Metallica’s Some Kind Of Monster documentary is coming out on DVD and will be available in stores on January 25. You can preorder it now at amazon.com.
I had been waiting for this to be released in local theaters so that I could see it on the big screen, but it didn’t happen, so you can bet I’ll probably be ordering it.
I think I’m a pretty big fan of certain musicians and would definitely call myself a movie buff. But after this morning I’m not sure I can really use the word “fan” to describe my love of music or movies.
Reading slashdot this morning, there was an article about a guy who is waiting five months in line at the theater for Star Wars Episode III tickets. Even stranger, the guy is keeping a blog, apparently right from his place in line.
I do not think that I could like anything to the point where I would camp out for 139 days for tickets. If I can’t buy the CD on amazon.com, or can’t buy the tickets somewhere like Ticketmaster or Fandango, chances are you won’t be getting me to listen to your music, see your concert, or watch your movie.
Then again, I might be an extreme. If the line is too long at McDonalds the first thought that comes to mind is “Maybe I’ll eat tomorrow …”.
We rented The LadyKillers on Saturday night. This was not a movie in our “must see” list, however we rented it because Tom Hanks was in it and given his track record we figured that if he elected to do it that it would have some level of quality — or at least be tolerable.
This movie SUCKED. It moved very slowly and Tom Hanks just droned through the whole thing. The movie was extremely painful to watch, as it seemed to go nowhere.
The premise of the movie is that Tom Hanks is a criminal masquerading as a scholar leading a renaissance band. He rents a room from a woman who lives near a casino boat so that they can tunnel through her basement to the vault and steal the money from the vault. The whole band idea is an excuse to use the basement to “practice”. The woman gets suspicious and the rest of the movie is full of rediculous attempts to bump her off.
That is really it as far as plot goes. Forgetting that it’s a stupid idea to begin with, the movie just sucked, and we couldn’t wait for it to end. Unfortunately, no matter how bad a movie is, the chances that we will actually turn it off are close to none, so we sit through the whole thing since we went through the trouble to rent it.
It would be far less painful (and probably more constructive) to spend the 104 minutes repeatedly pounding your head against a concrete wall than sitting through this film. At least the pain you feel at the end would be something you signed up for.
Happy Halloween!
Yesterday we picked up the DVD release of the Dawn of the Dead remake. Jonna has always liked Dawn of the Dead and spent quite a few years looking for the original on video. I had never seen any of the trilogy aside from Night of the Living Dead and while I liked that movie a lot (both the original and the later remake) I didn’t even know that the movie was part of a trilogy until Jonna told me that there were other movies.
When the remake was released to theaters, we went to see it and I really liked it. Normally I don’t like remakes. Something is always missing from the later remake that causes it to never live up to the original. The remake of Psycho is a really good example of this. They shot the script practically word for word and scene for scene, but there was something missing from the remake that made the movie seem “empty” or plastic.
For some reason though, George Romero movies seem to be really good candidates for remakes. I really enjoyed the remakes of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. I highly recommend you go and rent (or even buy) these two if you liked the originals.
The original Dawn of the Dead, for me, was difficult to watch. The ideas were all really good (and lets be honest, just the idea of living in a mall is pretty cool) but the movie moved very slowly and you didn’t really care about the characters very much. The dialogue, for the most part, just sucked and was very cheesy. Throughout the movie you wound up wondering to yourself just how long they could possibly drag it out, while thinking to yourself how cool the ideas were and what a cool movie they could have made.
The remake does a lot with the ideas of the original movie and make them into a great story. The characters are developed very well and the addition of the “Andy” character and subplot was a really cool addition to the movie that gave you a character that you actually liked and cared about what happened to him, even though you rarely saw him — and when you did it was from a great distance.
I don’t want to give away too much of the movie, so I’ll stop there. However, I will advise you to not turn off the movie when the ending credits begin rolling. When we saw it in the theater we watched as people left as soon as the credits started. We hung around to get the final payoff of the movie, so stick through the credits.
The DVD release also includes a lot of pretty good extras, including “Splitting Headaches: Anatomy of Exploding Heads” and “Raising the Dead”, a look at the zombie effects used in the movie.
I give this release 4 stars. I really like the movie a lot and highly recommend it for your Halloween viewing.
We picked up the new Star Wars Trilogy (widescreen, of course) last night. I watched the bonus DVD and thought it was really cool. It contains the documentary “Empire of Dreams” which I skipped last night, but I am pretty sure it has been on TV and I’ve tried to watch it, but I go to bed early and it seems that every time it has been on I’ve wound up sleeping through it. I’m looking forward to seeing the whole thing, but didn’t want to take the time last night because I wanted to watch at least one of the movies.
It also includes a few featurettes that were pretty cool. The featurettes include one on the characters of Star Wars, the making of the light saber, and the Legacy of Star Wars, in which they talk about the effect the movie had on film makers such as James Cameron, Ridley Scott and Peter Jackson.
Finally, after finishing the bonus CD stuff, sans the Empire of Dreams, we watched the first movie. This was the first time that I had seen Star Wars in its rerelease version, with all of the extra footage that they had added. I didn’t like the new scenes. They seemed completely out of place. The scene with Jabba the Hut and Han Solo kind of ruins the mystique of Jabba the Hut to me, since seeing him in Jedi was one of the highlights of the movie (you were always wondering who the hell Jabba was). I wish that they had thought of releasing the DVD with the choice to include these new scenes or to watch the movies as they had been originally released. The new additions just didn’t “feel right”, but would have been interesting if they were optional.
That said though, I am curious as to what else was added to the other two movies. Just because I didn’t like what they added to Episode IV doesn’t mean that I’m not curious about the other footage. That’s why the “option” to view them would have been nice.
Rerelease footage complaints aside though, I’m glad the the movies were finally released on DVD. Its been a long time coming and, quite frankly, should have been done years ago. I like the fact that I can pick up these movies and watch them whenever I feel like it.
Bieber Labs 