Posts Tagged ‘DVD Reviews’
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
The SmarK DVD Rant for Star Wars: The Clone Wars
You know, never let it be said that George Lucas is shy about marketing opportunities or self-promotion. A few years after running his prize franchise into the ground with the prequels, now we get The Clone Wars (which should have been the title of Episode II), which further mines territory that no one cares about any longer except for pre-teens who are seeing the movies for the first time. Really, do we NEED further examination of the time period between episodes II and III? Isn't the fanbase far more interested in what happened to Anakin AFTER he became Darth Vader?
Technically, this is a sequel to the Clone Wars mini-series from Cartoon Network a few years back, rather than a proper re-interpretation of characters who don't need any further interpretation. And really, it's a franchise for kids now, which I think generates a lot of the bitterness and cynicism among the older fans who grew up and watched Lucas take their movies away from them. But is it at least worth watching?
(more...)
Tags: Cinema, DVD, DVD Reviews, MMA, Politics, Sting, TV, Vader
Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
The SmarK DVD Rant for Scrubs - Season Seven
Although Bill Lawrence and Zach Braff both swore up and down that this season would be the last for the show, here we are are going into 2009 and Scrubs is prepped for season 8, this time on ABC instead of NBC. Things are looking up, though, as the year is the last for Braff and Judy Reyes, so the show will be massively overhauled if it continues past the 8th season. And frankly it needs it. Really, we as fans didn't even WANT another whole season, we just wanted 6 more episodes to wrap up the series and give everyone closure. It's already living on borrowed time as it is and flogging the dead body isn't going to suddenly create a ratings juggernaut, so just let it die already, ABC. Great, I'm bitter already and I haven't even started the review.
The seventh season of Scrubs features only 11 episodes due to the writers' strike, and they are presented on two discs as follows...
(more...)
Tags: Christmas, DVD, DVD Reviews, House, Scrubs, Smackdown, Sting, The Others, Vader
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
The SmarK DVD Rant for The Simpsons - Season Eleven
You know the deal by now I'm sure, even if I've never posted pictures of my giant collection of Simpsons-themed crap that adorns my office, but I'm a lifelong fan of the show and one of those longtime fans who actually started watching on the Tracy Ullman Show back when they were two-minute interstitials and has seen every episode multiple times.
I was actually looking forward to this season because these episodes are not often played in syndication, and even if the show was proceeding towards the shark jump, at least I haven't seen them 100 times like the early and later episodes.
(more...)
Tags: 24, Christmas, DVD, DVD Reviews, Edge, House, Sting
Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments »
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
The SmarK DVD Rant for the Smurfs: Season One (Volume Two)
(Note: The first part of this review is taken from my original review of Volume 1)
Ah, The Smurfs. The people who produce these things certainly know that there's a large nostalgia audience of Gen-Xers like myself who grew up watching the little blue communists every Saturday morning like clockwork. Annoyingly, the problem faced with these releases is not the content, but the presentation. In this case, the dreaded "Volume Two" which means that they're splitting up the seasons into "kid-friendly" $20 sets so they can milk the buyer twice instead of just doing one four-disc set for the same price and getting it over with. I really hate that and it's especially annoying because they're using single-layer discs and could probably fit all the content on this first set onto one disc.
But enough about that.
(more...)
Tags: Cracked, DVD, DVD Reviews, Edge, RAW, TV
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Sunday, October 19th, 2008
The SmarK DVD Rant for Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Unrated Collector's Edition
"Did you listen to my demo?"
"Yeah, I was going to, but then I decided to keep on living my life instead."
Judd Apatow has of course been on a hot streak as a producer ever since Anchorman debuted in 2004, and particularly with a genre that he has mostly mastered now -- the romantic-comedy as done from the perspective of the male. Despite the occasional commercial misstep (Walk Hard and Drillbit Taylor immediately spring to mind), Judd has been consistently successful because he's able to make the audience connect with the wacky characters who inhabit his movies by actually giving them human qualities instead of cartoon character personalities. Or at the very least, in ADDITION to the cartoon character personalities.
(more...)
Tags: Cinema, DVD, DVD Reviews, Edge
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
Friday, October 17th, 2008
The SmarK DVD Rant for Family Guy Volume 6
I of course have a love-hate relationship with this show, to say the least. While the first three seasons were frequently brilliant stuff and the strangest underdog story you'll see in animation, the show has kind of gone downhill since its death and resurrection. That being said, I own five different Brian and/or Stewie t-shirts, all the DVDs, and a crapload of other merchandise with Seth's characters on it, so there must be something going on. I think it's become the same kind of thing as The Simpsons, where it's become part of the cultural landscape and people like me keep watching no matter how much we bitch on the internet.
(more...)
Tags: 24, Back to the Future, DVD, DVD Reviews, House, Rants, RAW, TNA, TV
Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments »
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
Speaking of movies I haven't watched in a while, I got The Frighteners for free with my HD-DVD player way back when and it's been sitting on my shelf since then. So I figured that I'd get into the Halloween spirit with some scary movies and watched it again for the first time in 10 years. And amazingly, it was pretty great! I remembered it the first time as something of a cross between Ghostbusters and Evil Dead or something, and that the shift in tone halfway through the movie was really off-putting. Well I don't know if the extra 16 minutes in the Director's Cut fixed that or what, but I thought it moved pretty smoothly from the goofy con artist set up into the "Jake Busey trying for the serial killer record" payoff this time around and I had a blast all the way through. Maybe it's because I knew the change in tone was coming this time, I dunno.
Of course, there's still major problems with it. The opening scene makes absolutely no sense in the context of the rest of the movie now (Why would the Reaper be haunting that house?) and overall it feels like he could have very easily made two very good movies out of the concepts presented here instead of smooshing them together into one big idea. However, the awesome Jeffrey Combs is so much fun as the weird FBI agent and the later scenes with Frank shifting in and out of the hospital flashbacks are powerful stuff, even if the comic relief ghosts at the beginning feel like they're from a different movie by the time you get to the end.
Definitely deserving of the "cult classic" label and a clear sign that Peter Jackson was ready for bigger and better things at that point. Check this one out if you're never given it a chance due to the crap reviews it originally got.
Tags: Cinema, DVD, DVD Reviews, HD-DVD, House
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
Sometimes I just like to review random stuff that I buy, what can I say?
So let's talk about my DVD collection a bit, shall we? I recently had a chance to reminisce on its beginning like a bad sitcom clip show when I switched from having them on shelves (which were increasing sucking up a good portion of my house) to tossing all the cases and putting them in binders instead. Five 250-disc binders later (and that's just MOVIES, not even TV sets), I realized how out of control my collecting has gotten over the years, and yet I don't see it stopping because new movies I want will always be coming out.
(more...)
Tags: Batman, Cinema, DVD, DVD Reviews, House, Lost, MMA, TV
Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments »
Friday, October 10th, 2008
The SmarK DVD Rant for Ric Flair: The Definitive Collection
Charlie Reneke writes…
"I get the impression that you're not big on writing up recaps for the feature part of wrestling DVDs, so I figured if you wanted, I had already wrote the recap for the new Flair set and if you want to use it, feel free to do so and add your match reviews or your own thoughts on the DVD or whatever. Personally, I didn't like it myself. I think the better Flair documentary is the Horsemen one which covered all the bases already. But the ten matches they gave us are pretty good. Either way, enjoy."
Thanks Charlie. Indeed I'm not big on the documentary recaps, so I'll use yours and do the matches on discs two and three myself.
(more...)
Tags: 1994, 2000, 24, 24/7, Arn Anderson, Batista, Bobby Heenan, Carlito, Chris Jericho, Dusty Rhodes, DVD, DVD Reviews, Edge, Four Horsemen, Greg Valentine, heel turn, Heroes, HHH, House, Hulk Hogan, Intercontinental title, Iron Sheik, Jim Cornette, Jimmy Garvin, John Cena, Lex Luger, Locke, Lost, Magnum TA, Matt Hardy, Mid-Atlantic, Mr. Perfect, MSG, Nikita Koloff, Nitro, NWA, Randy Orton, Randy Savage, Rants, RAW, Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Roddy Piper, Royal Rumble, Shane McMahon, Shawn Michaels, Slick, Starrcade, Steve Austin, Sting, Terry Funk, The Office, The Rock, The Wrestler, Tully Blanchard, TV, UFC, Undertaker, Vader, Vince McMahon, WCW, World Championship Wrestling, Wrestlemania, WWE, WWF
Posted in Rants | 34 Comments »
Friday, September 26th, 2008
So it's another day, another reinvention of the Terminator franchise, after the T3 movie kind of failed at it (although in enjoyable fashion), so we take another shot at messing with time travel and killer cyborgs without the Governator and from the perspective of Sarah instead of John. And hey, Lena Headey was in 300, so that's pretty cool. From my perspective, I watched the pilot when it originally aired and one episode after that, but couldn't fit it into my TV watching schedule and I decided that if I could get the studio to send me the review copy, I'd give it a chance again then. So lucky me.
For those wondering about the continuity here, apparently Terminator and T2 happened, but T3 did not, so it's yet another "what could be" alternate timeline deal in a mythology already clogged with them. So what could be this time?
(more...)
Tags: DVD, DVD Reviews, Google, Heroes, RAW, Sting, TV, TV on TV Reviews
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »
Loading ...
