Category Archives: DVD/Blu-Ray

Ghostbusters (1984) & Ghostbusters II (1989)

Ghostbusters.  Oh Ghostbusters.  It’s like remembering the first girl you ever had a crush on, your best friend, and most of your favorite toys, all at once.  Also, there was Ecto-Cooler.  These two movies were easily the most viewed of my childhood, along with the cartoon, and of course any merchandise was a must have.  Looking back it’s hard to say just what it was about this story that pulled me in so utterly.  I was fascinated by ghosts, though there’s very little in the movies that could be considered anything other than spectral slapstick.  I certainly appreciate Bill Murray, though watching the films now I see just how much of his performance the kid version of me didn’t register.  I suppose it could have been simply a “right place, right time” situation, or my parents bringing a movie to me that we could all appreciate together, or even just all the amazing toys.  Whatever the case, the Ghostbusters franchise has been with me since near birth, and watching these films again as an adult, with hopefully a more critical eye, I think it’s safe to say I’ll be talking about them until the day I die.

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Kick-Ass (2010)

After Ebert’s less than enthusiastic review of Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick-Ass, I was both anxious and a little nervous to see the film.  I like Roger Ebert, and I respect his opinion.  It wasn’t luck that brought him to the status of Senior Film Critic in Chief.  But I read the books, and I loved them, and I loved them for the things that Ebert found so disturbing.  The absurdity and the violence.  The pure extremism of this entire scenario, and Mark Millar‘s through line that somehow keeps the thing from going too far.  It follows then that I should like the movie, with the two interpretations arriving so near one another, and Millar Executive Producing.  But there is a difference.  A few in fact, and it’s these differences that, on occasion, distort Kick-Ass the movie from silly entertainment into something dramatic, and intense, and on occasion, not particularly fun to watch.

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Bicycle Thieves (1948)

Desperation.  A theme found in an endless collection of stories and one that never lessens in it’s ability to impact us.  The power of this theme comes from the consequences of desperation, specifically the dramatic loss of honor that seems so inevitably tied to it.  It’s this universal emotion that allows Vittorio De Sica‘s Bicycle Thieves to remain so consistently effecting.  The story is simple, and not at all burdened with multiple dilemmas.  Just one: survive.  Survive for family, survive for honor, just survive.  Because this, more than anything else, is the point of existence.

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Clash of the Titans (2010)

Clash of the Titans is a train wreck; a 180 million dollar plus train wreck, where the train is painted bright red with flames on the side, and filled with thousands of faceless extras, and the sky is wholly computer generated for no good reason, and Sam Worthington is the conductor, and he’s yelling…a lot.

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Knocked Up (2007)

The simplest way of putting it is to say that Knocked Up is Judd Apatow‘s best film.  I hesitate to say “best work” as there are so many Freaks and Geeks loyalists out there, including yours truly, but the completeness of Apatow’s second film rivals his prematurely ended and wonderfully nostalgic TV show, and I’m not sure it’s a stretch to say it may be the best thing he ever does.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved Funny People, and I’ll certainly pay eight bucks to see whatever comes next, but following the uncontrolled kookiness of The 40 Year Old Virgin and coming before the pure self-indulgence of his Sandler/mid-life depression/look at my wife vehicle, Knocked Up seems to be a moment of near perfection on the unpredictable trajectory of Judd Apatow’s career.

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Shutter Island (2010)

There are a number of themes present in Martin Scorsese‘s Shutter Island, but the one most significant to the experience of the film is uncertainty.  From the first moment we meet U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), we’re thrust into a world of pure pandemonium, where it’s not just the chaos of the criminally insane that keeps us intensely uneasy, but also the aloof and decidedly dubious men in charge of the facility on the island.  There’s nothing here to hold on to, and no technique sets an audience on edge quite so effectively.  At one point in the film Teddy comes upon the cell of George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley), one of the more lucid inmates and a man Teddy has been searching for.  The two men bicker, canvassing their situation while keeping us firmly in the fog, then Noyce comes face to face with the Marshal, “Don’t you get it…?  You’re a rat in a maze.”  He may as well be looking right through the lens, into the audience.

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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)

Most of us have loved a book passionately.  There are at least five or ten that I have read more than twice, and inevitably I end up considering how it might adapt to film.  And for all the things that might work, and for all the things that certainly wouldn’t, the two elements that most often keep a book from serious consideration for adaptation are length and structure.  Books don’t work on a timeline, nor are they constrained by acts.  Regardless of the merits of either genre, the gap between the two feels evident here, as Brief Interviews with Hideous Men seems often confused and unsure of its legs as a motion picture.

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Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

The book of my life would have a good portion devoted to college.  So much of the person I am today was molded by those years of debaucherous youth.  Most of my friendships, most of my favorite memories, many of my firsts.  And as the distance grows, so does the nostalgia.  All the ridiculous moments and inside jokes seem more colorful in hindsight, and if there is anything about David Wain‘s Wet Hot American Summer that seems unflawed, it’s this same concept.  Like almost no other movie, Wet Hot achieves its real distinction in the joy of repeated viewings.  More than twenty if you really want to do it right.  Bizarre absurdity, which much of this movie banks on, becomes less offensive as it grows more familiar.  Not unlike the average college experience.

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The Hurt Locker (2009)

With The Hurt Locker, I ended up watching a very different film than I intended to.  The plan was to sit down and enjoy a dramatic war movie with nuanced performance and subtlety; an Oscar contender.  By the end though, I was watching a high suspense thriller that happens to take place in Iraq.  It’s not an insignificant difference, and it was one I needed to make before I could fully appreciate what I was watching.  Expectation is often the bane of a viewer’s existence, and that’s never more true than when one finally watches an Academy nominee.  The film was released on June 26th and Oscar-buzz began shortly thereafter.  Ever since then, our unformed opinions have been molded by everything BUT the movie itself.  I hate this for a number of reasons, but mostly because it’s unavoidable.  Either see it opening day, or go live in a cave.  Otherwise you had better be prepared to do battle with the forces of subjective opinion, because brother, they’re a-comin.

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Inglourious Basterds (2009)

The third act of Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds finds the Nazi elite mingling languidly in a quaint and gorgeous theater in Paris.  They are here to witness the debut of Joseph Goebbel’s latest film, Nation’s Pride, an account of Private Frederick Zoller’s (Daniel Brühl) war heroics, wherein he killed hundreds of Americans with only a gun and his German cunning.  From Bormann, to Goebbels, to Hitler himself, the Third Reich’s most distinguished members are in attendance to celebrate a mass slaughter carried out by one of their own.  And he no more than a private in Hitler’s army.  Zoller’s exploits feed their nationalism, their lust for victory, and as the lights in the theater dim and the film rolls, Goebbel’s film finds a ruggedly handsome Frederick Zoller killing one American after the next for an eternity.  The audience is held captive in their delight, their sweaty, angry faces beaming with a rapture both large and terrifying.  For you see, according to Quentin, Nazis are simply irritable nerds, and death is their porn.

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