David Vaughn

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Company Men (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Jun 13, 2011  |  0 comments
Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) is one of the best salesmen for an East coast-based multinational corporation who's climbing the corporate ladder. When tough times rock the company, he finds himself one of the casualties of the layoffs and must make adjustments to his lifestyle in order to make ends meet.

Writer/Director John Wells wanted to make this film after the dot-com bust earlier this century but couldn't get the project underway. After the recent downturn in the economy he was able to adjust the script and delivers a fantastic drama about how a layoff can ruin your life. The all-star cast includes Chris Cooper and Kevin Costner, although my favorite character in the film is Tommy Lee Jones who plays the executive with a conscience.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Concussion
David Vaughn  |  Jul 29, 2016  |  0 comments
Picture
Sound
Extras
Football Hall of Famer Mike Webster of the Pittsburg Steelers won four Super Bowl rings throughout his 17-year NFL career. He retired in 1990 and was enshrined seven years later, but his life would go downhill from there: Five years later, he was dead from a heart attack. The sad story would have stopped there if it weren’t for a junior pathologist in the Allegheny coroner’s office whose relentless search to know why led to the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. As more cases came to his attention, this Nigerian-born doctor took on one of the most powerful institutions in the world—the NFL.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Confessions of a Shopaholic (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Jun 23, 2009  |  0 comments

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/shopaholic.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>When Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) loses her job, her maxed-out credit cards begin to cramp her style. Her dream job is to work for <I>Alette</I>, one of New York's elite fashion magazines, but when the position's filled internally, her only job opportunity is with <I>Successful Saving</I>, a struggling financial magazine owned by the same publishing company. With a debt collector (Robert Stanton) hot on her heels, Rebecca becomes the unlikely author of a column on saving money.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Contact
David Vaughn  |  Nov 04, 2009  |  0 comments

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/contact.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>When Carl Sagan wrote <i>Contact</i>, he framed it in the context of a feature film, and it shows. Where most sci-fi flicks rely on wiz-bang special effects and evil alien invaders, this one is story-driven and has a firm grasp on real science. The video encode is solid, but it's the Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack that steals the show with an immersive surround experience, first-rate frequency response, and superlative dynamic range.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Contact (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Oct 25, 2009  |  0 comments

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/contact.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) has fixed her gaze on the sky her whole life. When her SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project is canceled by the US Government, she goes in search of private funding and receives it from a secretive multimillionaire, S.A. Hadden (John Hurt). One night, she and her scientific team receive a signal from space that includes the blueprints of a mysterious machine. What does it do?

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Contraband
David Vaughn  |  Apr 25, 2012  |  0 comments

The trailer for this movie showed a lot of promise and the star power of Mark Wahlberg had me eagerly awaiting its release on Blu-ray. Sadly, the screenplay is a predictable mess, the acting inconsistent, and the twists and turns have been done countless times in Hollywood that the ending couldn't come soon enough. At least the AVC video encode is loaded with detail and other than some occasional black crush, there isn't much to complain about, but the best aspect of the entire production is the fantastic DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack the features plenty of frequency response and some pinpoint imaging.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Cool Hand Luke
David Vaughn  |  Sep 15, 2008  |  0 comments

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/coolhandluke.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Paul Newman stars as "Cool Hand" Lucas Jackson, a man sentenced to a Southern prison camp for destroying public property&#151;well, who wouldn't want to cut off the top of a parking meter on a drunken bliss? Anyhow, soon after entering prison, Luke can't seem to bend to the arbitrary rules, and it's time to break out of the joint.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Cop Out (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Jul 19, 2010  |  0 comments
Suspended NYPD detectives Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis) and Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) search for Monroe's stolen 1952 collectable baseball card which he was planning to sell in order to pay for his daughter's wedding. Along the way, the two stumble into an ongoing investigation of a deadly drug cartel and are given an opportunity to resurrect their careers and reputations by taking the bad guys down.

The 1980s saw its share of some great buddy-cop films with 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop, but sadly this doesn't come close to delivering the laughs or a fraction of the entertainment value. Morgan's act is tiresome and the script from Mark and Rob Cullen is far from original.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Coraline
David Vaughn  |  Jul 24, 2009  |  0 comments

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/coraline.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>From the director of <i>The Nightmare Before Christmas</i> comes another visually stunning, stop-motion animated feature&#151;the first to be shot using stereoscopic 3D. Although the 3D experience doesn't translate well to Blu-ray, the 2D feature is amazingly clear with inky blacks and phenomenal contrast. The detail on the miniature sets looks surprisingly lifelike, from the fabric used for curtains to the textures of the characters' clothing and even their expressions. The audio track doesn't take a back seat to the video, either, featuring demo-worthy surround imaging.

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3D Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Coraline (Blu-ray 3D)
David Vaughn  |  Jan 15, 2011  |  2 comments
Eleven-year-old Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) has just moved with her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) to a new home in Oregon. With her parents distracted by work and no one to play with except an annoying boy, Wybie Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.), she spends her time visiting her older neighbors. When she convinces herself that her new home is the most boring place on earth, she uncovers a secret door that leads to a parallel world much like her own—but much better. Is the grass greener on the other side or is it all an illusion?

Pixar has changed the way animated films are made, but the days of stop-motion are far from over as director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) proves with this visually stunning and wildly entertaining tale of a young girl in search of attention. One caveat—this isn't really a kid's movie. There are some intense sequences in the "other world" that may frighten younger viewers, so a prescreening is recommended for parents with young children.

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