Blu-ray Movie Reviews

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Other TechBlu-ray Movie Reviews
Will Apple Kill Custom? Page 3
Brent Butterworth  |  May 11, 2011

Technologies that distribute audio and video around a home are incredibly cool—if you can afford them, if you can tolerate complicated installation, and if you can figure out how to use them once they’re in. I’ve long assumed a big consumer electronics company like Samsung or Sony would invent a more practical multiroom A/V solution, but it seems the technology that finally gets us past the old paradigms may be Apple’s AirPlay.

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Other TechBlu-ray Movie Reviews
Will Apple Kill Custom? Page 4
Brent Butterworth  |  May 11, 2011

Technologies that distribute audio and video around a home are incredibly cool—if you can afford them, if you can tolerate complicated installation, and if you can figure out how to use them once they’re in. I’ve long assumed a big consumer electronics company like Samsung or Sony would invent a more practical multiroom A/V solution, but it seems the technology that finally gets us past the old paradigms may be Apple’s AirPlay.

Continue Reading »
Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Oct 05, 2009

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/wwonka.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Roald Dahl's classic story tells the tale of five kids who find a golden ticket that entitles them to visit the secretive Wonka Chocolate factory, where one worthy child will win a lifetime supply of chocolate. Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum), a poor kid who lives with his mother and two sets of grandparents in the shadow of the factory, is one of the lucky five. The others&#151;well, let's just say they are the result of bad parenting and poor choices.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - 40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition
David Vaughn  |  Oct 10, 2011
Roald Dahl's classic story tells the tale of five kids who find a golden ticket that entitles them to visit the secretive Wonka Chocolate factory, where one worthy child will win a lifetime supply of chocolate. Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum), a poor kid who lives with his mother and two sets of grandparents in the shadow of the factory, is one of the lucky five. The others—well, let's just say they are the result of bad parenting and poor choices.

As a child, I never really connected with this film, but I've have grown to enjoy it as a parent. The behavior of the four "bad" kids provides extreme examples of what we often see in children today, and watching the film with my kids was a great way to teach them how not to behave. Charlie is a model child, and his virtuous behavior is a parent's dream. I think we all wish our children could be so respectful.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Win Puss in Boots on Blu-ray
Michael Berk  |  Mar 02, 2012

As we've been saying for a while now, 7.1's coming of age - and, with increasing frequency and utility, it's coming to home theaters.

With a growing list of releases taking advantage of those extra channels, why not take a chance with us and get yourself a copy of Puss in Boots on Blu-ray.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wipe your windshield
Ken Korman  |  Apr 02, 2009
Universal
Movie ••• Picture ••• Sound •••• Extras ••½
Is it possible to create high drama from the inventi
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wireless Blu-ray Player Face-off
Al Griffin  |  Nov 16, 2009

No longer content to be tethered to A/V systems alone, many new Bluray Disc players augment their basic BD-Live online capability with streaming services like Netflix, Pandora, Vudu, YouTube, and CinemaNow.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wish I Was Here
Josef Krebs  |  Feb 09, 2015
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Sound
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In this family affair—both in subject and moviemaking— Zach Braff directs and stars while co-writing and co-producing with his brother Adam. Together they’ve created a gently comic, small, oddball drama that, like Braff’s Garden State, often feels lightweight and silly but somehow manages to deal profoundly with the biggest questions and challenges of people’s lives in a resonating and moving manner. The family is that of Aidan Bloom, an immature, 35-year-old, out-of-work L.A. actor trying to live his passionate dream while holding his family together. The crisis comes to a head when he must remove his two children from their school because Aidan’s unforgivingly judgmental, sarcastically (and funnily) scathing father Gabe (Mandy Patinkin)—who was staking the kids’ education so long as it was in a Yeshiva school—needs the money for experimental cancer treatment, forcing Aidan to half-assedly home-teach his kids.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
With a Bang or a Whimper
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jul 03, 2005

<I>Avoid a Blue Tuesday by capping off your holiday weekend plans with the end of the world! Whether we will become extinct as a species from within or without is the subject of two movies on DVD, one an environmental-disaster flick of dubious distinction, the other a classic loosely based on the Victorian novel that in turn has inspired a current remake. Thomas J. Norton and Fred Manteghian report on 2004's </I>The Day After Tomorrow: All Access Collector's Edition<I> and 1953's </I>The War of the Worlds.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wolf Totem
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Apr 22, 2016
Picture
Sound
Extras
After he and his film Seven Years in Tibet (1997) were banned from China, director Jean-Jacques Annaud returns to the country for his visually stunning Wolf Totem, an adaptation of Jiang Rong’s semi-autobiographical novel.

Set during China’s Cultural Revolution of 1969, Wolf Totem is an environmentalist tale that follows Beijing student Chen Zhen (Shaofeng Feng), who is assigned to China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to teach its nomadic shepherd population. Instead, Zhen becomes attached to the land, its people, and the balance between them and their most feared enemy, the wolves.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Woman in the Dunes
Josef Krebs  |  Dec 16, 2016
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Extras
Stark, disturbing, disorienting, director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) is a masterpiece of macabre metaphor. An entomologist searching for specimens of insects in a desert at the edge of a seaside misses his bus back to Tokyo and is offered to spend the night in the hut of a young widow at the bottom of a sand dune surrounding it on all sides. He discovers the next morning that the ladder has been pulled up by the local villagers trapping him with the woman for years to come.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wonder Woman
Chris Chiarella  |  Jan 19, 2018
Picture
Sound
Extras
Many filmmakers would surely crack under the challenges of finally bringing Wonder Woman to the big screen. But the remarkably gifted Patty Jenkins (writer/director of 2004’s Monster, her last feature) tackles the ambitious production—an action-heavy World War I– era period piece—with educated gusto, thoughtfully honoring and expanding upon the beloved heroine’s legacy. Of course, none of that matters without the right star, and Gal Gadot’s Princess Diana combines strength, brains, and innocence to give this movie an irresistible heart.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
World's Greatest Dad (Blu-ray) World's Greatest Dad (Blu-ray)
David Vaughn  |  Dec 07, 2009

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/greatdad.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) learns that fame and fortune may not always be the key to happiness when in the wake of a freak accident his lifelong dream of being a famous writer comes to fruition, but at what cost?

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews3D Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wrath of the Titans
Thomas J. Norton  |  Oct 01, 2012
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3D-ness
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Extras
Interactivity
Zeus, king of the gods, enlists the help of his half-human son Perseus in defeating Perseus’ brother Ares, who has allied with Hades in an effort to release Kronos, the leader of the Titans and the father of Zeus and the other gods. But Perseus just wants to be left alone to live as a human with his son.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews3D Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Wreck-It Ralph
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jul 31, 2013
Picture
3D-Ness
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Extras
Ralph plays the bad guy in the decades-old video game Fix-It Felix, Jr. Each time the game is reset, he trashes the high-rise apartment building that serves as the game’s main setting, only to have Felix instantly repair the damage. It’s a living, but Ralph lives alone in a junk pile, the other characters in the game want nothing to do with him, and he finds relief only in a Bad-Anon support group. As another member of that group argues, he may be a bad guy, but he isn’t a bad guy.
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