All Articles by Jackson

9 DVD Review

Posted: February 11th, 2010 at 6:17 am

It’s rare that two films with the same name come out within months of each other.  After all, the MPAA Title Registration Database exists to protect against just such confusion; however, when both are adapted from pre-established source material, what can the MPAA do?  To be fair, so the two films in question, Nine and 9, are not quite identically titled.  The former is an adaptation of the stage musical of the same name that itself is taken from Fellini’s 8 ½.  This is not a review of that film.  The latter is an expansion of director Shane Ackers’s digitally animated short about a burlap doll that awakens in a post-apocalyptic world devoid of humans and must subsequently struggle to survive.  DVD review of that 9 after the jump.

FRINGE Season One DVD Review

Posted: September 14th, 2009 at 5:17 am

The new series on the 2008-2009 broadcast network primetime television season left a lot to be desired.  And when I say a lot to be desired, I mean the majority of them were only a couple steps above unmitigated disasters.  There may actually have been more watchable mid-season replacements than new series that started the year (maybe-when talking about numbers this low, it’s tough to tell).  The combination of the Writers Guild strike (which devastated the traditional television development season) with the global economic collapse and the threat of a Screen Actors Guild labor stoppage was too much for the nets to handle, at least in terms of quality.

The one show coming into Fall 2008 that really had my hopes up was Fringe.  Luckily, it did not disappoint.  Considering his fandom among many, I should point out that I am not a J.J. Abrams groupie and that, prior to Fringe, I never watched any of his shows beyond one or two episodes. More after the jump:

ADVENTURELAND DVD Review

Posted: September 10th, 2009 at 5:44 am

Adventureland is definitely a case of a film not being what I expected.  Not surprisingly, those expectations evolved out of how the movie was marketed-the advertisements were very, very misleading as to the nature of the picture.  Watching the trailer one would have thought the film to be a very broad coming-of-age comedy.  Considering that the writer-director was Greg Mottola, whose previous release was the extremely broad coming-of-age movie Superbad, it would seem to be a reasonable expectation.  Wrong, as it turned out, but reasonable. That doesn’t mean the movie isn’t good. More after the jump:

BAD LIEUTENANT Special Edition DVD Review

Posted: August 9th, 2009 at 9:40 am

Film as character study is always an interesting proposition.  Cinema, as a whole, is such a plot-centric art form that to succeed when otherwise requires especially fine crafting.  Not that brainless big-budget studio fare consisting solely of story and nothing else is ever very good-those other elements are definitely necessary to create a great film-but even most quality character-driven movies still have some degree of story, even if it plays second fiddle to the character relationships.  But a true, well-executed character study in which story means next to nothing is rare. Bad Lieutenant is just such a film. Read my review after the jump:

FROST/NIXON DVD Review

Posted: May 11th, 2009 at 2:35 pm

Frost/Nixon has to have one of the more interesting pedigrees of any film in recent years:  televised interviews about historical events, dramatized into an award-winning play, which was then adapted into an Academy-Award-nominated movie.  And yet the resultant motion picture remains as gripping as the original interviews must have been when first broadcast (alas, I was too young at the time to remember them).

Frost/Nixon is as much about the lead up to and circumstances surrounding the famous David Frost interviews of Richard Nixon as the interviews themselves.  The film injects verbal sparring with a tension more reminiscent of a political thriller-which, of course, isn’t that far from the case, considering the interviews’ subject matter.  Considering how many dialogue-driven character dramas these days fall completely flat, it’s a joy to see one that is truly enthralling.

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