Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Cloud Atlas
Chris Chiarella  |  Oct 31, 2013  | 
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Cloud Atlas is something of a cinematic curiosity. It is incredibly ambitious and deftly executed, weaving together six disparate tales with similar themes of oppression and rebellion, each told with the same handful of actors playing the key roles in each scenario. Set in different locations and in eras ranging from 1849 up through 2321, the movie serves up everything from a single slave earning his freedom on a sailing ship to a genetically engineered hostess inspiring a full-on societal revolt. But even when the all-star filmmaking team of the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer has three hours to play with, not one of the half-dozen narratives can be particularly deep or overwhelmingly original. They have, however, fashioned an enormous event movie that pushes technique—dramatic as well as purely technical—into bold new territory.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Coach Carter
David Vaughn  |  Dec 15, 2008  |  First Published: Dec 16, 2008  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/coachcarter.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Nearly 10 years ago, I remember hearing about a crazy high-school basketball coach who locked his undefeated team out of the gym for poor academic performance in Richmond, California—about 40 miles west of my home town. As a suburb of Oakland, it shares many of the same neighborhood issues, such as street gangs, drug problems, and violence. In this dramatization, as in real life, Ken Carter (Samuel L. Jackson) takes the tough-love approach in order to teach the young men there's more to life than basketball.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Cocoon (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Apr 15, 2010  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/cocoonbd.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Art (Don Ameche), Ben (Wilford Brimley), and Joe (Hume Cronyn) live a perfectly respectable life in a Florida retirement community. In order to feel younger, the three break into an indoor pool at a nearby property for the thrill of the experience and some private pool time. When a group of aliens from another world rent the property some strange physiological changes begin to occur making the men wonder if they've discovered the Fountain of Youth.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Collateral Beauty
Josef Krebs  |  Nov 10, 2017  | 
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This being the third film in a row I’ve reviewed on Blu-ray in which a man’s life is destroyed by the death of a child and the loss of a wife (alongside Manchester by the Sea and Nocturnal Animals) leads me to suspect that a strong sense of loss is vibrating through our national zeitgeist despite the blessings of unsocial media. Collateral Beauty, a feel-good downer (a romtrage, if you will), is a parable filled with It’s a Wonderful Life–like whimsy concerning a grieving advertising executive, Howard (Will Smith), who, two years on from the loss of his daughter, is writing letters to Time, Death, and Love to voice his complaints and express his trauma.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Company Men (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Jun 13, 2011  | 
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
Complete Matrix Trilogy - HD DVD
Tom Norton  |  May 20, 2007  |  First Published: May 21, 2007  | 

Stop the presses. There's a new set of reference high definition discs in town, discs that in technical quality alone very nearly blow anything you've seen so far out of the water. It's the <I>Complete Matrix Trilogy</I>, available this Tuesday (May 22) only in a boxed set of three HD DVDs.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Concussion
David Vaughn  |  Jul 29, 2016  | 
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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  | 

<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 (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Oct 25, 2009  | 

<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
Cool Hand Luke
David Vaughn  |  Sep 15, 2008  | 

<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  | 
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
Copy Rights
Brian C. Fenton  |  Apr 09, 2003  | 
I finally began to trust my 8-year-old son with my electronic equipment and software-he understands my warnings about disc care now that one of his favorite PlayStation titles got scratched so that it crashes at the same point every time. But now a DVD from my three-disc set of The Simpsons' first season has disappeared.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Coraline (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Jul 24, 2009  | 

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/coraline.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>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&#151;but much better. Is the grass greener on the other side or is it all an illusion?

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Corpse Bride—Blu-ray
Thomas J. Norton  |  Dec 28, 2006  |  First Published: Dec 29, 2006  | 

Tim Burton loves the bizarre, and his Corpse Bride (he shares director credit here with Mike Johnson) is nothing if not that.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Country Song (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Apr 20, 2011  | 
Country music superstar Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow) enters alcohol rehab after tumbling during a concert and meets Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund), an aspiring small town country singer. Once out of rehab, she wants to give Beau a shot at the big time by having him open her comeback concert, but her husband/manager James (Tim McGraw) has chosen a beauty queen (Leighton Meester) instead.

I'm not a big fan of melodramatic stories, and this has over-the-top sappiness seeping over the edges. Writer/Director Shana Feste can't keep seem to make up her mind on what direction she wants to take the film; is it a story about a pair of up-and-coming singers or about the superstar trying to regain her footing? Overall, it's a tiring two hour experience with mediocre music and horrendous dialog.

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