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DVDs on the Shelf
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Written by Trent Daniel
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Tuesday, 24 August 2010 |
 Often, sci-fi and low budget indie productions go together about as well as chocolate and onions. The high budget demands on special effects eventually hamper the entire story. Clone Hunter is indeed a low budget sci-fi actioner, but it overcomes any limitations of budget by doing all the things an indie should, namely offering an involving story, solid acting and intriguing characters.
The story follows Cane (Benjamin Thomas) a freelance clone hunter somewhere in deep space and his part-cybernetic partner (Angela Funk). They are hired by Montserrat, a tycoon who owns his own private planet, to track down and kill a younger clone version of himself. In the universe of this film, the rich and powerful can have clone created, have the brains transferred into younger versions of themselves, and thus give themselves a form of immortality. However, this younger version of Montserrat has rebelled and started a murderous army that threatens the stability of Monterrat’s planet. Like any good thriller, there is much more to the story than it seems, as the more Cane and Angela dig, the more rotten they find things at the planet’s core.
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Read more... [DVD review: Clone Hunter]
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DVDs on the Shelf
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Written by Ed Flynn
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Wednesday, 21 July 2010 |
 The White Ribbon is a drama starring Christian Freidl, Ulrich Turkl and Burghart Klaussner. Directed by Michael Haneke.
There is something wrong here. In a seemingly quaint German village pre-WW1, one unpleasant event occurs after another and no one is quite sure why.
There is a seeming sense of order in the village. It is run by a baron who owns most of the land and is the primary employer. There is a pastor who is the moral authoritarian in the village, along with a doctor and a young schoolteacher who is smitten with a young woman from a nearby village (he narrates the story years later).
Like Haneke’s most notable films (Funny Games; Cache), a sense of perfect order is upset by a strange, unexplainable occurrence which slowly spreads through the formally ideal sense of order like a cancer, until it destroys what once was.
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Read more... [DVD Review: The White Ribbon]
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DVDs on the Shelf
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Written by Trent Daniel
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Wednesday, 23 June 2010 |
 The film begins on an ominous note. Eerie strings play as the film fades to white. Soon, a ship appears out of the fog. Cut to a gumshoe, looking and speaking as if he has stepped straight out of a Mickey Spillane novel (fitting, since the setting is 1954), trying to hold himself together and fight off a case of severe sickness (“all that water”) in the ship’s bathroom. It turns out the gumshoe, US Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are being ferried to one Shutter Island, rock island in the middle of Boston Harbor-one that houses an institution for the criminally insane.
So begins “Shutter Island”, a haunting, challenging thriller by master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Teddy and his partner are there seemingly to investigate the disappearance of a female patient-but Teddy has personal reasons of his own for taking the case. Though it appears at first that Teddy is a gifted investigator, it seems that every lead he follows only opens multiple other doors. Soon, Teddy is battling suspicious doctors, a downright sinister warden, a hurricane that descends on the island and, most critically, his own neurosis as he strives for the truth. As seeming clues lead nowhere and the twists in the case only multiply, Teddy soon begins to question everything around him, including his own sanity.
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Read more... [DVD Review: Shutter Island]
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DVDs on the Shelf
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Written by Trent Daniel
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Friday, 18 June 2010 |
 Interestingly, the familiarity of “Day of Vengeance” is what separates it from many other low budget independent films. Where as many low budget indies tend to veer either into serious coming of age dramas, obscure mind trips, or horror, “Day of Vengeance” is more straightforward in its attempt to stage a modern day Western. While the film is clearly hampered by its low budget and (admittedly) amateurish acting, it is still a noble effort and effective debut for director Isaac Pingree.
The plot resembles that of a vintage western: a young hitchhiker named Jake Reid travels to the small town of Covelo, CA (note: an actual town) to uncover information about a botched robbery that led to the death of his father, as well as 3 other men. Though the townspeople clearly want to keep this grim moment in the past buried, Jake is determined to get answers-as well as find the missing loot. Jake eventually finds one reluctant ally in the town in Laura (who, as a child, saw her father killed in the aftermath of the botched robbery shootout). Soon, old wounds are opened, culminating in the local police, one outlaw who survived the shootout, and trigger-happy locals all clashing, with Jake and Laura caught in the crossfire.
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Read more... [DVD review: Days of Vengence]
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DVDs on the Shelf
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Written by Trent Daniel
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Monday, 07 June 2010 |
 It is clearly easy to hate Mike Tyson. He is certainly a polarizing figure, one that draws extreme disdain, defensiveness or sympathy.
The triumph of Tyson, James Toback’s admittedly biased, but powerful and surprisingly moving biography, is that it truly seems to show the real Mike Tyson. Tyson himself narrates the documentary. Not only is he persuasive, but seems brutally honest with his feelings, not only towards key figures in his life (both good and bad), but towards himself. To his credit, he doesn’t seem to be asking the audience to sympathize for him, but to just understand him,
Tyson starts by recanting his rather horrific childhood. With no father around and a mother who paid him little attention, he was on his own at a young age in the “mean streets” of Brooklyn. He was often harassed and bullied as a child, with the breaking point occurring when one of his pet pigeons was killed in front of him by a bully. Pandora’s Box was opened by that bully however, as he ended up being one of the first to fall victim to a Tyson beating. Much of Tyson’s fury that followed, both in and out of the ring, stemmed from the rage he felt as a child, his passionate resolve never to be humiliated again and a sort of revenge for the pet he lost.
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Read more... [DVD Review: Tyson]
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DVD review: Clone HunterOften, sci-fi and low budget indie productions go together about as well as chocolate and onions....
What to make of the ending to Inception?So far, my favorite film this year is Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Not only does it deliver all...
DVD Review: The White RibbonThe White Ribbon is a drama starring Christian Freidl, Ulrich Turkl and Burghart Klaussner....
Black Swan - Trailer