Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Jake (Randy Wayne) and Roger (Robert Bailey Jr.) were best friends up until the ninth grade and the two drifted apart. Jake became the star of the basketball team and landed the hottest girl in school and Roger didn't fit in with his new group of friends. Three years later Jake's world crashes down around him when Roger enters the school with a handgun and takes his own life. Wracked with guilt, Jake begins to question his life choices and wonders if there was anything he could have done to save his childhood friend.

Calling a film "religious" will ultimately alienate a large portion of the population, but as long as the script isn't too preachy, I can usually enjoy them. That's certainly the case here where the message being spoken—care about thy neighbor—is commendable, especially to the targeted teen audience. The script certainly has a Christian slant to it, which isn't too distracting, but the story is very melodramatic and runs about 20 longer than it should.

Movies: 2.5/5 Video: 4/5
Audio: 4/5
Extras: 2/5

Movie: 3.5/5 Video: 3.5/5
Audio: 4/5
Extras: 2.5/5

Last October, I was disappointed with one of the debut titles of Paramount's new Sapphire Series Blu-rays, Gladiator. While the audio track was outstanding, the video encode left a lot to be desired due to some excessive digital manipulation and rampant edge enhancement. At the time, I asked Paramount to recall the disc and offer a replacement program as Sony did with the original release of The Fifth Element.

Ask and ye shall receive! The studio has implemented a limited exchange program with a new video encode that drastically improves the disc. If you own the original release, call Paramount at (888) 889-9456 to exchange it. For consumers wishing to buy the new version, it will be available in stores with a yellow barcode versus white on the original release.

Coraline Jones is a lonely little girl. She has just moved into a creepy old house, has no real friends, and her parents are so preoccupied with their work on a gardening catalog that they have no time for her. But she soon discovers a small, papered-over doorway in the living room. It leads to another universe—similar to her own but different in important ways. Her “other” parents in that universe are devoted to satisfying her every whim. Her only new friend there doesn’t talk much (actually, not at all), the neighbors who share the old, subdivided house are fascinating rather than merely eccentric, and everything is colorful and fun.

All is not what it seems. Coraline is, at its core, a bloodless horror story. Much like the recent computer-animated film 9 (the first post-apocalyptic sock-puppet movie, and another dynamite audio/video transfer), it gets under your skin in ways that animated fare rarely does and could seriously frighten young children. It also uses stop-motion animation as refined by stop-motion expert Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Monkeybone, James and the Giant Peach).

Flint Lockwood has been obsessed with science and inventing since grade school. He lives on an isolated island that has long since lost its vitality when the sardine trade, its major industry, went under. But Flint has a plan that could change all that, with the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator, or, as Flint puts it, FLD SM DFR (flid sim difur) for short. It turns water into food.

The invention accidentally rockets into the stratosphere, where it remains fixed over the island, soaking up the plentiful water from passing clouds. Soon hamburgers begin to fall from the sky, complete with all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame-seed bun. And that’s just the beginning. At first it’s manna—or at least Big Macs—from heaven, but things quickly spiral out of hand. The town’s ambitious mayor starts living large in more ways than one and turns the town into an all-you-can-eat cruise ship buffet.