Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Whenever you dramatize one of the most beloved characters in all of popular culture, you’re going to elicit a lot of strong opinions. Many folks seem to either love or loathe Man of Steel, director Zack Snyder and producer/co-writer Christopher Nolan’s major reboot of the Superman franchise. The basic story is recognizable to even the most casual fans, yet much has changed, so it doesn’t feel like a rehash of any version we’ve seen before.

Fame, wealth, power, and success are the enviable goals of most people in Hollywood. Once achieved, the struggle and pressure to maintain them are unrelenting and will drive some to drastic lengths to ensure their survival.

Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) is an actress in the twilight of her career who still lives in the shadow of her more famous deceased mother. Constantly plagued by jealously, insecurity, and personal demons, she is desperate to keep her star status active while the delicate balance of her life and sanity rapidly unravel.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/marley.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Based on the best-selling book by John Grogan, this is a story about a young couple (Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston) who decide to get a puppy, Marley, in lieu of having a child at an early point in their marriage. Unfortunately, they adopt "evil" with the face of a dog that fails obedience school and is branded as "the world's worst dog."

Nine-year-old Milo (motion-capture performer Seth Green and voice actor Seth Dusky) stows away on a Mars-bound alien spaceship as it races away with his mom (Joan Cusack), who has been abducted so the Martians can steal her mom-ness in order to raise their young. Once he arrives on the Red Planet, he's befriended by Gribbler (Dan Fogler), an immature young adult whose mother was also stolen by the Martians when he was a boy. It's a race against time as Milo struggles to save his mother from imminent doom at the hands of the aliens.

This is a decent family film that starts off pretty slow but picks up steam in the second act as you get to know the main characters. The motion-capture techniques developed by producer Robert Zemeckis in The Polar Express have improved over the years, especially with adult faces, but the children come across a little creepy. Despite the shortcomings in the story, both the 3D and 2D presentations are outstanding, and the DTS-HD MA 7.1 soundtrack is definitely demo-worthy.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/061308master.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Captain “Lucky Jack” Aubrey (Russell Crowe) of the HMS <I>Surprise</I> receives orders to sink or capture the French privateer <I>Acheron</I> off the east coast of South America. In his first encounter with the enemy vessel, the more powerfully built French warship gets the better of his crew and nearly sinks the <I>Surprise</I>. Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), Aubrey's best friend and ship's surgeon, tries to convince him there is no shame in returning home given the conditions they face. Torn between duty and friendship, the fate of his crew weighs on his mind.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s best film by far, has often been called an “anti-Western,” but that’s a bit off. The plot is pure Western: A stranger comes to a frontier town, builds it up; bad guys come to kill him and take it away; he tracks them down on the street and kills them first; and oh, yes, there’s a whore with a heart of gold. The difference here is that the plot is infused with circa-1900 realism: The stranger’s a bit of a dunce; the town is a muddy mess; the bad guys are corporate poachers; our man kills them by shooting them in the back, and afterward he dies in the snow from gunshot wounds while the townsfolk put out a fire in an unused church; and, oh, the whore is also a shrewd merchant with an opium habit.