Author: Robert Greenberger

REVIEW: Prometheus

prometheus-6186619Ridley Scott rarely repeats himself, avoiding formulaic sequels, useless prequels, and remakes. Instead, the stylist conjures up new works and attempts to be thought-provoking time after time. You might have bought into the hype that this year’s Prometheus is an out and out set up to his Alien, but you’d be wrong. While tangentially connected to the first successful science fiction/horror film hybrid, this film is a pure science fiction film owing plenty to Stanley Kubrick.

The movie, now out on disc from 20th Century Home Entertainment, is an ambitious production with a strong cast, surrounded by amazing visuals. While we laughed at how weak the story and characterizations were in James Cameron’s Avatar, here, we are merely disappointed the story isn’t a match for the visual virtuosity on display. While far from Scott’s best, he deserves credit for trying something different and challenging his audience.

Scott sets his story in 2093, optimistically thinking we will be regularly working in space and ready to traverse the distant reaches of the galaxy. Scientists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) find a map as part of a 30,000-year-old cave painting on the Isle of Skye, confirming there is sentient life elsewhere in the universe. Dubbed The Engineers, they seemingly beckon mankind to find them. The audience has already met them in an opening sequence that suggests they arrived on Earth with some goo that ignited the spark of life (and was also seen as the mummified Space Jockey way back in 1979). To discover the answer, deep-pocketed Peter Weyland (Guy Pierce) funds the construction of The Prometheus, which is thusly launched, its crew in hibernation en route to moon LV-223 and the evidence of intelligent life.

Heading up the crew is Mereditch Vickers (Charlize Theron) alongside the ship’s captain Janek (Idris Elba) with android David (Michael Fassbender), geologist Fifield (Sean Harris), and biologist Millburn (Rafe Spall). One trick he does reuse from Alien is that before long, things go horribly awry. The story has gaping, starship-sized plot holes and the grand themes – where do we come from? — do nothing to mask them. It would have been nice if the crew had more depth of character or interacted in more interesting ways.

Fassbender has the toughest job, making his eight generation android different than the others seen in earlier films making up the Alien universe. Theron is strong with her work but Rapace gives us the more interesting, nuanced performance.

Scott shot this for big screen 3-D, framing things to pop just so, and dazzle us with detail. Thankfully, that all transfers pretty nicely to the home screen and 2-D. The transfer is pretty spectacular both audio and visual.

The Combo Pack offers you the film on Blu-ray, DVD, and Ultraviolet (a larger Combo Pack with 3-D Blu-ray is also an option, with a fourth disc containing an amazing three-and-half-hour documentary by Charles de Lauzirika). The special features provided on the standard Blu-ray begins with Scott’s audio commentary, supplemented with one from co-writers John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof.

There are thirty-seven minutes of Deleted, Extended & Alternate Scenes which you can on their own or with audio commentary by editor Pietro Scalia and VFX supervisor Richard Stammers. These are all interesting to watch, several of which would have made the film stronger. The Peter Weyland Files (18:57) are culled from the Internet.

REVIEW: Chernobyl Diaries

  • Uncategorized
  • October 21, 2012

Producer Oren Peli commanded our attention with the interesting Paranormal Activity, but has since proven to be a lot less interesting to watch. His subsequent works have lacked flaw or much suspense or originality. His latest disappointment is the post-apocalyptic Chernobyl Diaries, which is a horror film using the Russian nuclear disaster as the catalyst. The film, out on Blu-ray from Warner Home Video, lets down the viewer by not being good, scary, or by having anything to say about nuclear reactors at a time when the topic is bubbling up once again as we scramble for alternative energy sources.

The basics of the story show a group of friends take an “Extreme Tour” of Prypiat, the town next door to the fabled power plant which exploded in 1986 and currently sits buried under concrete. When they somehow get stranded from the tour, you know nothing good will come of this decision. Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), the tour guide, is the one to make the inane decision to spend the night rather than hike through the night the twelve miles to get help or find appropriate shelter. In a thankfully brief eighty-six minutes, we watch several get killed and a few lucky ones survive. Ho hum.

Peli knows how to scare us, having made his name with Paranormal Activity but he and Bradley Parker reuse all the same techniques in a new setting, recycling without any benefit to the audience. At least visually they make things look and feel bleak with Hungary and Serbia standing in for poor Prypiat.

This film was shot on the cheap, reportedly $1 million, which may explain the lack of adequate script or solid cast to convince us something bad is really going on. The quartet of kids is led by singer Jesse McCartney and Norwegian actress Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, neither of whom are bad enough to deserve Razzies, just bland. They run, they hide, they get hunted by who-knows-what, which miraculously transforms into I-don’t-care long before the fifty minute mark.

Before he is allowed to shot another movie, Peli needs to convince us he has something to say or something to show us. Right now, we’ve seen it all and have little need to come back for more.

The movie looks and sounds fine on the transfer. The Combo Pack offers us the Blu-ray, DVD, and Ultraviolet along with a few extras including Uri’s Extreme Tours Infomercial (1:19); Chernobyl Conspiracy Viral Video (2:25); a single deleted scene and an alternate ending that doesn’t help.

REVIEW: The Raven

  • Uncategorized
  • October 20, 2012

The timing of The Raven’s home video release is a curious one as I am busily teaching my eighth graders about the short story, using Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” as the first example. This feature film was released in the spring and sank without making much of a ripple at the box office, unlike Poe, who startled readers with amazing regularity for over a decade before his tragic, mysterious death.

To introduce the students to Poe, we reviewed his life which had him all over the northeast, marrying a thirteen year old relative and fighting depression and alcohol while trying to be the best writer or journalist he could be. His works of prose and poetry made for excellent reading in the newspapers and magazines while he laid the groundwork for contemporary detective fiction and helped transition us from the more genteel gothic tale to one of pure horror.

Screenwriters Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare used the unrecorded circumstances of Poe’s final days and blended them with elements drawn from his works to tell this particular story that fails to be a solid detective yarn or be particularly scary. Director James McTeigue’s (V for Vendetta) best move was to cast John Cusak as Poe, giving us a sympathetic character, although he appears far too robust given what really happened in Baltimore back in 1849. Foreshadowing the serial killers that became a staple of newspapers and novels decades later, this story shows us Poe chasing such a killer.

None of it really happened and the R-rated film is too violent for my young charges to see, which may be just as well given its lack of real suspense or good writing. Even the pounding soundtrack is more distracting than unsettling, just another layer of noise on an all-too busy film.

Why is he in Baltimore? Not chasing a killing but there to woo and marry Emily Hamilton (Alive Eve), despite the disapproval of her father, Captain Charles (Brendan Gleeson). He’s also drunk and in need of work, hoping to land some assignment from editor, Maddox (Kevin McNally). During this time, someone is killing young women in a manner reminiscent of Poe’s work so Police detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) summons Poe for a consultation and suddenly the game is afoot.

If you enjoy Poe’s work, you will appreciate the nods which have been woven or shoved into the fabric of the story but on the whole it is tedious business, not at all helped from flat dialogue and characterizations to a less than effective atmosphere. And it also avoids being interesting by being very predictable so of course Emily falls into the killer’s hands and Poe will be the only one to save her. Had the screenwriters actually used Poe’s structure of building suspense and playing with the psychological underpinnings of gothic fiction, things might have turned out far differently. Instead, we’re left checking our watch and wondering how such rich material could feel so obvious.

The film’s transfer to Blu-ray is nicely handled and McTiegue’s dark, shadowy shots retain their black moodiness. Similarly, the audio work is just swell.

McTiegue and producers Marc D. Evans, Trevor Macy, and Aaron Ryder provide rich details on the film’s making in the audio commentary. The disc also comes with six Deleted and Extended Scenes (10:41); none of which are missed. The Raven Guts: Bringing Death to Live (13:32) is a just-right-length making of featurette while the teaching in me wanted more from The Madness, Misery, and Mystery of Edgar Allen Poe (9:50), as a pair of experts tell us what Poe’s life was really like, especially at the end. There are three additional pieces: Behind the Beauty and Horror (2:18), The Raven Presents John Cusack & James McTeigue (2:45), and Music for the Raven – The Team (5:10).

REVIEW: Bones the Complete Seventh Season

Bones has carefully straddled the line between light-hearted crime drama, ala Hart to Hart and taut melodrama. Over the seven seasons, showrunner Hart Hanson has carefully brought the main characters, Special Agent Seely Booth (David Boreanaz) and Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel), together, nicely balancing the “will they or won’t they?” romantic tension until finally, in the last season, they finally became a couple. Probably quicker than anticipated, thanks to a real life pregnancy, Brennan was with child.

The seventh season of Bones, now out on Blu-ray from 20th Century Home Entertainment, is a shorter than normal thirteen episodes because of the circumstances, but Hanson did not slow down the pacing, setting things up for a dramatic cliffhanger that left fans really hanging for the spring and summer.

Along the way, the supporting cast at the Jeffersonian Institute Forensic Sciences Department was also given their moments in the spotlight, proving they are one of the richest, most interesting ensembles on prime time. With all the personal issues surrounding the cast, it’s pretty impressive they still manage to fit in unique corpse of the week stories. Things kicked off with a body at a paintball event and continued forward. The forensic testing results remain ridiculously fast in arriving and Angela (Michaela Conlin) never meets a challenge whose butt she can’t kick so there are definite stretches of credulity, moreso this season than in the past. Sweets (John Frances Daley) lost some of his boyish charm as he grew deadly accurate with his service revolver.

The series nicely rotated the usual interns, freshening the group dynamic with regularity and the addition of southern gentleman Finn Abernathy (Luke Kleintank) was a nice addition. His flirtation and dating of Cam’s (Tamara Taylor) daughter was an interesting development that ultimately went nowhere.

The most unusual episode of the season has to be “The Suit on the Set” where Booth and Brennan travel to watch a film based on one of her books is being made. They skewer Hollywood’s inability to faithfully adapt a novel, going for busts and pyrotechnics over plot and characterization. A little silly but a refreshing change of pace.

The finale sees the return of criminal Christopher Pellant who goes out of his way to frame Brennan, turning her into a wanted felon. The problem here is that the circumstantial evidence mounts so high so fast, at least one of the characters should have at least questioned the absurdity of all this damning information pouring out at once. But nope, never happened. Instead, Brennan and her dad (Ryan O’Neal) take the baby and go on the run, leaving Booth behind.

Given the shortened season, one would have expected either additional special features to compensate or fewer given the dearth of material to work with. We get more of the latter than the former with two deleted scenes, commentary on one episode, a four minute Gag Reel, and two small pieces on the Hollywood episode. First, there’s Creating The Suit on the Set (10:59) on how the episode was made then a fun, fake Bone of Contention: On the Red Carpet (3:18)

I was late to the series and was able to plow through the first five seasons to jump on board but you cannot start cold with this season. It’s too involved in its continuity and character relationships to be totally accessible to a newcomer. But for those of us who are fans of this show, adapted from the novels by Kathy Reichs, it was a slid if flawed season and worth a second look.

REVIEW: Moonrise Kingdom

You have to credit director Wes Anderson with having a unique vision, one that is slightly off kilter compared with most of his fellow filmmakers. As a result, his films tend to visually interesting and highly stylized, getting notably quirky performances out of his cast. Moonrise Kingdom, his oddly sweet summer confection, is the latest such offering. He revels in dysfunctional groupings, in this case a family and local community, set in 1965, on the cusp of dramatic changes to society as a whole. This tale features two twelve year olds who run away as a storm looms over New Penzance, an isolated island off the coast of northern New England and has a kid’s book feel to it. In many ways, it reminded me of having fairy tale similarities to the hyper-realized rainbow bright Pushing Daisies.

You laugh at the oddball characters, marvel at the mannered performances from a stellar cast, and find your expectations upended time and again. You root for the kids, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), to find happiness. To them, it’s a love story. He abandons his scout troop and she runs away from home, and you would too given her dazed dad Walt (Bill Murray) and adulterous mother Laura (Frances McDormand).

Sam is an orphan and his foster family doesn’t want him back so it falls to the local sheriff (Bruce Willis) and the scout master (Edward Norton) to mount the hunt. With the storm approaching, things are ratcheted high enough to snag the attention of Scout commander Pierce (Harvey Keitel) and Khaki Scout chaplain Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman) along with Social Services (Tilda Swinton); and yeah, that’s the character’s name.

While the storm and the missing children are whipping the adults up into a stylized frenzy, the two kids are innocent, unaware, and wholly devoted to one another. While every adult is flawed and mostly unlikable, the kids are fresh-faced and worthy of rooting for. What’s interesting is watching the effect their unseen devotion to one another is having on the adults as the film progresses. One by one, love transforms (or at least softens) the adults, the authority figures who are thinking of punishment and retribution.

The story is charming and riveting in its simplicity, a testament to Anderson’s skill as a storyteller. The movie is lovingly transferred to Blu-ray so the soft colors, a palette that works so well as an element, are well captured. The audio is also superb.

Amazingly, there are but three three-minute featurettes included on the disc: A Look Inside Moonrise Kingdom, Welcome to the Island of New Penzance, and Set Tour with Bill Murray.

REVIEW: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

  • News
  • October 17, 2012

Your first thought at seeing this review is: “Why on earth is ComicMix reviewing this?” First of all, we’re a pop culture site; but more importantly, this is a film filled with marvelous British actors we have enjoyed in countless genre offerings. They deserve to be seen in just about anything they do and when you put them all together, it’s a British version of The Expendables, the geriatric edition. When you have Judi Dench (the current Bond films), Maggie Smith (Harry Potter, et. al.), Bill Nighy (the Pirates of the Caribbean series), and Tom Wilkinson (Batman Begins) acting together, you sit down and pay attention.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a charming, well-written, well-acted film that is actually about something. It was directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) and based on Deborah Moggach’s novel These Foolish Things. The cast is fortunate to still be working, but many of their peers – and many of us – are not working as we age, and our future has come into question. The film follows these Brits as they decide to relocate from their homeland to a more affordable retirement community in India. They were suckered into believing the glossy brochure, without stopping to investigate. The reality, of course, is far worse than imagined and now they have to deal with the decisions they have come to make.

The film, now out on DVD from 20th Century Home Entertainment, plays things with a light touch while the subject matter is fairly heavy and resonates with our aging elders here, too. There’s Dench as a recently widowed woman who finds 21st Century technology baffling, and Wilkinson, who lived in India as a young man and has desired for a return. Nighy and Penelope Wilton (Shaun of Dead) blew their retirement savings on funding their daughter’s failed start-up so make this move out of desperation. And there’s Smith, playing a racist who only came to India for a quick and cheap hip replacement operation. It’s not all bleak as Ronald Pickup plays a retiree hoping to score with some of his compatriots, his ardor still running hot.

Sharp contrasts are drawn between the characters and their motivations for making such a major move so late in life. How they react to the decrepit hotel, run by the charming, enthusiastic and overwhelmed Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) propels much of the story. Jaipur, where the story takes place, is beautiful and squalid, a composite of modern day India.

The film follows the characters and over time we watch some adjust, some struggle, and many fight. It’s a school of fish out of water, prompting a lot of cultural miscues and comedy, but it overlays a poignancy that this stellar cast projects in a nice, subtle way. They learn things from the local people, and each other, while they also teach Sonny a thing or two, letting him finally take the belated steps towards a mature adulthood.

The film has its predictable moments but you’re smiling through most this and you want a happy ending for all concerned, which you (for the most part) get. It’s immensely satisfying and worth a look.

The transfer to Blu-ray is good, not great, and has fine audio. There are a handful of perfunctory extras that are too short for the subject matter, such as Behind the Story: Lights, Colors and Smiles (2:34) and Casting Legends (3:55). The exotic and picturesque locales get their due in Welcome to the “Real” Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2:55) and Trekking to India: “Life is Never the Same” (2:45).

Win a Copy of The League Season 3

  • News
  • October 16, 2012

While we’re almost halfway through the current football season, hard to believe, fans who cannot get enough of the sport should know that season three of The League is now out on home video.

We have two Blu-ray copies to give away courtesy of 20th Century Home Entertainment. The semi-improvised hit comedy is about a fantasy football league, its members, and their everyday lives.

To be a fan of The League, you don’t need to know much about fantasy football, or sports at all. You just need to have friends that you hate. The ensemble comedy follows a group of old friends in a fantasy football league who care deeply about one another – so deeply that they use every opportunity to make each other’s lives miserable.

Taco lost the Shiva Bowl in season three so what advice would you give him for the current season? The two best answers received by 11:59 p.m., Sunday, October 21 will be winners. The judgment of ComicMix will be final and the contest is open to readers only in the United States and Canada.

The box set includes the following Special Features:

●   The Lockout – Extended Episode

●   The Sukkah – Extended Episode

●   The Au Pair – Extended Episode

●   Ol’ Smoke Crotch – Extended Episode

●   Bobbum Man – Extended Episode

●   Deleted Scenes

●   Camenjello – Extended Episode

●   Thanksgiving – Extended Episode

●   The Out of Towner – Extended Episode

●   St. Pete – Extended Episode

●   The Funeral – Extended Episode

●   Alt Nation

●   Taco Tones

●   Gag Reel

 

“The Dark Knight Rises” Comes to Home Video December 4

  • News
  • October 16, 2012

On the off chance you missed it, the home video version of The Dark Knight Rises will be out December 4, just in time for the holiday season. Check out the sizzle video:

The Dark Knight Rises is the epic conclusion to filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. It has been eight years since Batman vanished into the night, turning, in that instant, from hero to fugitive. Assuming the blame for the death of D.A. Harvey Dent, the Dark Knight sacrificed everything for what he and Commissioner Gordon both hoped was the greater good. For a time the lie worked, as criminal activity in Gotham City was crushed under the weight of the anti-crime Dent Act. But everything will change with the arrival of a cunning cat burglar with a mysterious agenda. Far more dangerous, however, is the emergence of Bane, a masked terrorist whose ruthless plans for Gotham drive Bruce out of his self-imposed exile. But even if he dons the cape and cowl again, Batman may be no match for Bane.

Own it on Blu-ray Combo Pack or Digital Download December 4.

Win a copy of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 7

  • Uncategorized
  • October 15, 2012

The hysterical It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia just saw its seventh season released on Blu-ray/DVD.

In season 7 we saw the Gang prepare for the apocalypse, hit the beach at the Jersey Shore, produce a child beauty pageant, and take a walk down memory lane at their high school reunion. As they say, some things never change. So if you haven’t seen these episodes yet, be prepared for more depraved schemes, half-baked arguments and absurdly underhanded plots to subvert one another.

We have two copies to give away to readers, limited to those in the United States and Canda. Tell us who is your favorite character and why before 11:59 p.m. , Saturday, October 20. The judgment of ComicMix will be final.

Here are more details on the home video release.

Special Features:

●   Commentary on “THE GANG GOES TO THE JERSEY SHORE” featuring Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney
●   Blooper Reel
●   Artemis Tours Philadelphia
●   Commentary on ‘The Anti-Social Network’ featuring Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney
●   Commentary on ‘The Gang Gets Trapped’ featuring Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney
●   Commentary on ‘The High School Reunion Part 2’ featuring Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney

REVIEW: 30 Beats

  • Uncategorized
  • October 9, 2012

The great television series Naked City used to close each episode with the famous tag, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” It’s very compact size and dense population means people are intersecting in new and unusual ways all the time. This has given rise to some wonderful fiction such as Kissing in Manhattan and some less memorable fare such as the recently released film 30 Beats. Using a heat wave as the through-line the heat is also a metaphor for the sexual tension between ten various New Yorkers. Structurally, it owes a great deal to Max Ophuls’s La Ronde but never comes close to its brilliance.

The cast is headed by sexy Paz de la Huerta (Boardwalk Empire) and Lee Pace (Pushing Daisies), and the film was written and directed by Alexis Lloyd. The cast also includes Condola Rashad, Justin Kirk, Thomas Sadoski (The Newsroom), and Jennifer Tilly. Its tag line, “New York City, in the heart of summer: a heat wave transforms the city into a tropical zone. Ten characters are drawn, one after the other, into a ring of love and desire, each one caught beyond his or her control in a chain reaction of seduction, impulses and self-discovery” is certainly catchy but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Given the rich possibilities, it’s a shame the film runs a lightweight 88 minutes and doesn’t really bring any of the characters to real light or allow them any depth. As a result, there’s a lot of sweat and plenty of exposed skin, but you’ve seen better on any late night Cinemax production.

Out today from Lionsgate Home Entertainment, it’s billed a comedic romance but the comedy is fairly tame and the romance is of the heaving bosom variety. There’s the older woman (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) seducing the virgin (Ben Levin) at a spa only to learn she was hired by dad to be his first sexual experience. While a cliché situation, Lloyd allows their inner thoughts to come through, making this awkwardness somewhat sweet. It also promises this could be a good little film, but then we’re shown she was only inspired this one time. The rest is a series of clichés without redemption as character A meets up with character B and after sex, character B hooks up with character C and frankly, the characterizations are as flat as this description. That the core cast is between 25-35 also steals chances for some interesting comparisons among the generations.

There’s the tarot reader helping the young man overcome erectile dysfunction with the aid of some crystals and the chiropractor who gets it on with one of his patients. Every encounter between characters culminates in sex, without fail, and each exchange robs the actors of a chance to actually invest any emotion and feeling into their characters. There’s far too much sex (believe it or not) and nowhere near enough depth.

It’s always a shame when a film about sex is just the sex and nothing about those who commit the act. A more adult approach would have taken this concept, heat wave and all, and really made the audience melt.

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