Blu-ray Movie Reviews

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/officespace.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) has reached the breaking point with his mind-numbing white-collar job at Initech Corporation. His girlfriend Anne (Alexandra Wentworth) convinces him to get a new outlook on life by visiting a hypnotherapist, and it changes his life forever. Armed with a new attitude, he is quickly promoted to upper management&#151;but is that what he really wants?

All of you know the taxicab scene from On the Waterfront in which Marlon Brando tells Rod Steiger, “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let’s face it.” But I’d bet not many have recently seen the whole movie—and never have you seen it looking as breathtaking as it does on this Blu-ray Disc, a wondrous collaboration between Sony’s 4K digital-restoration lab and the Criterion Collection’s special-features team.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/419onemissedcall.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>College students start dropping like flies when they receive voicemails from their future selves with the exact date, time, and horrid details of their eventual deaths. Psychology student Beth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon) becomes concerned when a number of her friends are murdered, so she enlists the help of detective Jack Andrews (Ed Burns) to search for answers as quickly as possible, because Beth has received her own disturbing voicemail from the future.

Good witches, bad witches, good witches who become bad witches; it’s all in a day’s work for the Wizard of Oz. The story of how the Wizard of Oz first arrived in Oz and became the great and powerful Wizard of Oz is chronicled in Oz the Great and Powerful. This prequel to The Wizard of Oz pays reverent homage to the original classic film in many ways but most noticeably by mimicking its famous prologue. Just like when Dorothy leaves Kansas and her monochromatic world magically morphs to glorious, exhilarating Technicolor, so it goes for the Wizard as well. After a 20-minute black-and-white prologue cropped in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, Oz’s balloon arrives somewhere over the rainbow, the image bursts into vibrant color, and the aspect ratio expands to a full 2.40:1.

Kaiju is a Japanese word meaning, monster—typically a big monster and a very bad hombre with anger issues. Kaiju are hard to miss, and the founder of the Kaiju feast was, of course, Godzilla the Great.

In Pacific Rim, Kaiju (gesundheit) are popping up all over, emerging from a rift in the ocean floor and stomping all over the biggest cities around the Pacific. To counter the looming apocalypse, mankind has built mechanical monsters of its own, mechas known as Jaegers. Jaeger means hunter in German, but while my first encounter with a Jaeger was a schnitzel, these Jaegers are huge machines, matching the size and strength of the Kaiju.

Based on the true story about French ex-convict Henri Charriére (Steve McQueen), a petty criminal who is unjustly convicted of murder, and his constant struggle to escape to freedom from the brutal French penal system at Guiana's infamous Devil's Island. On the way to the hellhole, he meets Dega (Dustin Hoffman), a convicted counterfeiter who relies on Henri for protection. The two men end up becoming good friends and they rely on each other for their survival.

While the performances are marvelous from both McQueen and Hoffman, the pacing of this movie is horrendously slow. I understand that director Franklin J. Shaffner is trying to show the struggle that Charriére endured to secure his freedom, but a good 45 minutes could have been left on the cutting room floor improving the overall enjoyment of the film.

When a young couple bring a newborn baby home, someone or something begins terrorizing the family. In order to gain some piece of mind, the father (Brian Boland) installs some security cameras in and around the house in order to catch the hooligans in the act but the "real life" footage shows there's much more going on than meets the eye.

This isn't a genre of film that I particularly enjoy, so I never caught the first Paranormal Activity but I knew the general premise due to its popularity. My expectations weren't high and while I've seen far worse, I felt the screenplay took too long to introduce the characters and build up the tension (or lack thereof).