Blu-ray Highlights for 8/17/10. What Are You Buying?
At first glance, this week’s Blu-ray slate looks kind of hairy. Get it? Hairy. Because the biggest title is an animal comedy. Didja pick up on my subtle wit there? Oh, you did? Eh, nevermind then.
At first glance, this week’s Blu-ray slate looks kind of hairy. Get it? Hairy. Because the biggest title is an animal comedy. Didja pick up on my subtle wit there? Oh, you did? Eh, nevermind then.
After all the heartache and near-tragedy that has befallen him recently, things finally seem to turn around for Tommy in last week’s ‘Rescue Me’ episode, ‘Forgiven.’ Relatively, anyway. He wouldn’t be a Gavin if life were actually easy.
Well, in the long, sad history of me being wrong about stuff on this blog, I couldn’t be wronger or sadder to report that the king of the box office castle this week is none other than Sly Stallone’s action movie starring a bunch of dudes on Viagra (both literal and metaphor), ‘The Expendables.’ Ick. I was certain that Ryan Murphy’s ‘Eat Pray Love,’ based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s best selling self help memoir-y thing – and the first female-centric summer movie since ‘Sex & the City 2′ came out in May – would win the prize. Nope, Stallone and the boys took home the top honors. As the saying goes: some people’s taste is relegated to their tongue.
It’s stuff like this that makes me love ‘Futurama’ even when the show isn’t at its comedic best. ‘A Clockwork Origin’ combines science and comedy in a wonderful way.
Over the weekend, George Lucas announced at the Star Wars Celebration V convention in Orlando that the entire series of ‘Star Wars’ films will be released on Blu-ray late next year. Fans from across the galaxy erupted in joyous frenzy… until the realization set in that he’s still only releasing the craptastic “Special Edition” versions of the original trilogy with Greedo shooting at Han Solo first and the stupid CGI Jabba making googly eyes at the camera. To make up for this, supplements on the ‘Return of the Jedi’ disc will include a never-before-seen deleted scene… that looks totally fake. This guy really just hates his fans, doesn’t he?
It’s Friday the 13th! That can leave us with only one possible topic for this week’s Roundtable: Favorite horror movies, of course. What we’ll do at Halloween, I’m not sure yet. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, let’s get on with the creepshow.
In ‘Persons Unknown’ this week, we’re given our most significant look behind the scenes of the conspiracy that brought our group of abductees to the strange little town they can’t leave. The Joe storyline also takes an interesting turn, and the episode ends with a cliffhanger sure to shake things up further in subsequent episodes. Yet it also leaves me with at least one major question that I just can’t reconcile.
This weekend, Hollywood seems to be drawing a line in the sand, and contributing to antiquated notions of gendered movies. If you’re a hardscrabble dude, the kind who washes his mouth with rattlesnake venom and likes to beat up on “sissies,” then there’s a movie for you. Oh, and if you’re a sensitive woman, always on the lookout for your next handsomely photographed spiritual adventure, well there’s a movie for you too. If only there was also a movie for twenty-somethings, one that captures both the fizzy fun of falling in love and the male inferiority complex, with charmingly rendered visual effects. Wait, there’s a movie for that weird, slightly skewered demographic as well! Everybody’s happy! Well, not everybody. But some.
The studio bosses at Buena Vista announced back in March that they were pulling the plug on the long-running ‘At the Movies’ review program originally made famous by Siskel and Ebert, later sullied by “the two Bens,” and finally turned respectable again with current hosts A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips. The final episode taped this week and will air on Sunday. Say what you will about any of its hosts, this show was an institution and deserved better treatment than it received in recent years.
There was a part of me, probably the part of me that cackles with glee every time ‘Commando‘ is on television and a montage of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his teenage daughter (Alyssa Milano, if I’m not mistaken) seamlessly segues into a sequence where Arnold plunges a huge knife into various dudes’ necks, that was looking forward to ‘The Expendables,’ writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone’s riff on ’80s action movie machismo. But then I saw the thing. And boy, is it terrible.
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