RIC MEYERS: Hard Dorm
It’s about time I got around to Tartan – specifically Tartan Asia Extreme, since they’ve been inundating the DVD market with every Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai “horror” movie they can get their well-manicured hands on. I put horror in quotes, because, in reality, many of their releases are actually episodes of The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt with delusions of cinematic grandeur – essentially familiar ghost revenge sagas pumped and/or padded to feature length. I also say “well-manicured,” because, whatever the overall quality of the film they’re presenting, Tartan’s packaging is uniformly classy.
On the one hand, if you’ve yet to have Tartan’s special editions of South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s “Vengeance” trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and Old Boy), acquire them with all speed (and watch them in the aforementioned order, despite their actual release dates). On the other hand, I showed eighteen hours of Tartan’s other Asia Extreme releases at last year’s World Science Fiction Convention and didn’t see a single film that rated above “okay.”
So warned, let’s judge some of their latest releases from the special features perspective. First, there’s Dorm, a Thai award winner that strives to be like Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone. Both concern what happens to a young man in a creepy private school, and while del Toro connects the ghosts to the Spanish Civil War, director Songyos Sugmakanan weaves it within the universal loneliness of an outcast new student. It’s a well-made mood piece more than anything else, and a fine one, but, as previously mentioned, it would have been well-served as a ninety minute (or less) chiller, rather than the 110 minute saga it is.
Tartan attaches an interesting audio commentary with Songyos and some of his cast, in addition to a “making of” (which is really a ten minute on-set home movie of the complications that come of making a film with a pre-teen cast), a “behind the scenes” (which are actually a bunch of short prevue pieces detailing the cast and plot), fittingly eerie deleted scenes, a special effect featurette, and a welcome “character introduction,” which is like a visual program book. All in all, it’s a satisfying job. (more…)
They don’t draw comic book covers like this any more. And, well, that might be a good thing.
Hilton was busted for violating her plea agreement. As such, she was real stupid. Hilton is despised for being an “artificial” celebrity, as if there’s any other kind, and for being a whinny spoiled brat. I understand; she is a whinny spoiled brat. But that’s not against the law; if it were, I’d have a much, much easier time going shopping here in Fairfield County Connecticut.
This is a show that lost its raison d’être the moment actress Nancy Marchand died, back in 2000. Her character, momma Livia Soprano, was the story’s anchor. Without her, the plot never was as compelling, nor was it as understandable. It was reduced to its core element: Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, the family of Made Men.
And, sadly, that’s what The Sopranos had been about.
OK, so here we go: it’s the official midway point between the first and latter half of the Summer of Blockbusters. With last week’s box office flop consisting of 
The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey
People and events of consequence cast their shadows before them, never behind. Oklahoma-born and Texas-reared Gordon “Boody” Rogers (1904 – 1996) owns one of those forward-lurching shadows – an unlikely mass-market cartoonist whose oddball creations anticipated the rise of underground comics, or comix, and whose command of dream-state narrative logic and language-mangling dialogue remains unnerving and uproarious in about equal measure.
Newsstand distributors have released some misprinted copies of Iron Man #16, wherein pages are printed out of order. Expect to see these on eBay shortly going for far more than their worth by any objective measure.
