Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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).

They say there's nothing new under the sun, and nothing drives home that old adage like the birth of a new format or two. The first movies that come out on a new format invariably aren't the <I>Citizen Kanes</I>, or even the <I>Titanics</I> of film history. No, it's the star-studded action warhorses that are considered at least somewhat tried and true that are trotted out by the studios.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/passengers.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>After a plane crash, a young therapist, Claire Summers (Anne Hathaway), is assigned to counsel the flight's five survivors. When she begins to uncover conflicting accounts of the accident, she chalks it up to traumatic stress disorder&#151;until the survivors start vanishing one by one.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/paycheck.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) is a genius engineer who has his memory erased after every project to keep the clandestine projects he works on secret. When an old friend offers him a huge paycheck in exchange for three years of his life, Michael reluctantly agrees. But when he's finished with the project, instead of the $90 million promised, he's left with a group of unrelated objects as clues to discover the truth about the previous three years.