Blu-ray Movie Reviews

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/monstersbd.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Not only does <i>Monsters, Inc.</i> feature fantastic animation, it's one of Pixar's best stories, too. While the film was being made, California was subject to rolling blackouts due to Enron's manipulation of the energy market, so it's only fitting that the wizards at the studio came up with this wonderful story about powering Monstropolis with the screams of children. I love this movie, and its treatment on Blu-ray is exceptional in both the audio and video departments, with meticulous attention to detail and first-class sound design.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/moon.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Sometime in the future, Lunar Industries becomes the Earth's dominant supplier of clean energy that's harvested from the lunar soil and sent back to our planet. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) has been stationed on the dark side of the moon for nearly three years and has only two weeks to go before he can rejoin his wife and young daughter back home, but his extended isolation is beginning to take its toll. He starts to hallucinate and question his sanity when he discovers he may not be the only human at the facility.

Moonrise Kingdom is another witty charmer from writer/director Wes Anderson, this time with a bittersweet tinge of youth’s passing in 1965 New England. The protagonists are two troubled 12-year-olds who run away to marry in the wilderness of insular New Penzance Island. Suzy’s parents are miserable, insufferable lawyers (Frances McDormand and Bill Murray). Suzy sees a lot (often through binoculars) and has discovered her mother is having an affair with the island policeman, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis). Sam is an orphan with outstanding wilderness skills, who resigns from his Khaki Scout troop (in writing!) and is not invited back to his foster family if found. His only family is the troop of Khaki Scouts led by the well-meaning but overmatched Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton).

A laid-off television producer (Rachel McAdams) is desperate for work and takes a job to produce the lowest-rated morning new show called "Daybreak." She soon learns that the zany world of network broadcasting will require quick thinking and a great sense of humor in order to handle the self-absorbed co-hosts of the show (Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton).

The film boasts and impressive cast, an accomplished writer (Alan Brosh McKenna - The Devil Wears Prada) and director (Roger Michell - Notting Hill), and hit-maker J.J. Abrams as the producer. Unfortunately, the accomplished team delivers few laughs with a cast of unlikable characters and shallow scrip.

“Human nature was a mystery that logic alone could not illuminate.” In this tale of memory, fiction, and flashbacked facts, Sir Ian McKellen completely transforms into an aging Sherlock Holmes, a real-life person who’s been misrepresented in Dr. Watson’s books and turned into a romanticized creation. Living in retirement for 33 years following a failure that still haunts him, Holmes, who is rapidly losing his memory, is trying to recall the details of the case that derailed him in the hope of writing an account to correct the “myriad misconceptions created by the imaginative license” Watson had embellished his recounting of the investigations with.

There’s not much gained by the contemporary setting to offset the oddness of having Shakespeare’s characters seem like a bunch of Wall Street stockbrokers speaking strange in the Hamptons as if in a Woody Allen comedy, but otherwise the Bard’s words flow well enough from the pretty mouths of the cast.

Mulholland Drive is a wild and woolly movie, rife with swooning mysteries, esoteric clues, red herrings, black swans, and, even if the whole mélange remains a puzzle to you, it tosses up some of the most haunting and sensual images and sounds ever to come out of Hollywood. It begins with heavy breathing and soft focus on a red sheet, your first signal that what you’re about to see is someone’s dream, though how much, and at what point things flit back and forth from nightmare to reality (or, simply, to random jetsam from writer-director David Lynch’s own weird dreams and fantasies) is up for grabs.