LATEST ADDITIONS

Ocean's Twelve—Warner Brothers
Amy Carter  |  Jan 11, 2006  |  First Published: Jul 11, 2005
Video: 3
Audio: 3
Extras: 0
For those of you out there who are anticipating an even bigger party than the fun that was Ocean's Eleven, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. The beauty of the first film was that everything came together in the end, and you left feeling like you'd really been privy to geniuses at work. Everything, and I mean everything, was part of the big picture. Ocean's Twelve just makes you scratch your head. What happened to these seriously smart guys? How in the world did they end up in this situation, and where's the big heist that made the first film so much fun? But, most importantly, who thought it would be funny for Julia Roberts' character to pretend to be Julia Roberts? Has Hollywood completely lost its mind?
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House of Flying Daggers—Columbia/TriStar
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Jan 11, 2006  |  First Published: Jul 11, 2005
Video: 5
Audio: 5
Extras: 2
House of Flying Daggers is, in many ways, similar to many other martial-arts movies you've seen (most notably, the crazily popular Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). It has all of the action and incredible fight sequences we've come to expect from the best Hong Kong exports. From a visual standpoint, though, it has more in common with the stylized color works of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. And what visuals they are. In Hero, director Yimou Zhang used massive amounts of color. Sometimes entire shots would be one color. Here, that is rarely the case, but color is no smaller a tool—just a more finely honed one. The story is of a love affair between an assassin and a policeman as a war builds around them.
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Geoffrey Morrison Blog
More CES Coverage
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Jan 11, 2006
Here are the rest of the pictures I took at CES . Well, the rest that were worth anything. I have a few other products I saw at the show that I’ll talk about later, probably Friday.
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Kinsey—20th Century Fox
Adrienne Maxwell  |  Jan 11, 2006  |  First Published: Jul 11, 2005
Video: 4
Audio: 3
Extras: 2
If nothing else, Kinsey shows us just how far we haven't come since Alfred Kinsey first published his books on human sexual behavior in the 1940s and '50s. When we see the sex photos that Professor Kinsey shows his students during his first college course about sex, we're just as shocked as they are that we're actually being allowed to see them-and that the MPAA didn't slap an NC-17 rating on the film as a result. In a manner befitting the subject, writer/director Bill Condon provides a straightforward, almost clinical examination of Kinsey's life, which succeeds primarily because of the wonderful performances by Liam Neeson as Kinsey and Laura Linney as his wife Clara.
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The Big Red One: The Reconstruction—Warner Brothers
Chris Chiarella  |  Jan 11, 2006  |  First Published: Jul 11, 2005
Video: 3
Audio: 4
Extras: 4
Samuel Fuller's quasi-autobiographical World War II drama, named for the symbol of the 1st Infantry, was brutally trimmed for its 1980 theatrical release. Now painstakingly pieced back together and enhanced for modern audiences, The Big Red One is almost 50 minutes longer and hereby revealed as a genuine epic. It's better than ever on every level. We can finally witness one of star Lee Marvin's most richly crafted roles as it was meant to be seen.
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Are We There Yet?—Columbia/TriStar
Gary Frisch  |  Jan 11, 2006  |  First Published: Jul 11, 2005
Video: 4
Audio: 3
Extras: 3
Before XXX State of the Union iced his destiny as an action star, Ice Cube stretched his wings with this charming but fairly routine family-bonding flick that hit box-office bling earlier this year. The family here is a surrogate, as Cube hauls a pair of spirited kids from Portland, Oregon, to Vancouver in his new Lincoln Navigator in order to win points with their hottie divorce mom. Illicit thoughts of mom aside, the road trip actually brings him close to the two brats. It's a no-lose formula, and any film with Nichelle Nichols (Star Trek's Lt. Uhura) earns extra points in my book.
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Beaches Special Edition—Touchstone
Aimee Giron  |  Jan 11, 2006  |  First Published: Jul 11, 2005
Video: 3
Audio: 4
Extras: 3
Directed by Garry Marshall, Beaches is a story about two 11-year-old girls who meet on the beach in Atlantic City and continue to keep in touch and weather the challenges of adult life throughout the years. The film is best remembered for its ability to turn on your waterworks, but the best thing about it is that it doesn't sugarcoat what really happens in a friendship, like the one between CC Bloom (Bette Midler) and her best friend, Hillary Whitney, (Barbara Hershey). Beaches is a moving story, filled with camaraderie, jealousy, glory, pain, and forgiveness.
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Audio Video News
Images from CES 2006
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Jan 11, 2006
A few images from CES 2006

I took a bunch more pictures at CES than I could put in my blog. So here's the better ones.

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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou—Buena Vista
Adrienne Maxwell  |  Jan 11, 2006  |  First Published: Jul 11, 2005
Video: 3
Audio: 4
Extras: 5
For The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, writer/director Wes Anderson found a new writing partner. Gone is Owen Wilson (as writer, but not as actor), who helped him pen Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums—replaced with Noah Baumbach, writer/director of one of my all-time favorite indie films, Kicking and Screaming. Add Bill Murray as the title character, and I couldn't wait to see what kind of exquisitely wry tale lay ahead.
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Bookshelf Speaker ReviewsSoundbar Reviews
Polk Audio SurroundBar Speaker System
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Jan 11, 2006
Home Theater in a (Very Narrow) Box.

Thanks to plasma TVs, everyone is convinced that skinny and flat are where it's at when it comes to home theater—and those now-out-of-work robotic assembly lines that used to crank out CRTs by the boatload haven't been the only ones affected by the slender-is-better trend. You can't throw a crumbled-up extended-warranty brochure in an electronics store nowadays without hitting some sort of sleek, on-wall, "plasma-friendly" home theater speaker. Some manufacturers, fully embracing the slim trend, have created three-in-one (left front, center, and right front) single-cabinet on-wall speakers designed to be mounted above or below your flat-panel TV—or set on top of a rear-projection TV. Boston Acoustics, Definitive Technology, Atlantic Technology, and Mirage, for example, have all come up with their own variations of three channels coexisting in one narrow box.

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