The Uninvited (Criterion Collection)

YOU CAN ALMOST SMELL THE MIMOSA!
Based upon Dorothy Macardle's 1942 novel "Uneasy Freehold" THE UNINVITED is a wonderful and unique film which keeps the viewer mesmorized throughout. On the last day of their vacation in May, 1937, Rick and Pam Fitzgerald (brother and sister!) find an empty house on the seaside which they purchase for a ridiculously low price. Naturally, the place has "disturbances" in the form of two spectres,one of which just happens to be the daughter of the previous owner, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp).The other ghost is the spirit of Carmel Casada an artist's model. The commander's grand-daughter, Stella Merideth makes friends with the Fitzgeralds and she is ecstatic about visiting them in the childhood home she loves dearly. Gail Russell is luminous as the moonstruck Stella; this was her second film and her lack of acting experience is actually an advantage-her eerie lustre and shy, naive demeanor suit her role perfectly. There is a great sequence involving a...

Its about time!
Finally, one of the best, and most awaited ghost/haunted house stories is given the million dollar treatment by Criterion. This 1944 film had me sneaking upstairs (against explicit instructions by my parents to "go directly to bed") to watch the late show with a blanket nearby for the scary parts. Honestly its not really scary, no mater what my 12 year old self still thinks, but it's one of the creepiest and well produced supernatural movies from Hollywood.

Ray Milland (Rick) is the perfectly suave leading man who falls in love with the beautiful Gail Russell, (Stella) a young 20 year old daughter of the mystery spirit who maybe haunting "Windward House", that sits perched upon a tall cliff on the haunted Cornish coast in England. [Oh, yeah, very Gothic!] Milland and his sister (Ruth Hussey) buy the house while on vacation at a heavily discounted price from the stern Commander Beech (Donald Crisp). His granddaughter, Stella, becomes upset with the sale until she is...

A Good Old Fashioned Ghost Story Effectively Told
Neatly playing light-hearted daytime fun against unsettling nighttime hauntings, THE UNINVITED is very much a traditional ghost story. When Ray Milland and sister Ruth Hussey buy a house on the Cornwall coast the purchase seems ideal--particularly as Milland is attracted to the seller's granddaughter, beautiful Gail Russell. But once settled in, Milland and Hussey soon find they are not quite alone in their new home.

The film is particularly notable for an "every day ordinary" style: there are no manipulative camera angles or unexpected editing tricks; there is no foreshadowing soundtrack; there are precious few special effects--and by refusing to use such time-honored elements, the story's ghostly elements seem all the more disturbing by comparison. The strong cast, which also includes Donald Crisp, Alan Napier, Cornelia Otis Skinner, is first rate and plays expertly, and Lewis Allen directs with restraint but never allows the pace to drag. THE UNINVITED is not a...

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Ghostbusters Double Feature Gift Set (Ghostbusters / Ghostbusters 2 + Commemorative Book)

Good DVD and a better story.
I received the DVD a few days earlier than expected, and in an unexpected way.

There was a knock on the door, it was maybe 2 in the morning. I don't really remember. I slowly got out of bed and peeked through the doorhole to see who it could possibly be.

It was Bill effing Murray. Dressed up as a ghostbuster. When I opened the door, he clicked a remote to turn on a stereo boombox he had with him. Ghostbusters theme blaring, he starts dancing. 70's disco style.

After "WHO YOU GONNA CALL," he held the DVD case up to my face and paused the song. I was silent, he lowered the case and put it in my face again.

"Ghostbusters?" I asked.

He started the music again, put the dvd down on my doormat, took the boombox and danced away.

I opened up the DVD case when I got back inside, and on the INSIDE of the SHRINK WRAPPED DVD CASE, I kid you not there was a note that read

"No one will ever believe you. No one buys DVDs...

Cheap as heck and the transfer is upgraded!
Well, this isn't packed with special features, but it's sure worth more than two stars. After all, what do you expect for a double-feature (each film is in its own thin-pak case) plus episodes of the cartoon (which it will be great to reminisce while watching, by the way) and a scrapbook at such a low price?

The real treat that home theater enthusiasts and most people with eyes will appreciate is that the transfers have been remastered and are marvelous-looking. That alone makes this a good companion to the old discs (KEEP THE OLD RELEASES because the video commentary from the first Ghostbusters DVD isn't on this new one and the neither are theatrical trailers). e-mail me for a link to comparison pics of the transfer upgrades! Worth an upgrade for home theater enthusiasts and fans of the cartoon (and fans of cool gimmick packaging, too, I guess!).

Widescreen/Fullscreen box misprint
The outside box does say that GB is in fullscreen and GB2 is in widescreen. However, that is a misprint. Originally they did intend to release it this way, but the backlash was so severe that they reversed this (stupid) decision. I guess the box artwork was already printed by this point. Rest assured that the actual movies are BOTH in widescreen and there is not even a fullscreen option. The inside boxes do both indicate widescreen.

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Grateful Dead: All the Years Combine: The DVD Collection (14-DVD Box Set)

Could be best music DVD box set ever!
This is the most amazing box set to come out on DVD in the history of music! I know how that sounds but I can not believe what you get for the Price. Except for two of the Discs I already owned everything else in the box and I still think it's great. P,us at this price if i had bought the two discs on their own it would come to almost the same amount. For those of you who were ticked off that very little of this box set was still avalible on their own you get it all at a greatly reduced price. I paid almost $40 for the Winterland DVD and close to $50 for the DVD of the Grateful Dead movie. Even the vault series discs were expensive when they came out. This is what you get:

The Grateful Dead movie which was originally released in theaters. This was shot on film so it looks great. The audio improvements are nothing short of incredible.

Closing Of Winterland which was originally a TV broadcast. Again amazing sound. Nice mix. Three sets of music plus the Blues...

Fantastic box set, lots of content for a low price!
This is a gorgeous set that combines basically all the previously released DVDs in to one giant box set for a disgustingly low price. You get all the bonus material fully intact from the original DVD releases, a full disc of new bonus stuff, and So Far for the first time on DVD. The bottom line here is that many of these DVDs have been out of print for years --- copies have been hard to find and often pricey. I think if you get this box set along with Crimson, White, & Indigo and Rocking The Cradle you've got 99% of their entire official video catalog.

Why don't they release more stuff on blu-ray?
People keep asking this question over and over. Most of the footage they have of the band was shot in lower quality / lower resolution analog tape as opposed to a higher resolution film or digital video (which didn't exist yet). The Grateful Dead Movie was shot on a high quality film stock converted to high definiton and it was shot in a full wide screen format. That's...

Perfect for someone who's late to the party...
I've always had a healthy respect for Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, but I'm one of the people that was born in the 1960's and came to know them by way of their brief appearance in the Billboard Top 100 with "Touch of Grey" (and to a lesser extent "Hell In a Bucket") and the subsequent MTV video featuring the dancing skeleton puppets. Their brief rennaissance, which began in 1987 and fizzled by 1992 (after which time Jerry turned his attention to his acoustic side projects with David Grisman-a large percentage of which were released posthumously) left many of us wanting more but not really knowing where to look. I DID listen to the nationally syndicated radio show "The Grateful Dead Hour" at one point, but this stopped airing in Chicago some time ago and is only available as a webcast I believe.

My generation are much more familiar with Phish,which zoomed in to fill the void after Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, as well as other jam bands such as String Cheese...

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The First Week (#1) The First Program (Black & White, 1967)

Mister Rogers: Still relevant to today.
When Mister Rogers was removed from the daily feeds of our local PBS station and replaced with drivel, I was upset. My four year old was just as upset, but kept watching repeats of the few episodes we had saved on tape. While I have been trying to collect other "Mister Rogers" episodes since that time, they were hard to come by and resulted in attempts by me to "ration" new episodes. When I discovered seven volumes of Mister Rogers at Amazon on demand, I was thrilled. The smile on my daughter's face when she saw the first episode was priceless.

The children of today's society desperately need a quiet, gentle, and calming figure in their crazy lives: Mister Rogers is one of the few TV personalities capable of filling that role.
In a world of television programs that are over-stimulating and age inappropriate, Mister Rogers was and continues to be an oasis. He teaches quietly, gently, and with a unique perspective on childhood fears and emotions. He does not just...

Thank you for returning this wonderful show for our children!!
I am so glad to see that Mr. Roger's Neighborhood is available again. I had looked forward, for years, to sharing his show with my children and was upset to learn that PBS had discontinued airing the program. I will be purchasing Amazon Prime just for access to the show. I am so grateful to Amazon for bringing back this classic-timeless show of gentle words, kindness and positive moral lessons which are not reflected in any other show I have found on Television these days. Thank you, once again, Amazon. To any who are interested, this is a link to Fred Roger's testimony before the US Congress that planned on cutting PBS Funding in half. His 7 min. testimony saved PBS. It needs to be heard again! [...]

Can I give it 10 stars??
Why can't we find something, anything, like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood today?? Anyone who has kids of the appropriate age group (3-7ish) should have them sit down and watch a few episodes....this is children's television at its best!

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Timecop [HD]

Enjoyable despite inconsistencies (but full-screen?)
Apart from the _Terminator_ series, there haven't been all that many SF time-travel action thrillers. There have been time-travel _movies_, but they're generally not action flicks. (_Somewhere in Time_, for example, is primarily a romance, and the brilliant _12 Monkeys_ isn't about "action.") Of course there's Nicholas Meyer's excellent _Time After Time_, which isn't as well known as it should be.

And there's this one. It's not (just) a Van Damme vehicle, though it works well enough for fans of the Muscles from Brussels. It's also a fairly well constructed and enjoyable SF movie.

SF readers be warned: it does _not_ have the logical tightness of Robert A. Heinlein's early time-travel stories ('By His Bootstraps', 'All You Zombies'), or even of the first _Terminator_ film. But as Heinlein found in later life, an unalterable past/future just doesn't make for very exciting drama. (As of _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_, RAH was officially allowing the past, and...

How did you get here?
Time Cop DVD

Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as a time-traveling law enforcement officer whose mission is to prevent and/or apprehend anybody from traveling back in time for their own personal gains. You know that as soon as humans invent Time-Travel someone will be abusing the invention.

Highly recommended for fans of Jean-Claude Van Damme and the book The Time Machine (Signet Classics)

Gunner March, 2008

Awful pan and scan version!
For a film that was shot in full anamorphic Panavision 2.35:1 by a very good director/cinematographer I find it very weird that Universal would only release this in cropped format. Many other people have expressed their disappointment in other reviews about this but I must let you know that the R2 version IS in widescreen. If you must by this film then get the UK Region 2 version. The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack remains the same but the movie is shown in it's correct OAR. And that is what matters most.

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Prelude To A Storm

What you would expect
A Typical Power Ranger. My kids love it but not for me. Very silly with karate moves and fun villains.

Great videos
I like it when they morph and I like the opening sequence. This is a nice selection in the Amazon library.

Great action!
Keeps my 4 year old grandson quiet until it's over! Happy this is one of the selections for Amazon Prime!

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Taken (Two-Disc Extended Cut) [Blu-ray]

Great film - see the movie for its own sake
When I was a soldier stationed in Germany in the 1970s there was a raid on a Turkish-owned bar on the outskirts of Frankfurt A/M. German Polizei and US CID (US Army Criminal Investigation Division) broke up a white slavery ring that had been operating out of the bar for some time. The bar was a way-point in the transportation route of young European girls (preferably blonde) who had been kidnapped throughout Europe and were being smuggled to be sold in the harems and brothels of the Middle and Far East. The police found some twenty girls in the basement of the bar, some from as far away as Denmark and the Netherlands, waiting to be shipped further down the pipeline.

The German police and Interpol had been watching the bar for some time and were hoping to trace the route farther down the track to take down the ringleaders. The white slavers made the mistake of kidnapping the daughter of a US Army colonel whom they thought was a German national. The Colonel learned about the...

Besson you've done it again!
This is a review for the 2 disc version:
Taken blew me away. It's a tight, well written action flick. Luc Besson wrote and produced this and the character building of Bryan (Neeson) reminds me a lot of "The Cleaner" in Leon: The Professional, which was an earlier work of Besson's. The action reminds me of the Bourne series but more satisfying in a way than Bourne. The first 30 minutes is awkward. But a lot of what Besson writes is awkward, but charmingly awkward. The extended cut is the European cut. They decided the American audience couldn't handle some of the scenes. There is NO nudity in this film at all and none in the extended cut.

But what you get on the 2-disc version and not on the 1-disc is the following:
"The Making of 'Taken'" (18:22) - a featurette of the making of.
"Avant Premiere" (4:37) - video of the premier night in Paris
"Inside Action: Side by Side Comparisons" (11:05) - what it says
Plus, two tracks of commentary.
The...

Let God sort 'em out...
This is one of those great action movies where the hero isn't burdened by doubt, ineptitude, or guilt. He knows what he has to do and he does it coolly and ruthlessly! What he does is kill bad guys... Lots and lots of bad guys of all nationalities, races, and creeds who deserve what they get. Very efficient and ecumenical...

I lost count, but Liam Neeson must have killed about 50 bad guys in this one. And they keep on spawning so he has more to kill. I haven't seen one hero take on so many bad guys who keep on reproducing since Steven Segal made "Hard to Kill"...

The action is non-stop and the retribution is very satisfying. There is a lot of violence, but this is not an explicit blood and gore film. Just good old Hollywood movie violence that hits you at the gut level. "Taken" is a nice vicarious vigilante thrill for all the rest of us who must play by the rules. Liam Neeson does an excellent job! Highly recommended for action fans...

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