Reviews

Love this series, and was really looking forward to the stuff on the strike and the home run chase/steroid era. One glaring omission, though, was during the long segment on 9/11 why didn't they show the President throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium at the World Series? It would've fit perfectly with that segment. Just makes Ken Burns look petty, and it was a huge thing at the time, even for people who didn't vote for him. (There's another baseball documentary where they interview players and journalists who talk about the importance of that moment). It was also impressive that he threw a strike from the mound while wearing a bulletproof vest.

Would also like to add that Keith David is an excellent narrator. I could listen to him talk all day.

I have seen a few of these gamer movies popping up from time to time over the last few years. The Gamers and its sequel Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising set the bar pretty high, however.

I came across THACO on YouTube. I laughed several times. Great gamer in-jokes. It's not as coherent as the Gamers movies (particularly the 2nd one) but I still enjoyed it. Thankfully it didn't run on for too long and was actually edited fairly tightly.

I recognized several of my own friends' quirks in the characters and the gags about the game mechanics and different versions were good. A bit on the esoteric side for some, but funny for the intended audience.

Great effort.

I was looking forward to Dante's contribution to this excellent horror anthology series from Showtime, but this was easily the worst of the bunch. It's really too bad. Part of this may be due to the poor, if odd, choice of source materials. Why Joe didn't just write an original, I have no idea. Instead, we get this soapbox episode where the "message" overwhelms the script, the characters, the staging, everything, and by the end I was just wondering whether it could get any worse, and I won't spoil it...but it ended up getting worse. What a stinker by such a talented creative team. Skip this one and buy the John Carpenter one instead. It manages to balance all of the elements: horror, humor, character, vision, and it's fun. Homecoming is about as fun as having a bear take a dump on you while you sleep.

It's annoying that programs of this quality are axed (I axed Showtime after this and Beggars and Choosers were canceled). Tim Reid, most famous for being Venus Flytrap on WKRP has turned into a complex and nuanced writer/producer, and Linc's was a joy to watch in terms of character and dialogue every week. Most remarkable about Linc's, was that it managed to create a political dialogue that's almost unheard of in modern TV programming. There were no off-hand cheap-shot remarks, the kind of immature political one-liners that show up on Six Feet Under or Law & Order. The characters came first, and their political beliefs flowed from their characters, and all sides of various issues were discussed with care and complexity.

Three cheers for an excellent program, I wish it had gone on for much longer.

I think the naming of this series of videos is a misnomer...a certain kind of parent is made to think that these videos will make their kids smarter or something. I have a 1yr old and a 3yr old who both enjoy watching them, but I don't expect it to make them smarter. That said, they know when certain sequences are coming up and start repeating them before they appear, (both of the kids do this). The DVD also includes the "language lab" where there are flashcards in more than a dozen languages. These *are* educational and also work well. (also good for drilling kids in Spanish or German or whatever).

The video production is on the cheap, for sure...and the DVD mastering is poorly done, in that there are no chapters, the menus have "Dead ends" in them--but they're still good for pre-school children. Don't expect this to make your kids smarter, that's just part of their obviously effective marketing campaign, but on the other hand, the kids *can* enjoy these videos and *can* learn something from the language lab.

This cheapo show, with its stock crowd footage (to compete with the Wiggles, who actually draw crows?), hyper songs, fast-cutting, frenetic pace, all it does is make the kids crazy. The songs are incomprehensibly awful. The costumes are awful, and there is almost no educational value to it at all.

What was Disney thinking? The biggest stinker they've ever had on Playhouse Disney by far, as mindless as Barney or Teletubbies. For adults, just about any other show can be tolerated, if not outright enjoyed. The Wiggles et.al. have some cheese in them, but at least they make some attempts to be educational and maintain some standard of production values and professionalism.

Doodlebops looks like it was thrown together with a video camera and a tape of stock footage. The messages are anything BUT educational, and the songs are just plain bad.

Hopefully this stinker doesn't last long.

VG Means VIDEO GAME! this has nothing to do with the sci-fi miniseries and now series that is airing in the UK and will air here in January 05.

VIDEO GAME.

Sheesh.

Now if you've actually seen this video game, then you'll know that it includes all of the original case, plus they managed to get their hands on Kristina Loken and some other names to be the other voices. I'm glad people pay attention.

VG Means video game in an IMDb entry. The mini series is under something different.

If you have any sort of appreciation for character and dialogue, and any sense of American cultural history, you will find a lot of very absorbing material in this film. It probably was originally a play, and that's why it's dialogue heavy, but I can't stress enough how these icons that we only have a shallow understand of are made into truly complex and wonderful characters.

This film is better than any college course for telling you how to create a character-driven story.

Not sure what was sticking out of the craw of most of the reviewers of LXG. It wasn't nearly as bad as they made out to be. There were certainly some pacing and editing problems in the second act, but for the most part, it lived up to most of the hype. I was certainly entertained, which is more than I can say for a lot of the films I've seen recently. The literary one-liners were fun, and the plot twists were unpredictable, which was nice for a change. A lot of the reviewers complained about the car chase and about Peta Wilson's acting, the latter seems nuts, haven't any of these people actually read Dracula? She pretty much stuck to how I imagined her character to be. Most of the rest of the characters were the same. Another major complaint was American secret service agent Tom Sawyer, which definitely was a bit of a dorky addition to the cast, but on the other hand, it could've been a lot worse. (a spunky annie oakley who falls for quartermain, for example, played by Mandy Moore).

Anyway, don't let the reviews turn you away, it's fun for both the hollywood action film fans and those with a more literary state of mind.

I've heard this called a "comedy" or a "college buddy" movie, and maybe there's elements of both, but at the same time, Fandango is full of wistfulness and emptiness, and genuine moments that rarely appear in hollywood flicks.

The last part of the movie, where Costner's character bluffs an entire city into staging a wedding for his ex girlfriend and her fiance is worth the price of admission.

Magical is all I can say. Best acting Costner's ever done, in my opinion.

It's obvious that it was made in the 70s, but still, the music and performances are pretty well done and as most of the reviewers have stated, the New York locations are used brilliantly. The messages of the film are presented in a completely unpretentious manner.

The opening sequences that introduce each of the players are almost movies in themselves, very well done characterization moments that tell long stories before we even get to the story.

Hunt For Red October is still the only film of a Clancy novel that has remained remotely faithful to the original. The very things that make the books popular (multiple dense story lines) make them impossible for the most part to film. The Sum Of All Fears is the latest example of this. They pretty much took the title of the film and a couple of scenes, names of characters, and made a different film. Setting it in the present doesn't help, changing Arab terrorsts to neo nazi's is completely ridiculous, taking the family aspect out of Jack Ryan's character diminishes his depth. Clancy is somewhere counting the dollars, and I know that previously (Patriot Games) he has refused to let them use his name in advertising, but dang. Affleck's acting is adequate, but he will never be able to get past the fact that he's Ben Affleck. He has plenty of charisma, but none of the intelligence and depth of a Ford or Alec Baldwin. Whenever he tries to be intense, it's the same facial moves and vocal moves that he's used in stuff like Mallrats. Ah well. Luckily it was a free preview. Didn't have to waste any money.

I've seen a lot of films in the last few months...Royal Tenebaums, Lord of the Rings, Man who wasn't there, Mulholland Drive, but Amelie has them all pretty much beaten for sheer entertainment value. I was constantly in awe of the imagery more than anything, from the tiniest details on up, it was a carefully crafted film. I spent a lot of the film laughing out loud...and occasionally I even found myself choked up. It was a remarkable movie experience for me. It makes other attempts at magical realism or fantasy sequences (such as Ally McBeal, for example) look like utter vomit.

Junet has outdone himself. This film has that third dimension that his other films always seem to lack. (not counting Alien: Resurrection, which only had one dimenstion to begin with).

The Titanic model of filmmaking strikes again...oh, it's not really about the ship sinking, it's really more about this love story. I doubt that Pearl Harbor will inspire the same repeat-viewing among teenaged girls, however, the love story isn't that great.

Pearl Harbor sequence is exhilirating, but I think the movie's first act doesn't set the stage enough for the third act, which comprises the doolitle raid on Tokyo. The way the movie is now, I felt it should have ended after Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war. There just wasn't enough about the mood of the country or the need for a moral victory in the beginning of the movie that made the last part of the film necessary. That could have saved an hour of my time.

I was aware of this play for a long time, and before every having seen or read it, I recommended it to my high school (we did wizard of oz instead). I finally got to see the movie on cable and immediately was floored by it. Luckily I was able to get the restored Laserdisc version, which is not only the proper aspect ratio (the director used the whole frame fairly often) but it has a lot of footage restored, including the song "Cool Cool Considerate Men" which is often seen as the centerpiece of the 2nd act.

There's some good trivia with this one too. Howard Da Silva, who plays Franklin was once a blacklisted actor during the whole red scare thing.

Jack Warner made many of the cuts to the theatrical version of the film (some 40 minutes) while the director was away. They were restored to the film for the special laserdisc edition after it was discovered that his secretary had cut the parts into short strips and hidden them rather than burn them as Warner had requested. These included the song "Cool Considerate Men," which it is supposed Warner disliked because they "bad guys" in this case sing a song about "keeping to the right" and such.

Anyway...great film, great performances, great great great.

One of the most simple yet moving of William Inge's plays is presented here with some of the finest American actors to grace the screen. This is American cinema at its greatest. Anything else I could say would sound even more trite. If you can find this film (it's never been released on video as far as I know) give it a try. I was able to tape it off of Encore once, and I am forever grateful that they aired it.

The movie can be summed up in the title it had when writer Adam Herz submitted his script to studios. "Untitled Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made For Under $10 Million That Most Readers Will Probably Hate But I Think You Will Love." It was cheaply made, and it has the words "teenage" and "sex" in it. That is why the film got made, and that's just sad. It really wasn't much of a comedy, it was just an excuse for a string of sex jokes and fart jokes. If done correctly, they can be clever (see South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut) but in this case, the film just seemed like an excuse to show teens having sex. There was no "message" or truth to be learned from the film, and that is why it failed. Most of those teen sex films from the 80s actually had some kernel of truth buried in them, but there's nothing here at all, except, everyone's having sex and if you don't, then YOU'RE the abnormal one. The one relationship that I thought was going to be real was the one between Heather and Oz, but instead it just got cheapened by their post-prom-sex. The movie panders to the worst parts of teenagers, who are obviously the target audience. The only effect I can see it having on them is to make them think they aren't drinking, screwing, or partying enough. That is totally the wrong message, but its the only one that is apparent.

If there's one theme of this film, it's that people can cope with hardship by having a good imagination. This family is poor, their father works graveyard, and their mother works double-shifts, and Peter is constantly picked on for a variety of reasons, and becomes increasingly frustrated that he is often mistaken for a girl. He is just starting to approach that age of 10 or 11 where your perceptions start to change, and thinks like your appearance start to matter. The backdrop of this story is the 1967 World's Fair and the Centennial of Canada. The film's greatest moments come during the various fantasy sequences where we see just how they cope. Watch the flim, and if you've ever had a childhood friend that you dreamt with, and then for some reason, lost, you'll really like this film. Perhaps kids will like this film, but only adults will truly appreciate it, including its references to bolshevik's and what parent's will do for their children.

I accidentally caught this film on TV one night on a channel I didn't really get, and noticed it was filmed near where I live. This piqued my interest enough to rent it, and boy was I glad I did. B-Movie man Albert Pyun wrote and directed this hilarious martial-arts action film. It's got a lot of comedy in it (sometimes not intentional) and Pyun manages to even make Andrew Dice Clay likeable! It also has a pre-Lois Teri Hatcher as well. It's corny fun, not meant to be taken seriously, similar to Barry Gordy's The Last Dragon. Lots of one-liners, running gags, decent action, and Teri Hatcher, what else matters?