Blu-ray Movie Reviews

A high-tech retelling of Charles Dickens' beloved tale about a penny-pinching Scrooge (Jim Carey) and his encounter with three ghosts who take him on an eye-opening journey to discover the true meaning of Christmas.

It's a story that's been told countless times throughout cinematic history but Robert Zemeckis puts his own spin it and delivers a technological marvel that bored the hell out of my family. The story can easily be told in under an hour but the 95 minutes felt like nine hours, especially when Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. I'm surprised the film received a PG rating due to some scary images of the ghost's visits. Regardless, the beautiful animation couldn't make up for the shortcomings of the screenplay.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/d9.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>In the early 1980s, an alien spaceship hovers over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, and shows no signs of life. After waiting six months for contact, the government decides to cut into the vessel to see what's inside, and it finds the alien crew starving and malnourished. The local authorities set up a refugee camp for the aliens, and over the span of nearly 30 years, their numbers grow to over 1.8 million. Now what?

Set sometime in the future in a world devastated by war, a group of human survivors has fortified the city of Chicago as their home base, and in order to keep the peace, they have separated the populace into five distinct groups based upon their personality traits. Candor is for those who seek the truth, Erudite is the intellectuals, Amity is for peace, Abnegation is for the selfless, and Dauntless is filled with thrill seekers who also serve as the security for the community. When Tris comes of age and must choose her “career,” her aptitude test shows her not fitting into one group. She is a Divergent (think square peg going into the round hole), and in the supposed utopian society, this causes problems—and all hell is going to break loose.

Tensions, rivalries, banter, squabbling, self-aggrandizement, and, above all, putdowns add to the hot air on this day in the life of Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn as the 98 percent Black (down to 70 percent in the last census) community and small mix of Hispanics, Whites, and Asians try to get along during a sweltering summer.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/dothing.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>It's the hottest day of the year in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. As the thermometer rises, so do tempers in the racially charged atmosphere. Local Italian pizza man Sal (Danny Aiello), proprietor of Sal's Famous, runs the restaurant with his two sons and employs Mookie (Spike Lee) as their delivery boy. When local radical Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) takes umbrage with the restaurant's lack of "brothers" on its "wall of fame," all hell breaks loose when the businessmen are pushed too far and the police must intercede.