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Recent Reviews

The Thing (2011) (Blu-ray)

A fireaxe lodged in a door. A corpse perched in front of a radio, still clutching a straight razor in his frozen hand with streaming icicles of blood emerging from his slit throat and wrists. A gigantic, half-shattered block of ice. The charred corpse of some sort of...thing with two distorted faces halfway fused together. R.J. MacReady and company had made the dangerous trek out to the Norwegians' camp in search

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of answers, and instead, they found...well, that. Anyone who's watched John Carpenter's The Thing likely had the same reaction as MacReady: what the hell happened here? With the last of the Norwegians smoldering in the ruins of a crashed helicopter, no one was left to tell the tale, and it wouldn't be long before the Americans were a little too busy to reconstruct what went on at that other camp. Part of the brilliance of this revisiting of The Thing is that it works as both a prequel and a remake. The Thing approaches the onslaught from the perspective of the Norwegians, but otherwise, the story's much the same: a group of researchers and support staff in a hopelessly isolated Antarctic camp are overcome by a shapeshifting alien creature. It takes the place of crew members one-by-one and ravages the group from within, be it from fear and mistrust or by tearing them apart into bloody chunks. There's no hope of escape. No one can be fully trusted. A research facility isn't exactly geared up for a battle with a virulent, otherworldly force. And...well, since you've already seen what happened to the Norwegian camp in Carpenter's film, you know this won't exactly end well.

I'm sure pretty much anyone reading this review feels the same way, but I'll say it anyway: John Carpenter's The Thing is arguably the greatest genre film of the past thirty years. ...[read the entire Blu-ray review of The Thing (2011)]

Real Steel (Blu-ray)

For a few minutes there, I thought I was gonna love Real Steel. I mean, the opening sequence of the flick has an eight-foot-tall robot punching a bull in the face. Okay, okay, you've gotta struggle with Kevin Durand doing some kind of deliriously over-the-top ger-hyuk-hyuk-Southern-fried accent at the rodeo, and a gaggle of obnoxiously precocious little girls are somewhere in there too, but whatever. I've watched

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a lot of movies over the past thirtysomething years, and I can honestly say I've never seen a bull-punching robot before. That's exactly what I wanted -- what I needed -- so bravo, Real Steel. Bravo.

After that, though...? I could practically picture Jack Lipnick spelling out the premise. "Charlie Kenton's a washed-up boxer. Give me his hopes...his dreams. Naturally he gets mixed up with a bad element and a romantic interest or else an orphan. Oh, and robots." Real Steel is pretty much exactly like one of those hyperformulaic, completely interchangeable feel-good boxing flicks from the '40s. Yeah, you've got Charlie (Hugh Jackman), the boxer whose best days are years and years behind him in the rearview mirror. You've got Max (Dakota Goyo), the plucky quasi-orphan he's supposed to protect and who teaches Charlie about life and love and responsibility and stuff. You've got Bailey (Evangeline Lilly), the dame waiting for him back home who gives all these solemn speeches about how she loves this knucklehead but can't keep being there for him....[read the entire Blu-ray review of Real Steel]

Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Blu-ray)

"Can a person become happy through striping evil?"

Okay, so even before the opening titles are out of the way in Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City:

1) A middle-aged teacher dressed up as a zebra-themed superhero does a headplant on some random badnik

2) A dwarven Japanese super-scientist jabs a pencil into a little girl's neck

3) As what's left of Tokyo is being gobbled up by a zebra-stripe-painting energy bubble, an older, amnesiatic version
of that teacher is chased down by guntoting stormtroopers

4) A zebra-centric music video cuts in outta nowhere, and as the crowd triumphantly pumps their zebra panties
or whatever in the air, the aging former Zebraman putters across the screen on his Rascal Scooter

This is seriously, like, the first five minutes too. I guess what I'm getting at here is that Zebraman 2 is kind of the greatest movie ever.

So, anyway...dateline! 2025. Tokyo -- and, well, pretty much everything around it too -- is a distant memory, twisted and deformed into the totalitarian state of Zebra City. It's governed under the idea that evil can never be fully eradicated, so instead it's tightly controlled. At 5:00 AM and 5:00 PM, for 5 minutes a pop, just about anything goes. Government officials can't be held accountable for their crimes during those ten minutes a day, so rape and murder run rampant. The Zebra Police can legally gun down anyone who looks at 'em funny. Uh, believe it or not, the Zebra Time craze is kind of infectious too, and after hearing that unsanctioned crime in Zebra City has dropped by half, the word going around is that 17 states on this side of the Pacific are on the verge of adopting it. First Zebra City, and next, the world? The cry goes out both far and wide for a hero to vanquish this sinister menace. The cry goes out for Zebraman. The only thing...[read the entire Blu-ray review of Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City]

More reviews...

Stuff I've Watched Recently

1/27: Traffic (The Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
1/27: 50/50 (Blu-ray)
1/26: Godzilla (The Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
1/22: Tokyo Story (Blu-ray)
1/21: The Thing (2011) (Two-Disc Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet) (Blu-ray; Commentary)
1/21: The Thing (2011) (Two-Disc Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet) (Blu-ray; Commentary)
1/21: The Thing (2011) (Two-Disc Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet) (Blu-ray)
1/21: The Sacrifice: 2-Disc Remastered Edition (Blu-ray)
1/19: Sherlock Jr. / Three Ages (Blu-ray)
1/18: Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (Blu-ray)
1/15: The Making of Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Blu-ray)
1/15: Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (Blu-ray)
1/15: Real Steel (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (DVD; Commentary)
1/15: Real Steel (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (Blu-ray)
1/14: Night Train Murders (Blu-ray)