It's not quite as clever as it tries to be, but The Game does a tremendous job of presenting the story of a rigid control freak trapped in circumstances that are increasingly beyond his control. Michael Douglas plays a rich, divorced, and dreadful investment banker whose 48th birthday reminds him of his father's suicide at the same age. He's locked in the cage of his own misery until his rebellious younger brother (Sean Penn) presents him with a birthday invitation to play "The Game" (described as "an experiential Book of the Month Club")--a mysterious offering from a company called Consumer Recreation Services. Before he knows the game has even begun, Douglas is caught up in a series of unexplained events designed to strip him of his tenuous security and cast him into a maelstrom of chaos. How do you play a game that hasn't any rules? That's what Douglas has to figure out, and he can't always rely on his intelligence to form logic out of what's happening to him. Seemingly cast as the fall guy in a conspiracy thriller, he encounters a waitress (Deborah Unger) who may or may not be trustworthy, and nothing can be taken at face value in a world turned upside down. Douglas is great at conveying the sheer panic of his character's dilemma, and despite some lapses in credibility and an anticlimactic ending, The Game remains a thinking person's thriller that grabs and holds your attention. Thematic resonance abounds between this and Seven and Fight Club, two of the other films by The Game 's director David Fincher. -- Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com
In 1980 the US Navy's most powerful warship the USS Nimitz is caught in a storm during routine maneuvers in the Pacific. Enveloped by a strange green light the ship passes through a vortex and when they emerge the crew find that their communication has been cut off. Captain Matthew Yelland (Kirk Douglas - Spartacus Lust for Life) sends out a patrol and the F-14 pilots are shocked to encounter vintage Japanese warplanes. To their surprise they discover that they have somehow been transported back in time to 6th December 1941: the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. As captain of a technologically superior craft should Captain Yelland fulfill his duty to protect the United States and foil the impending attack or let history run its course? With fantastic aerial sequences made with the cooperation of US Navy pilots this classic tale of space time and war features a cast full of Hollywood veterans including Martin Sheen (The West Wing) and Katherine Ross (The Graduate The Stepford Wives). Will things ever be the same again?...it's The Final Countdown!
Tune in with the King of Rock and Roll' with a curated collection of his finest movies. Includes performances of hit songs Wooden Heart , Shoppin Around , Little Egypt , Can't Help Falling In Love', Rock-A-Hula Baby , Bossa Nova Baby and Return To Sender . Lightweight fun and soundtracks to get you on your feet, there is no better gift for Elvis superfans. Collection Includes: G.I Blues Tulsa, a soldier with dreams of running his own nightclub, places a bet with his friend Dynamite that he can win the heart of an untouchable dancer...but when Dynamite is transferred, Tulsa must replace him in the bet. Blue Hawaii After arriving back in Hawaii from the Army, Chad Gates (Elvis Presley) defies his parents' wishes for him to work at the family business and instead goes to work as a tour guide at his girlfriend's agency. Girls! Girls! Girls! When he finds out his boss is retiring to Arizona, a sailor has to find a way to buy the Westwind, a boat that he and his father built. He is also caught between two women: insensitive club singer Robin and sweet Laurel. Roustabout After a singer loses his job at a coffee shop, he finds employment at a struggling carnival, but his attempted romance with a teenager leads to friction with her father. Fun in Acapulco A yacht owner's spoiled daughter gets Mike fired, but a boy helps him get a job as singer at Acapulco Hilton etc. He upsets the lifeguard by taking his girl and 3 daily work hours.
HellboyIn the ongoing deluge of comic-book adaptations, Hellboy ranks well above average. Having turned down an offer to helm Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in favour of bringing Hellboy's origin story to the big screen, the gifted Mexican director Guillermo del Toro compensates for the excesses of Blade II with a moodily effective, consistently entertaining action-packed fantasy, beginning in 1944 when the mad monk Rasputin--in cahoots with occult-buff Hitler and his Nazi thugs--opens a transdimensional portal through which a baby demon emerges, capable of destroying the world with his powers. Instead, the aptly named Hellboy is raised by the benevolent Prof. Bloom, founder of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, whose allied forces enlist the adult Hellboy (Ron Perlman, perfectly cast) to battle evil at every turn. While nursing a melancholy love for the comely firestarter Liz (Selma Blair), Hellboy files his demonic horns ("to fit in," says Bloom) and wreaks havoc on the bad guys. The action is occasionally routine (the movie suffers when compared to the similar X-Men blockbusters), but del Toro and Perlman have honored Mike Mignola's original Dark Horse comics with a lavish and loyal interpretation, retaining the amusing and sympathetic quirks of character that made the comic-book Hellboy a pop-culture original. He's red as a lobster, puffs stogies like Groucho Marx, and fights the good fight with a kind but troubled heart. What's not to like? --Jeff ShannonHellboy 2: The Golden ArmyThe feverish Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is a very busy sequel that might have looked unhinged in the hands of a less visionary director than Guillermo del Toro. Ron Perlman returns as Hellboy, aka "Red," the Dark Horse Comics demon-hero with roots in the mythical world but personal ties in the human realm. Still working, as he was in Hellboy, for a secret department of the federal government that deals (as in "Men In Black") with forces of the fantastic, Red and his colleagues take on a royal elf (Luke Goss) determined to smash a longtime truce between mankind and the forces of magic. Meanwhile, Red's relationship with girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair), who can burst into flames at will, is going through a rocky stage observed by Red's fishy friend Abe (Doug Jones), himself struck by love in this film. Del Toro brilliantly integrates the ordinary and extraordinary, diving into an extended scene set in a troll market barely hidden behind the façade of typical city streets. He also unleashes a forest monster that devastates an urban neighborhood, but then--interestingly--brings a luminous beauty to the same area as the creature (an "elemental") succumbs to a terrible death. Del Toro's art direction proves masterful, too, in a climactic battle set in a clockworks-like stronghold tucked away in rugged Irish landscape. But it's really the juxtaposition of visual marvels with not-so-unusual relationship issues that gives Hellboy 2 a certain jaunty appeal hard to find in other superhero movies. --Tom Keogh
Wado Ryu Karate is an excellent way to learn disipline self control develope self defence skills and improve fitness and vitality. In this DVD you will be taken through each stage starting with the basic punches and kicks through to some more advanced movements and techniques.
From the director of 'Platoon' Oliver Stone comes a new battle set in the greatest jungle of them all Wall Street: a place where honour is traded for power and peace of mind for a piece of the action. Against this background two men form a dangerous friendship - one a ruthless multi-millionaire corporate raider the other a newly minted power hungry young broker. Two men trading their women families and each other against all odds and every rule in the book...
Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is a shrewdly successful businessman who is accustomed to being in control of each facet of his investments and relationships. His well-ordered life undergoes a profound change however when his brother Conrad (Sean Penn) gives him an unexpected birthday gift that soon has devastating consequences. There are no rules in The Game...
No director could ever have hoped to repeat the artistic achievement of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and nobody knew that better than Peter Hyams, who made this much more conventional film from the first of three sequel novels by Arthur C Clarke. Whereas Kubrick made a poetic film of mind-expanding ideas and metaphysical mysteries, Hyams shouldn't be blamed for taking a more practical, crowd-pleasing approach. In revealing much of what Kubrick deliberately left unexplained, 2010 lacks the enigmatic awe of its predecessor, but it's still a riveting tale of space exploration and extraterrestrial contact, beginning when a joint American-Soviet mission embarks to determine the cause of failure of the derelict spaceship Discovery. Having arrived at Discovery near the planet Jupiter, the American mission leader (Roy Scheider) and his Russian counterpart (Helen Mirren) must investigate the apparent failure of the ship's infamous onboard computer, HAL 9000, as well as the meaning of countless mysterious black monoliths amassing on Jupiter's surface (an interpretation Kubrick originally left up to his viewers). Meanwhile, Earth is on the brink of nuclear war, and an apparition of astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) appears repeatedly to promise that "something wonderful" is about to happen. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com
Shia LaBeouf stars as a budding Wall Street broker taken under the wing of the financial district's prodigal son, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas).
With Tim Roth as Oliver Cromwell and Dougray Scott as Sir Thomas Fairfax, the film explores how the love and loyalty between two of the most fasicnating figures of the English Civil War turned to betrayal and political intrigue.
When strange anomalies in time start to appear all over England Professor Cutter and his team have to help track down and capture all sorts of dangerous prehistoric creatures from Earth's distant past.
Groundbreaking on several counts, not the least of which was an innovative use of animation and stereophonic sound, this ambitious Disney feature has lost nothing to time since its release in 1940. Classical music was interpreted by Disney animators, resulting in surreal fantasy and playful escapism. Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra provided the music for eight segments by the composers Tchaikovsky, Moussorgsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Ponchielli, Bach, Dukas and Schubert. Not all the sequences were created equally, but a few are simply glorious, such as "Night on Bald Mountain", "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and "The Nutcracker Suite". The animation ranges from subtly delicate to fiercely bold. The screen bursts with colour and action as creatures transmute and convention is thrust aside. The painstaking detail and saturated hues are unique to this film, unmatched even by more advanced technology. --Rochelle O'GormanFantasia and Fantasia 2000 are also available together in the 3-disc DVD Fantasia Collection.
Return of the Living Dead III is the third go-round for a premise intended as both a sequel to and a satire of the George A Romero Living Dead films. This could just as easily have been an entry in director Brian Yuzna's Re-Animator series, and indeed the plot nugget seems derived from the last shot of Re-Animator itself, as a devoted youth (J. Trevor Edmond) revives his freshly dead girlfriend (Mindy Clarke) with trioxin, a military zombie-making gas, and learns to regret his actions. Though it has some left-field ideas--the heroine turns herself into a DIY Hellraiser Cenobite poster-girl with extreme body piercing to distract herself from the desire to eat her boyfriend's brain--and effective action, it is still confined by its low budget and thus stuck with ordinary acting, a minimal plot and too many dumb developments. The central thread is the necrophile/SM romance, which ends up in a liebestod clinch in the army base's furnace, but there's a sub-plot about a quartet of zombified gang members which serves mainly to get some violence going every few minutes. Clarke is a striking presence, studded with bits of metal like a punk porcupine, but her performance flat lines even before her death in a motorcycle crash and revival as a zombie, while the rest of the cast--with the honourable exceptions of Kent McCord as a senior officer and Basil Wallace as a mystical down-and-out--are typified by Sarah Douglas' strident militarist mad scientist, who wants to put zombies in armoured exoskeletons and deploy them as combat troops. Nevertheless, this is gruesome fun for the fans, with some imaginative zombie mutilation effects. On the DVD: It's a no-frills full-screen transfer. The only extra is a 50-second trailer.--Kim Newman
Journey to the centre of the Earth, in Kevin Connor's spectacular version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' subterranean adventure, adapted by the great man himself.In the underground world of Pellucidor, amidst twisted vines and lava flows, a tyrannical race of pterodactyls rule. A group of Victorian scientists drilling through the Earth's core lose control of their Iron Mole and mistakenly emerge in the fantasy kingdom. Imprisoned in volcanic dungeons by the prehistoric monsters, they strive to rescue the enslaved primitive humans in a dramatic display of special effects.
Advertised in 1970 as "the first electric Western", Zachariah is an endearingly pretentious effort that prefigures such genre oddities as Jodorowsky's El Topo and Alex Cox's Straight to Hell. The story is the archetypal one about two friends who become gunslingers and must inevitably face off against each other in the finale, but it's treated here as if it Meant Something Deeper--which means that after enjoying 75 minutes of violence we can all agree that peace and love and harmony is on the whole better for children and other living things. Curly haired farmboy Zachariah (John Rubinstein) and eternally grinning apprentice blacksmith Matthew (Don Johnson) are the fast friends who run away from home to join up with a gang of outlaws known as the Crackers (played by hippie folk-rock collective Country Joe and the Fish). These apparent 19th-century Westerners tote electric guitars and are given to staging free festival freak-outs at one end of town to distract from the bank robbery at the other. The boys soon hook up with Job Cain (Elvin Jones), an all-in-black master gunfighter who is also an ace drummer (his solo is impressive), but then drift apart as Zachariah has a liaison with Old West madame Belle Starr (Pat Quinn) in a town that consists of fairground-style brightly painted wooden cut out buildings (a gag reused in Blazing Saddles), then gets rid of his outrageous all-white cowboy outfit to settle down on a homestead and grow his own dope and vegetables. Matthew, of course, goes for the black leather look after outdrawing Cain, and comes a gunning for the only man who might be faster than him, but the hippie-era message is once these kids have killed everyone else they can still make peace with each other and the desert or something, man. Aside from a Beatle-haired teenage Johnson making a fool of himself by over-emoting to contrast with Rubinstein's non-performance, the film offers a lot of beautiful "acid Western" scenery and excellent prog rock and bluegrass music from the James Gang, White Lightnin' and the New York Rock Ensemble. Comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre (huge on album in 1970) provided the script, which explains satirical touches like the horse-and-buggy salesman (Dick Van Patten) spieling like a used car dealer and the madame's claim to have had affairs with gunslingers from Billy the Kid to Marshal McLuhan. The DVD extras are skimpy, but the print quality is outstanding. --Kim Newman
20 000 Leagues Under The Sea (Dir. Richard Fleischer 1955): An adventure based on Jules Verne's prophetic novel.... Climb aboard the Nautilus and into a strange undersea world of spellbinding adventure! Kirk Douglas Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre star as shipwrecked survivors taken captive by the mysterious Captain Nemo brilliantly portrayed by James Mason. Wavering between genius and madness Nemo has launched a deadly crusade across the seven seas. But can the captive crew expose his evil plan before he destroys the world? Disney's brilliant Academy Award-winning (1955) adaptation of Jules Verne's gripping tale makes 20 000 Leagues Under The Sea a truly mesmerizing masterpiece! Swiss Family Robinson (Dir. Ken Annakin 1960): A family fleeing from the despotic regime of Napoleon is chased off course by a band of pirates. They are then shipwrecked on a tropical island where they begin a new and adventurous life. Based on the book by Johann Wyss. One Of Our Dinosaurs (Dir. Robert Stevenson 1975): It's Nanny Hettie to the rescue when British Intelligence Agent Lord Southmere is captured by Chinese agent Hnup Wan. Hettie is the only one who knows Southmere's secret: he has stolen a piece of top-secret microfilm from a Chinese warlord and hidden it in the skeleton of a dinosaur in a London museum. Aided by a small army of fellow nannies Hettie saves the day by foiling Wan and his gang.
This critically acclaimed film from the legendary American director John Sayles is an intelligent and thought provoking drama that follows two women who return to their Florida hometown and are forced to deal with a variety of personal and practical issues...
In 1979 The China Syndrome was the movie everyone was talking about thanks to the enormous publicity generated by the real-life Three Mile Island accident that not only mirrored the events depicted in the film but occurred just twelve days after the movie's release. Nominated for four Academy Awards - Best Actor (Lemmon) Best Actress (Fonda) Best Original Screenplay Best Art Direction The CHina Syndrome remains ""as explosive as the metaphor of its title"" (Los Angeles Herald Exa
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