Movie DVDPrice: $49.98
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Lie to Me: Season One
Tim Roth stars as Dr. Cal Lightman, a compelling new drama from the producers of 24, about the world’s leading deception expert who studies facial expressions and involuntary body language to expose the truth behind the lies.- Audio: English: 5.1 Dolby Surround
- Language: Dubbed: English / Subtitled: English, French & Spanish
- Theatrical Aspect Ratio: Widescreen: 1.78:1
- Pilot
- Moral Waiver
- A Perfect Score
- Love Always
- Unchained
- Do No Harm
- The Best Policy
- Depraved Heart
- Life Is Priceless
- Better Half
- Undercover
- Blinded
- Deleted Scenes
- Sacrifice
Price: $49.98
Air Force One
Terrorists have seized Air Force One thirty thousand feet in the air with the President, his family, and more than fifty other people on board.Price: $14.94
One Night In Vegas
On the evening of Sept. 7, 1996, Mike Tyson attempted to take Bruce Seldon’s WBA title at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Sitting ringside was rapper Tupac Shakur, one of the best-selling musical artists in the world. Shakur and Tyson were friends, a feeling of kinship linked them as each rose to stardom from poverty only to be thrown in prison. Following Tyson’s victory, Shakur and “Iron Mike” were to celebrate at an after party, but the rap star never arrived. Shakur was brutally gunned down later that night, and the scene in Las Vegas quickly turned from would be celebratory revelry to ill fated and inopportune tragedy. Director Reggie Bythewood, with the full cooperation of Mike Tyson, tells the story of that infamous night and of the remarkable friendship between Tyson and Tupac. DVD bonus includes Tyson / Seldon coverage from before and after the fight and an interview with Nas, discussing the late rapper.This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.\r\n
Price: $14.95
Waiting for Superman: The AMG Review
Davis Guggenheim tackles public education in the United States with Waiting for Superman. From an aesthetic standpoint, the movie is light years beyond Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (aka “Al Gore’s PowerPoint Presentation”). With its cute animated sequences illustrating various statistics, its effective John Legend-assisted score, and its focus on five bright, adorable kids and their guardians’ quixotic quest to improve their futures, Waiting for Superman goes down easy. The filmmakers deserve credit for addressing such a longstanding, complex, politically incendiary, and urgent issue. The movie has to be seen as a failure, though, in its examination of the public school system and how to improve it.
The film oversimplifies things. Guggenheim offers simple solutions to a very complex problem. He has his heroes (reformers like Washington, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone) and villains (“bad” teachers and the union that protects them). While Canada has done amazing work and is a great interview subject, Rhee also gives good interview, but her tenure has been controversial, and Guggenheim doesn’t really address concerns about the allegedly autocratic manner in which she’s run the school system, which has angered many parents.
Guggenheim’s fashionable demonization of the teachers’ union is more troubling. His essential point is that great schools need great teachers, and he suggests that the union and the tenure system are largely responsible for the “impossibility” of getting rid of the “bad” teachers. He doesn’t spend much time defining what a “great” teacher is, or how we recognize that greatness, or train prospective teachers to be great. He doesn’t analyze what makes a “bad” teacher, either, though we do hear about the infamous “Rubber Rooms” of the New York City school system (which were eliminated before the film’s release), and we see some hidden-camera footage of a teacher reading the paper in class. As this is one of his key points, and the stick he uses to beat Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers (which has been around since 1916, long before America’s educational decline), it would have made sense to develop this part of his argument further. If he’s going to say the system needs more good teachers and fewer bad ones (not exactly revelatory, that), he should explain how that might be accomplished, beyond making changes to the clearly imperfect tenure system.
The film also stumbles in focusing solely on the successes of a small number of charter schools. There are a lot of successful public schools (publicly run and union-staffed, unlike the charters) that Guggenheim could have highlighted and that would have lent some balance to the documentary. As it is, he presents charter schools as magical solutions to all the problems of public education, when in fact studies suggest that there are good charters and ineffective ones, just as there are with public schools.
Guggenheim has stated that one of the reasons he focused on charters was so that he could highlight the various school lotteries at the climax of the film. These serve as both a metaphor for the inherent unfairness of our educational system (which is irrefutably worse for those living in impoverished areas) and add drama to the film. By focusing on the lottery prospects of the five children we’ve been following throughout the movie, Guggenheim gives us a rooting interest in their success, which slightly undercuts his real point, which is that all of our children deserve a chance to succeed. Worse yet, he appears to be stacking the deck in order to strengthen his contention that the unions are largely to blame for the state of public education.
Guggenheim presents his solutions, which are embodied in the few effective charters he studies, but he doesn’t explain how their small-scale successes could be implemented on the massive scale of American public education. He suggests that “good teachers” are a key element to successful schools, but gives little indication as to what makes a good teacher, let alone how a school system can produce them. He stacks the deck against the teachers’ unions in favor of what is essentially the privatization of American public education. The film laudably points out that children can succeed at the highest levels, regardless of their background, but it also downplays the devastating effect of poverty on a child’s education. It’s valuable to bring these issues to a wide audience, but Guggenheim doesn’t dig deep enough. In the end, Waiting for Superman is entertaining filmmaking, but shoddy, shallow journalism.
One Tree Hill: The Complete First Season
Same town. Same team. Same father. Different lives. Half-brothers rival each other on and off the basketball court in the wildly popular high-school drama that tallied a whopping 185% audience growth among W18-34 from it series premiere to the first season finale.DVD Features:
Additional Scenes:Over 48 minutes of Unaired Scenes with introductions
Audio Commentary:Commentary by the cast and crew on The Pilot (Disc 1), To Wish Impossible Things (Disc 5), The Games That Play Us (Disc 6)
Documentaries:Building a Winning Team: The Making of One Tree Hill - a never-before-seen making-of documentary with interviews with the cast and crew. Diaries From The Set - A behind-the-scenes vignette with the cast of One Tree Hill.
Gag Reel:Christmas Elf Gag
Music Video:Oh, Chariot musical performance by Gavin DeGraw
Price: $49.98
Review: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Posted by Rodneyon 27. 09. 2010in Headlines, News Chat, Reviews
Thanks for checking out our Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Review
Genre: Drama
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Staring: Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan, Susan Sarandon
Released: Sept 24, 2010
THE GENERAL IDEA
THE GOOD
Seeing Michael Douglas naturally aging into the man that would be Gekko 23 years later was a treat. Douglas fits the role like an old shoe and all the memories that go with it. He is just as charming and seductive as he was in the original. He is still Gekko, but thankfully he is also Gekko-after-prison and actually evolves with the story instead of just showing up as if the first movie didn’t conclude.
And Shia LaBoeuf? I had hopes for him as an actor and I was not disappointed. While he seems to be attached to projects that earn him some mockery by association, Shia has stepped up his game and he deserves to be in this film. He earned it.
Brolin plays Bretton James, and he is a true product of the corruption and heartless business that the financial world has become. He is the reason for that corruption and very much the “enemy” giving a face to the issues this film addresses. Brolin plays the heartless banker so well he makes Gekko look far less intimidating.
Charlie Sheen makes a cameo appearance as Bud Fox, explaining where he has been for the last 23 years too, and it works well.
THE BAD
Carey Mulligan is wasted in this movie. It seems her only purpose here is to direct hate at Gekko and cry a lot to remind us he is evil. Honestly, if they didn’t have a love interest for Shia LaBoef, I don’t know that it would have mattered at all. She was just another part of his life that gets affected by his situation. He would be just as torn up if a baseball card left by his father was at risk. At least then they wouldn’t have spent all that time trying to convince me to care about his relationship.
There is some pacing issues and there are parts of the film that drag on. That and the forced “purpose” of the film. They couldn’t just make it about Gekko getting out of prison and finding a new way to impact the game he craves? No, they have to throw in some weepy romance, a father daughter redemption story. They could have done this without the obvious “this is why we are doing this” story.
OVERALL
This film will forever be measured against the original, and while Gekko was great to see again, he serves the same purpose in this film as he does in the original. Everyone remembers Wall Street as that Michael Douglas film where he plays Gordon Gekko. But in reality Gekko was a secondary character and the cause of the rise and justification of Bud Fox, and in this film – while its great to see him in his hardass Gekko form – Douglas is secondary.
It really doesn’t stack up to the original as far as impact, but is still a good film on its own, especially with the backdrop of the financial crisis.
I give Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps a 7 out of 10
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