December 2005

The final volume of Stellvia brings the series to a close as the cosmic rift races towards the Earth.  The fate of humanity hangs in the ability of Shima and Kota to pilot their spacecraft.  Though Kota is ready, Shima is doubting her abilities once again.  In this final volume there's a lot of action and suspense, making it one of the better volumes in the second half of the series.

Series Synopsis:

In the your 2167, the Earth was hit by a very powerful electromagnetic wave created by a supernova 20 light years away.  The wave had catastrophic effects, and life on Earth was almost extinguished.  But the survivors rebuilt civilization, and now, 189 year later, a second wave of particles traveling only 10% as fast as the electromagnetic radiation, but ... Read the entire review

THE MOVIE

As far as non-American film industries go, Croatia's isn't exactly Bollywood. The Internet Movie Database shows fewer than 600 films to come out of Croatia EVER, and many of those were straight-to-video or TV productions.

So you cut a little slack for a war-ravaged country where most of the citizens have more urgent things on their minds than making movies. But "Sorry for Kung Fu" ("Oprosti za kung fu"), the third feature from writer/director Ognjen Svilicic, requires more than a little slack. It's slow-moving and feels padded, even at only 72 minutes.

It has some good ideas, though. It begins with the return of Mirjana (Daria Lorenci) to her remote Croatian village from Germany, where she has been staying during the recent military conflicts. Mirjana is under 25, unmarried ... and pregnant.

Her parents, Jozo (Filip Rados) and Kate (Vera Zima), insist... Read the entire review

The Movie

Generally considered one of Roger Corman's finest productions, 1974's Big Bad Mama might be not much more than Bonnie & Clyde with a lot more nudity and a lot less sense ... but I'd be lying if I said this colorful ol' piece of camp doesn't have some real and lasting appeal. It's silly and simple and even a little mindless, but Big Bad Mama still stands up as good, clean B-movie fun. (Except for all the murders, kidnappings, and statutory rape, that is.)

Angie Dickinson is a whole lot of fun in the titular role, that of a Depression-era, tommy-gun-wielding matriarch of two ever-gigglin' teenage girls and overseer of a patchwork crime gang. After ruining her daughter's wedding and running afoul of two FBI agents, Wilma McClatchie is well on her way to becoming Public Enemy #1. From bank robberies to oil field heists and one ill-devised kidnapping, Ma... Read the entire review

Land Raiders (1969), a quasi-Euro Western starring Telly Savalas and George Maharis, is pretty typical of the kinds of movies producer Charles H. Schneer made when he wasn't partnered with animator Ray Harryhausen: workmanlike but not bad, undistinguished but competent, resolutely B-movie fodder but slightly above average for its place on the bill.

Savalas and Maharis are improbably cast as Hispanic Cain and Abel-like siblings, Savalas as Vince Carden, an immoral cattle baron with no regard for human life, and Maharis as his long-estranged brother Paul, a man haunted by the death of a lover some years before, a death many in his Arizona Territory hometown believe was murder.

Partly Land Raiders is a racial drama. Vince, born Vincente Cardenas, "becomes a gringo" in the eyes of younger brother Paul/Pablo. Vince has married a fair-skinned American woman (Arlene Dahl) an... Read the entire review

To call the New York Knicks a "dynasty," as the NBA has done by releasing the team's history in the "NBA Dynasty Series," is a bit of a stretch. The team has two titles to its name, less than any of the other four franchises (Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, Chicago Bulls, Philadelphia 76ers) represented in the series. Most seasons, the Knicks are mediocre at best, squeaking into the playoffs and exiting in the first round.

There are, it seems, some advantages to being located in the country's biggest media market. And no, I don't mean the possibly-fixed draft lottery that gave the Knicks the right to draft Patrick Ewing.

Whether the team itself is worthy, The New York Knicks: A Complete History is an incredibly in-depth release, with NBA Entertainment dipping deep into the vaults to come up with footage from every era of the team.


NBA Dynasty Series - New York Knicks - The Complete History

The Film:

A beautiful transsexual prostitute (Stéphanie Michelini), a bi-sexual North African (Yasmine Belmadi), and a clandestine Russian immigrant (Edouard Nikitine) are the focus of attention in Sebastien Lifshitz's (Come Undone) latest film about love, passion, and broken dreams. Certainly a film that will make prude audiences shift uncomfortably in their seats Wild Side is a poetic journey to a place where genders are a thing of the past.

In a remote village of the French countryside Stephanie has come home to her critically ill mother. Time is running out and the boy who once chose to live his life as a woman is now slowly beginning to remember where it all started. Followed by Michail, her charismatic Russian boyfriend, and Djame... Read the entire review

While he may have lost some of his street credibility after appearing on television hocking Chryslers with Lee Iacocca on the golf course, Snoop Dogg proves he can still keep it real by starring in this bizarre modern day blaxploitation drama with musical interludes directed by Pook Brown.

When the movie begins, Cordé Christopher (Snoop) is sitting in jail. Soon his lawyer shows up. After he's done hitting on her and daydreaming about dancing girls with fresh panties, we learn how he got there through a few flashback scenes. You see, way back when, Cordé was a grocery clerk who was always getting into trouble with his boss at work as he had a much better eye for the hotties than he did for the produce he was assigned to.

Fed up with his dead end job, Cordé wants to make some real coin and start living the easy life. He wants the American Dream, he tells h...Read the entire review

"Tony Takitani" is an unusually lovely film about a man struggling with loneliness. It's just 75 minutes long and has only a few characters. There is very little dialogue. The musical score consists of a piano playing an evocative, haunting theme. In terms of achieving the mood it's aiming for, it's one of the most effective movies I've ever seen.

The title character (played by Issei Ogata) is the son of a jazz musician who spends most of his time touring. Tony's mother died when he was an infant, so Tony learned to be alone throughout his early life. Now, as an adult -- first an art student, then a successful commercial illustrator -- he is alone but does not consider himself lonely. It's his natural state of being.

Then he meets Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), a beautiful woman 15 years his junior with a passion for clothing and style. He proposes marriage, and while... Read the entire review

Murder One was a short-lived television series from the late nineties about the defense attorney's perspective in the courtroom. The show came from Stephen Bochco, creator of Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and NYPD Blue. In the series' first season the show did something that most series do not dare try. The entire season (twenty-three episodes) was spent unraveling one story arc with several sidebars for character development and subplots. Most television series stay away from this model because it can be hard to keep the viewer's attention for so long. Of course, there are exceptions and Murder One was one. The series wasn't a huge success when the first season aired on television, but it was liked enough to keep around for a second season. Unfortunately the second season, while good in my opinion, didn't grab the ratings hoped fo... Read the entire review

Filmmaker Michael Bay is well aware that his films are pretty much loathed, detested, and reviled by most film critics. And when a movie is loathed, detested, and reviled by a whole lot of film critics, that generally means that the movie at hand, well, it probably sucks. But don't tell that to the teeming throngs of multiplex monkeys, because Bay's last three efforts (Bad Boys 2 , Pearl Harbor, Armageddon) were huge moneymakers all across the globe. Yes, Michael Bay knows full well what the film critics think of his films -- and it's obvious he couldn't care less. But after enjoying the hell out of The Island (despite its solid catalog of flaws) I'm beginning to think the guy just might be on the lookout for a few brownie points.

You name it, sci-fi wise, and it's bound to be found in The Island: Blade Runner, Gattaca, Min... Read the entire review

In the far flung future of the year 2000 (or at least what could have passed for the year 2000 back in 1975), America has become a fascist empire. The national sport is no longer baseball, but an annual 'Death Race' in which skilled race car drivers gun their customized four wheeled killing machines from one side of the country to the next, earning points for killing as many innocent bystanders as they can along the way. Every year the Death Race draws a huge crowd, it really is the event of the year akin to today's Super Bowl, but this year things promise to be even more intense than usual as the reigning champion, Frankenstein (David Carradine of Kung Fu and Kill Bill) has a new challenge in the form of a rookie driver named Joe Vitrubo (a young Sylvester Stallone of Rocky and Rambo fame).

Of course, there are other competitors to worry... Read the entire review

Surprisingly short-lived but still a popular favorite, Disney's Gargoyles was easily one of the strongest animated series of the 1990s. Combining the humor and fantasy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with the dark, brooding atmosphere of Batman: The Animated Series , Gargoyles was a favorite among many wide-eyed kids, teenagers, and the parents of both. Sadly, like most other shows aimed primarily at a younger audience, Gargoyles burned brightly but didn't last long. After only two seasons' worth of shows (with 65 episodes in all), it was soon replaced by The Goliath Chronicles, a terribly inferior version of the original that was all but abandoned by co-creator Greg Weisman (and rightfully so). Still, the quality of the original is evident even today, ... Read the entire review

The immortal PJ Soles plays the equally immortal Riff Randell in Rock N Roll High School, a 1979 Roger Corman production co-written by Joe Dante (of Gremlins fame) and directed by Allan Arkush (of Caddyshack II and a ton of TV series).

Riff is obsessed with The Ramones. They're her favorite band in the universe and she wants nothing more than to experience them live when they roll through her town in the coming days. In order to score herself some tickets, Riff is going to have to camp out at the box office but seeing as she's a high school student, that might be a problem, as she's supposed to be in class all day and there's no way that the hard nosed principal, Ms. Togar (Mary Woronov of Sugar Cookies) is going to let her skip out.

Riff comes up with some interesting excuses to get out of class but things are starting to get k... Read the entire review

At the time, science fiction/fantasy shows were limited to the crude serial-like adventures of Captain Video and His Video Rangers and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Even The Adventures of Superman, newly out on DVD, is pretty flaccid, and its affection is driven more by nostalgia than quality.

Tales of Tomorrow, by contrast, was in terms of content mor... Read the entire review

You hear "documentary" and you expect one or all of these: Controversy (Fahrenheit 911), insight (anything historical), or beauty (Winged Migration).

Animals: Friend or Food has little of the first two, and makes a token attempt at the third, following a nondescript Canadian as he runs his first animal farm in Nova Scotia, from purchasing the livestock to slaughter.

The title gives you the impression that a vegetarian or a hippie is behind this, and filmmaker Jason Young does sport the long hair and scruffy beard. But Young is not only a meat-eater, but seems to have few reservations about the issue. He just wants to see what being a livestock farmer is like, and whether being closer to pigs, steer and rabbits will alter his view of food. No statistics on anim... Read the entire review

An enjoyably grungy and entirely engaging little crime thriller you've probably never heard of, Gregor Jordan's Two Hands qualifies as a bona-fide pleasant surprise. The DVD case informed me that the 1999 Australian flick stars Heath Ledger and Bryan Brown, and also that it was directed by the guy who'd go on to helm Buffalo Soldiers (which is damn good) and Ned Kelly, which is NOT as bad as you've heard.

So I sat down expecting some sort of mega-flashy, yet patently Oz-centric, take on Trainspotting, and was quite pleasantly surprised by Jordan's tight-fisted and efficient style of storytelling. Two Hands might not be the most unique crime story ever told, but it's more than engaging enough to warrant a 3-dollar rental and a 90-minute sit-down.

Heath Ledger plays a go-nowhere kid named Jimmy who (unwisely) accepts a simple courier g... Read the entire review

Don't go into the 1940 western drama Arizona expecting a whole lot of action, and odds are you'll find a lot to like in this enjoyably outdated little chestnut. Starring old-school legends William Holden and Jean Arthur, Arizona takes its good ol' sweet time moseying through the narrative tumbleweeds, but there's still an enjoyable sheen of old-fashioned little oater.

Arthur stars as Phoebe Titus, "the only American woman in the Arizona territory," and a tough little cookie in her own right. Oh sure, Phoebe makes a living selling pies to the local soldiers and businessmen, but that's just a way to make ends meet until she can open her very own cattle ranch. (Too bad cows are not indigenous to Arizona.) And woe is the ornery cuss who tries to separate Phoebe from her hard-earned cash, because this is a woman who owns a big shotgun, and she's not afraid to swing... Read the entire review

"This is the story of Gerald McCloy, and the strange thing that happened to that little boy."

Gerald McBoing Boing was the brainchild of Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss.)  He invented the character and released the story on a record, but it didn't sell well.  Seuss still believed in the idea, and thought that maybe a cartoon was the way to go.  He had contributed some scripts to the Private Snafu cartoons during WWII, and he looked up some of the people he had worked with at that time.  A deal was made and he sold the concept to UPA (United Productions of America).  They turned the Seuss story into a cartoon which went on to win critical acclaim and even an Academy Award.  They followed this first short up with three more, and then created a TV show which was the first animated show to be shown... Read the entire review

Back when I was in high school, my pals and I all had our very "own" favorite singer. One of my buddies claimed Phil Collins, another dug Billy Joel, and one poor lunatic had every single Steve Winwood CD. Me, I was a Peter Gabriel fan. No, not that "early Genesis" stuff that sounds (to me) like a whole lot of acid-inspired warbling. No, I mean the "solo stuff" Peter Gabriel, from his numerous self-titled CDs to his fantastic "Plays Live" release, and (of course), the mega-platinum, amazingly overplayed "So," which yielded tunes like In Your Eyes, Big Time, and Sledgehammer.

And when Peter Gabriel would stretch his wings and pen entire scores for films like Birdy and The Last Temptation of Christ , something special was usually the result.

So when I picked up a DVD assignment that I'd never even heard of, something called "Still Growi... Read the entire review

Haste comes with a price. In my case, I casually saw Pulse on the list of flicks for review and assumed it was Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse aka. Kairo, which I know quite well and figured would be an easy, quick review. Well, this Pulse is a 1988 PG-13 US flick starring lil' Joey Lawrence, and, as it turns out, the 88' Pulse was not unfamiliar to me. The video box art used to always stare back at me when I perused the horror isle. It had a very 80's horror cover design of a woman being electrified like she stumbled on a live cable backstage at a Deep Purple concert. Of course, as is so often the case these days, that cool artwork has been replaced by a more generic and safe cover for the DVD release.

Divorcee Bill Rochland (Cliff De Young- Flashback, Flight of the Navigator) has his son David (Joey Lawrence- Blossom and numerous covers of Tiger Bea... Read the entire review

The Movie:

Kind of a poor man's rip off of Jaws with liberal doses of Tremors and Jurassic Park thrown in just for the Hell of it, Dinocroc is a really dumb movie that makes really poor use of really dumb effects and really poor acting. Produced by Roger 'King Of The B's' Corman and directed by Kevin O'Neill (a quick check on his credits shows us most of his experience is in the world of digital effects), this really is bottom of the barrel stuff.

The plot is simple and wholly unoriginal – a genetic engineering company called Geraco inadvertently releases into a small backwoods town a mutant dinosaur-crocodile thing that looks suspiciously like a left over test monster from the abomination that was the American Godzilla. When the monster starts eating some of the locals, the Sherriff (Charles Napier, of Rambo and Supervixens) is... Read the entire review

Ever hear the phrase "some things are best left alone"? Sometimes that's the best advice for the TV shows that you enjoyed in childhood. Certainly there are the instances in which you're charmed and delighted by something that you loved as a kid, but then there are other times when you realize that... well, tastes change, styles come and go, and what you once thought was classic is now just plain cheese. That's pretty much where I ended up with Remington Steele Season 2.

Nostalgia is always a powerful help in appreciating the good parts in programs that haven't aged as well as they might have, but I'm afraid that with Remington Steele, nostalgia can only go so far before smacking into the show's flaws. Remington Steele may have seemed ultra-cool to 9- or 10-year-old me in the early ... Read the entire review

Matt Damon and Heath Ledger play Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, two brothers who spend their time traveling from one small town to the next small town, conning the local simple folk out of their hard earned money by performing staged magic tricks and pawning them off on them as the real deal. Their gig becomes far less profitable for them when an officer in Napoleon's army named Delatombe (Jonathon Price) exposes them for the fraud's that they are.

Taken into custody and obviously guilty of swindling the good people of late 1700s Germany, Delatombe decides that instead of torturing them or locking them up that he will send them to the remote village of Marbaden, deep in the heart of the forest. It seems that there has been a rash of mysterious disappearances there, primarily of children, and Delatombe wants the Brothers Grimm to use their cunning to uncover the mystery of... Read the entire review

1999's The Mummy was a blockbuster that kind of came out of nowhere, struck itself a nice early-May release date, and squeezed a whole lot of bucks out of an enthusiastic audience. I didn't much care for the movie upon first inspection, but I'm not embarrassed to admit that the thing has grown on me in a pretty positive way.

It's the story of a dashing hero (Brendan Fraser), a beautiful babe (Rachel Weisz), a few goofball sidekicks, an evil mummy, and about 23 megatons of high-octane special effects mayhem. Stephen Sommers, director of a true guilty-please favorite (Deep Rising ) strikes a amiable mixture of Indy Jones-style derring-do, PG-13-level horror stuff, and a cockeyed sense of humor to top the whole thing off. It sure isn't high art (heck, it's not even half the flick that Pirates of the Caribbean is), but The Mummy is a flashy and unass... Read the entire review

Although I'd never seen The Amazing Race on TV, I jumped at the chance to review the first season's DVD release, mainly because I am a huge Survivor fanatic and my friends kept telling me "yeah, Survivor's cool, but The Amazing Race is even better." Oddly enough, aside from these two programs, my tolerance level for "reality" television is exceedingly low. (I once watched an episode of Temptation Island and then had to re-learn the entire alphabet.)

So when I reviewed The Amazing Race: The Complete First Season , I said stuff like this:

"As The Amazing Race's first season hops from Africa to Paris to China, you get to know the contestants in up close & personal fashion. But then one duo that you love to hate turns around and does something sweet. Or your favorite team pulls a sneaky tactic and you start to root for some... Read the entire review