course description included Archives: blu-ray
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5 March 2010
Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries (2004)
I finally succumbed to all the pressure about this show being second to none and checked out the miniseries. For the most part, it was pretty good. But it still feels like a television show, mostly in the way dramatic queues are framed around commercial breaks. It’s also great to see a show commit to [...]
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4 February 2010
The Hurt Locker (2009)
The Hurt Locker is among the best of the Best Picture nominations. It doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Avatar let alone actually be in competition with it. They’re both spectacles, to be sure, but one has a depth of character and human understanding that is awful glossy in the other. [...]
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27 July 2009
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Okay – so more or else an epic failure on the bear story. I’m still writing it, but the regular posting of it made me stop writing until I stopped posting. This is obviously reflective of a host of neuroses that are more or less less interesting than Mad-Libs. And so, in the words of [...]
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12 April 2009
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
Okay, I admit it: I am a sucker for these summer movies. A coworker was telling me sometime last week that he was disturbed deeply when he realized how targeted McDonald’s happy meals were to his niece (she’s 6 or 7), so he would attempt to engage her in conversation that would prove enlightening:
“You know, [...]
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9 March 2009
Appaloosa (2008)
Ed Harris’ western reminded me of some other recent revisionist Westerns, like 3:10 to Yuma and Unforgiven. But it’s bogged down by a pretty bizarre perforamnce from Renee Zellweger, and a muddled third act, largely propelled by Zellweger’s character.
That said, Viggo Mortensen gives a great performance as Ed Harris’ buddy, Everett. They have the [...]
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9 February 2009
Total Recall (1990)
“If I’m not me, then who the hell am I?”
Roger Ebert pins the success of Total Recall on Schwarzenegger’s performance – and while you can revel in the science fiction base of Philip K. Dick all you want, Ebert’s right – it still doesn’t work if Schwarzenegger somehow doesn’t manage to believable as a fish-out-of-water [...]
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5 January 2009
Chungking Express (1994)
In my mind, I always get Chungking Express confused with Wong Kar-Wai’s other movie Fallen Angels. I guess it’s a cops and guns kind of conflation, but it doesn’t really matter. Having watched Chungking Express, I am now sure I’d only seen the expired pineapple sequence, having somehow missed entirely Tony Leung’s segment or just [...]
