There is a quirkiness about Canadian sitcoms that makes them different from their US cousins in a way that is hard to pin down. That kind of quirkiness abounds in Call Me Fitz, an adult comedy on HBO Canada and recently released on DVD by eOne about a used car salesman who finds himself partnered with his conscienc [...]
DVD Reviews
Cedar Rapids Insures Against Boredom
Ed Helms takes his expertise at dweebish characters out of The Office in Scranton, Ohio, and over to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in this sometimes light, sometimes dark comedy-drama that sends up the cutthroat business of insurance sales while more-or-less keeping its feet on the ground. The terminally childlike and pro [...]
Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son is a Sequel That Has Inherited Few Comedic Genes
As a film reviewer, you have to watch all sorts of movies, even three-quels starring Martin Lawrence. The facial gurning and OTT gestures he relied on in his early films didn’t win me over. Hence, I wasn’t expecting much of this second sequel to his Year 2000 hit Big Momma’s House. Can yet another movie be squeezed [...]
Stargate Universe: The Complete Final Season Gives Us Almost Everything Except HD
I was afraid this would happen. As soon as Syfy mumbled their cancellation of Stargate Universe just before last Christmas, I doubted we would see the superior second season of the series on Blu-ray. It is typically the destiny (no pun intended) of series that are cancelled early in their life to have their last hu [...]
Love and Other Drugs is More Than Your Average Hollywood Rom-Com
Searching for a Hollywood-made romantic comedy that doesn’t fit the standard template is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Your average Hollywood rom-com typical has as its principal couple two young, good-looking, physically-fit middle class Americans whose lives would be perfect if only they c [...]
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is an Entertaining Journey
It’s been a while since I visited Narnia. The last film that I saw in the series was the first one, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. At the time, the idea of kids involved in brutal hand-to-hand combat may have offended my sense of political correctness. Or maybe it was just that the film felt like Lord of th [...]
Gulliver’s Travels is Lazy Comedy and Black Swan is No Joke, Either
I have a love/hate relationship with Jack Black. I thought School of Rock was a minor classic. I also stuck up for him as the lead actor in one of my favorite films of all time, Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Then he goes and makes dross like Gulliver’s Travels. When is Hollywood going to stop taking a work of class [...]
Tangled Harks Back to Classic Fairy Tales
Although it’s the Walt Disney Studio’s 50th animated feature, Tangled isn’t a film I was expecting to be taken with. With that kind of milestone I anticipated more fanfare when the film was released in theaters. Despite the fact that it was trailed on BD and DVD releases for months, Tangled opened with relatively l [...]
‘Unstoppable’ Is a Ride; ‘Conviction’ Carries Weight
‘Unstoppable’You can’t say you don’t know what your gonna get with a Tony Scott movie about a runaway freight train and the attempts by two men—played by Denzel Washington and Chris Pine – to stop it: flashy directing, non-stop action and big explosions. Yet Unstoppable deserves more credit than that synopsis mi [...]
‘Never Let Me Go’ Grips Your Heart Like a Wrench
Smartly scripted and superbly acted, Never Let Me Go is a tonic for the plethora of dumb crash-bang action movies littering theaters. Yet its relentlessly somber tone and uncompromising tragedy make it a hard film to recommend. If you can handle sad and depressing, you will be richly rewarded by one of the most intelli [...]
