full-screen version in 2-D, a widescreen version in 2-D, and a widescreen version in 3-D. You’ll find my comments about each of the formats in the Video section below. Journey to the Center of the Earth seems to be Hollywood’s go to novel when [...]

Blu-ray Review: Universal Soldier

While I’m not a big fan of horror films, I’ve always had a place in my heart for action films. Action movies of the eighties were about muscle bound machismo; think Schwarzenegger and Stallone–blow a few things up. Save the world. When the credits rolled ninety minutes later, the audience went home pumped up and [...]

Blu-ray Review: Wall – E (3 Disc DisneyFile Special Edition

For years, I’ve been waiting for Disney-Pixar to disappoint me. I figured the studio that has brought us Toy Story, A Bugs Life, Cars and Finding Nemo among others was bound to put out a real stinker at some point. After watching Wall – E on Blu-ray, my stinker watch has ended and I’m about [...]

DVD Review: I Dream of Jeannie – The Complete Series

It is the holiday season friends. That means that the studios are trying to put forward their best stuff in hopes that their special editions and mega-sets will make it to your gift giving list this year; I’ve been receiving this stuff on a daily basis now for a couple of weeks. I’m on a [...]

DVD Review: The Boys in the Band

Written by Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band opened off Broadway on April 14, 1968 at Theater Four. The show played to many standing room only crowds during its 1000 performance run. In 1970, Crowley adapted his play for into a film directed by a young William Friedkin and produced by future Vanity Fair [...]

DVD Review: Kitt Kittredge – An American Girl

Directed by Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park) and produced by Julia Roberts is the fourth film to be based on the popular line of American Girl dolls. As any fan of the dolls knows, each of them comes with their own backgrounds and histories. Of the four films produced based on the American Girl dolls, Kitt [...]

DVD Review: Get Smart (2008) – 2 Disc Special Edition

Get Smart is a film adaption of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s 1960s spy parody television series of the same name. Warner Bros.’ remake attempts to pay tribute to the old television series, which itself was a spoof of the then fairly new series of James Bond films. Doing a remake of a popular film [...]

DVD Review: Sabrina – Centennial Collection

Fresh off her success in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn joined Humphrey Bogart, William Holden and director Billy Wilder for 1954′s Sabrina. The film was adapted from the Samuel A. Taylor play Sabrina Fair. Taylor adapted his play for the screen, along with Ernest Lehman. Paramount originally released Sabrina back in April of 2001, [...]

DVD Review: Roman Holiday – Centennial Collection

Released on August 27, 1953, Roman Holiday is probably best known as the film that introduced American audiences to Audrey Hepburn. Director/producer William Wyler (Ben-Hur) had originally wanted Elizabeth Taylor for the role of Princess Ann (‘Anya Smith’) but Hepburn was cast after a screen test. After she had performed a dignified, subdued scene from [...]

DVD Review: Scrubs – The Complete Seventh Season

Created by Bill Lawrence (Spin City), Scrubs premiered in October of 2001. Lawrence has stated that he had two main reasons for calling the serfies Scrubs: The obvious being the attire worn by doctors, and the other being the fact that most of the main characters are fresh out of medical school, new and inexperienced [...]

Blu-ray Review: Monster’s Ball

Written by Milo Addica and Will Rokos, under the direction of Marc Forster, Monster’s Ball is a film in which the characters seem to jump off the screen and draw us in to their difficult lives right from the start. Forster uses a slow, mournful tone that accentuates the sorrow in all the characters, without [...]