FilmRoar

I seldom buy movies, when I do they are on DVD and I start at www.dvdpricesearch.com and purchase from the seller that has the best listed price. The prices you find by shopping around a bit are quite a bit better than what you get at your local brick and mortar store or by just shopping one of the major sellers like Amazon.com or Buy.com. A few times a month I will rent a movie. My favorite video store for renting videos is Scarecrow Video in Seattle. They have a huge collection including hard to find foreign, cult and art films. In Portland I mainly rent from Movie Madness, not nearly as large as Scarecrow but they still have a very respectable collection including one of the largest DVD collections I have seen.

The vast majority of the movies that I watch are either borrowed from friends with a good DVD collection (like Sven who has over 200 titles in his library) or checked out of the local library. In addition to very friendly and very cute librarians Multnomah County Library allows you to check items out for 30 days at no cost (assuming you are a good citizen and return your material on time) and with no limit (that I have found) on how many items you have out at a time. Most items are in regular circulation so you cannot choose exactly which movies you get when, but what you can do is browse their online catalog for titles to put a hold on. The library sends a notification email when the title comes in and will hold it at the local branch for up to a week. While their collection is not as massive as a video store may be, you likely be surprised with how many movies on the to-watch list can be found at the local library.

I took the time to search for all DVD titles at the Multnomah County Library and prepare a table. There were 1,447 titles listed when I executed this search, and I am sure more are added each week:
Read the rest of this entry »

What a sad way to close out a season. TNG: Conspiracy is one of the worst episodes in the whole series. The alien-in-the-gut that turns into the second most overused Alien cliché of an alien quickly shuffling away looks.. well, pathetic. It is never a good sign when you can see a glow around the edge of a character that has been shot against a green screen and then composite in. And the stop motion animation? It give this episode the look and feel of an amateur film.

Kate Beckinsale in an article with MTV.com expressed an interest in reprising her vampiric role from Underworld.

“I would love to do it again, I had an amazing experience on this movie. I think that when you push yourself beyond what you think your limits are it’s a really profound kind of life experience. And I had an amazing time on this.”

“If Len [Wiseman] directed [a sequel], I would do it,” she said.

“I’m actually not a big vampire movie fan,” Beckinsale said. “I was really drawn to it by the fact that it’s a great action movie, [with] a female lead like ‘La Femme Nikita.’ I think there is something really cool about seeing a woman kick ass, whether you’re a man or a woman. For a woman it’s kind of empowering, but for a man it’s kind of hot.”

The Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez ultra bomb Gigli (2003) has earned worst honors with a 1.5/10 rating on the IMDb list of bottom 100 films, making it the least liked movie of the 1,500 title database (to make it on the list a movie must have at least 600 votes, Gigli has had over 2000 people give ultra low ratings). The hard to earn spot puts Gigli below such stinkers as Police Academy: Mission to Moscow (1994), Mariah Carey’s Glitter (2001), Battlefield Earth (2000) and Jaws 4: The Revenge (1987). Gigli had for a while also held the unique honor of being the only movie to hold a perfect 0 score on rottentomatoes.com (the current rating is 113 against, 8 for).

A collection of pictures for the movie Underworld posted on Darkhorizons.com last week. Here they are for everyone to enjoy.
Read the rest of this entry »

What a sad way to kill a main character. The death of Tasha Yar in TNG: Skin of Evil came as a surprise and left me deflated when I first saw the episode. Until this day I had always thought it pretentious to always have to kill a main character in some incredible noble fashion (giving their life for everyone else, dying in a huge battle, etc…) The empty and meaningless death of Tasha made me change my mind about that. She deserved better.

On another note, I want to know who manged to convince Frakes that it was a good idea to jump into a tub full of ink!

Harsh lighting and uncomfortable moments punctuate what looks like a Gus Van Sant meets David Lynch movie, perhaps because director Tim Hunter worked on some episodes of “Twin Peaks” (1990). In River’s Edge (1986) Crispin Glover (Back to the Future (1985), Charlie’s Angels (2000)) and Keanu Reeves star as a couple of confused directionless teenagers trying to deal with the death of one of their friends a the hands of another member of their group. No one is sure what to do when Samson takes the group to the site where he left the body of Jamie. Layne (Glover) looses himself in a fantasy of saving Samson from “them” while Matt (Reeves) simply wonders about trying to loose himself in pot and beer. None of the kids are connected enough with themselves or reality to know what to feel about the murder. The only person who seems to have any idea of the impact of what has happened is a loner psychopath played by Dennis Hopper.

River’s Edge acts as a sort of magnifying glass for the archetypal characters personified by the lead actors. Crispin Glover emotes his weird mannerism in this movie more than I have ever seen in any of his other films. Reeves looks even more stoned, stupid and lost than he usually does, Hopper is his usual psychotic archetype. The movie is just disturbing enough to make it feel like a though-provoking drama, but just lost enough to keep the viewer an arms length away. As I have mentioned before I have a hard time caring about characters in movies that don’t seem to care about themselves. The distance that each of the dysfunctional characters in River’s Edge has from reality made it hard for me to relate or care about any one of them enough to get into this movie.