Tony: My Sister's Keeper DVD review

My Sister's Keep was one of those movies I read a lot about, but never reallllly wanted to watch. I know we're late on this one, but as with many things in life, it was worth the wait. This may sound funny, coming from someone who loves movies as much as I do, but it looked too damn depressing to watch. I knew it was about a little girl who was dying, and that's about it. There was so much more to this story.

As always with AtD, we're about opinion, not plot. I will tell you this, the story is center around the character of Kate, played by Sofia Vassilieva. Kate is a teenage girl dying of leukemia. Her mother (played by Cameron Diaz) is desperate to keep her alive at all costs. Diaz's character is married to Jason Patric, who is terrific in this film, and very underrated in Hollywood. The story arc centers around Kate's sister, Anna, played by Abigail Breslin. Anna has had five operations in her short life, trying to help save her older sister.

The film does something rarely seen anymore, shows you the ugly side of people, but still makes you care about them. Every character in the movie is good, deep down inside. But Kate's illness has brought out the worst in everyone. Her mother is a crazy person, determined to keep her alive. Her parents barely know each other because they are so preoccupied with her illness. Kate's little brother, played by Evan Ellingson (also great in the film), has been neglected since he was a child due to her illness.

The movie is directed by Nick Cassavetes who also directed such films as Alpha Dog, The Notebook and John Q. There are a lot of flashbacks and flash forwards in order for the audience to see Kate before she was sick, during her illness, and her later days. Every member of the family has a narrative in the film, which is great to see everyone's perspective of the family's situation.

The star of the show is by far Abigail Breslin. This little girl had my wife and I in tears during multiple scenes in the film. She commands attention for every scene she is in, and you truly forget her age, she's only 13 years old! Diaz was really the only negative for me in the film, I didn't buy the whole "bitchy mom" act. She's played too many goody good girls to make us believe she could be "evil". As I said earlier, Jason Patric is great and I wish we saw more of him in Hollywood. He had a nice co-starring role this season on Entourage which was fun to watch. And Sofia Vassilieva may not win an Oscar for her role as the sick daughter, but she will earn great recognition. I would say this is a movie definitely worth watching. Just have a box of Kleenex ready.

"Yogi Bear" to be CGI & Live-Action Hybrid

Entertainment Weekly reported that a live-action and computer animated hybrid feature of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Yogi Bear is in the works.

The film is set to star Dan Aykroyd as voice of the titular CGI star Yogi and Justin Timberlake will play the voice of a CGI Boo-Boo.
Tom Cavanagh (Ed) will play a live-action Ranger Smith and AtD favorite Anna Faris will play a live-action character named Rachel.

Supposedly, the story will be that Yogi and Boo-Boo are stealing a bunch of pic-a-nic baskets from the campers and getting on Ranger Smith's angry side. Rachel, a nature documentary filmmaker, is trying to film Yogi and Boo-Boo for her next project.

The movie is set to be in 3D and will be directed by Journey to the Center of the Earth director Eric Brevig. Warner Bros. is trying for a release date of December 17, 2010.

Quickie: First Iron Man 2 poster released

Yahoo has put up the first official poster for Iron Man 2. Looks great!!!!

Quickie: New Toy Story 3 teaser trailer

Enjoy!

Death of the DVD?

Hello boys and girls, and welcome to the round table. I don't know why I just said that, but I did, and you're reading it so ha! Today I want to discuss something near and dear to my heart, the DVD medium. I remember less than ten years ago, my life was changed forever... DVD's were made readily available at a store near you. You're telling me I can skip chapters, like 5 or 10 minutes at a time? You're telling me there's subtitles and multi-angles (which never works btw)? YOU, are telling ME, that there will be "extra" stuff, like behing-the-scenes footage and "making of" documentaries? Holy-shmoly! I was hooked, and here I am over a 1,000 DVD's deep and into the Blu-Ray medium.

Here's my concern, everything is headed digital, or streaming. Netflix online, or straight to a PS3 or X-Box 360 is coming. Streaming movies from their server to your system. Digital Copies of your favorite movies online, for free, and legal. Some may argue that nothing replaces the physical aspect of owning a DVD or Blu-Ray. But I'll tell you this... they said that about CD's no more than five years ago. And now, the digital downloading age is upon us. I officially have as many friends that buy CD's as they do at the iTunes store.

I have always been one to adapt to change, but these DVD's are my babies and I can't let them fall to the waste side. I can't seem to accept that some day, there will be nothing but microchips to play our movies, in full HD. I have to be OK with letting them go. But for now, I will not. I will hold my head up high and brag... about my DVD's!

Guest Review: Al Berto: "The Men Who Stare at Goats"

I must say, the only thing that was remotely interesting about The Men Who Stare at Goats was the trailer. Whoever created this trailer did a pretty damn good job, because this movie was just horrible. This movie reminds me of Burn after reading. It’s clear the writers couldn’t figure out which genre the movie was going to be. It tries so hard to be a comedy, yet it keeps falling short of a drama.

A reporter, played by Ewan McGregor, is in Iraq trying to find the story of a lifetime when he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a guy who claims to be a former member of the U.S. Army's First Earth Battalion, a unit that employs paranormal powers in their missions.

Throughout the whole movie you’re wondering to yourself, is Lyn Cassady for real or full of BS? And as the plot goes on you realize he’s a little bit of both. The two of them roam around the Middle East trying to find “something” and run into a number of obstacles and only have one tool to find it, Lyn Cassady’s psychic abilities.

George Clooney’s last few movies haven’t been really that good, and I’d think twice about seeing another one in the future.

All and all, it’s the type of movie you’d expect so much from, yet it falls so short. I guess if you’ve seen everything else, and you’re really really bored, then go see this.

Guest Review: Al Berto: "Planet 51"

Welcome to a world of creativity with a lack of… creativity.

Captain Charles "Chuck" Baker played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson , an American astronaut, lands on an unknown planet thinking he's the first life form to step foot on it. To his surprise, he finds that this planet is inhabited by little green people who are happily living in an American 1950’s, white picket fence world. Lem, played by Justin Long, (who you can usually be find in the Mac vs. PC commercials), is just a teenager working on getting the girl of his dreams, while trying to land a job at a local planetarium. Lem risks his job, his relationship with his family and his future girlfriend to help Chuck get back to his ship orbiting the planet above.

When I watched the trailer to this movie I was totally excited. I thought to myself, “finally, something original.” I’m so sick of this phase the film industry is going through of bringing back old ideas to keep selling tickets. It’s as if Hollywood writers lost all touch with the right side of their brains and I’m honestly getting sick of the “Hollywood Formula:” Everything’s normal, something disrupts it all, the main character faces a number of challenges, he or she overcomes those challenges, happy ending. You’d think in this day and age that movie watchers would expect more, something a little different.

Sadly this movie is typically the same as the rest. The one thing that stuck me the most was the complete lack of imagination and creativity from such an amazing plot idea. They took absolutely no effort whatsoever to give you the feeling that you were on another world. I think the only real difference between earth and planet 51 was that the inhabitants physically look different, (they were obviously green with four fingers and didn’t have noses), and they have weird gravitation properties. Their dogs were a small cute version of the alien seen in the 1986 movie Alien. For some reason they had American looking cars that floated, yet their helicopters needed blades to lift them off the ground. Somehow, 50 million light years away, another species also invented a game that required a round heavy object to hit 10 pins, and they called it bowling! Did I mention it rained rocks? The odds of all this occurring has to be one out of, I don’t know, a billion-zillion-kagillion! The one and only thing that was remotely entertaining about this movie was a small probe sent to the planet to study and find living creatures, but failed its mission because it had an obsession with examining and collecting rocks.

You would figure an animated movie would have encouraged a number of creative ideas from such an interesting movie plot idea. Planet 51 was basically just a reason to make a quick buck by an unknown animated movie company. This is why Pixar will still be number one in my book; DreamWorks comes in a close second.