Browse by Catagory:
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Transformers (Two-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray]
Release Date: 2008-09-02
Sales rank: 4
"I bought a car. Turned out to be an alien robot. Who knew?" deadpans Sam Witwicky, hero and human heart of Michael Bay's rollicking robot-smackdown fest, Transformers. Witwicky (the sweetly nerdy Shia LaBeouf, channeling a young John Cusack) is the perfect counterpoint to the nearly nonstop exhilarating action. The plot is simple: an alien civil war (the Autobots vs. the evil Decepticons) has spilled onto Earth, and young Sam is caught in the fray by his newly purchased souped-up Camaro. Which has a mind--and identity, as a noble-warrior robot named Bumblebee--of its own. The effects, especially the mind-blowing transformations of the robots into their earthly forms and back again, are stellar. Fans of the earlier film and TV series will be thrilled at this cutting-edge incarnation, but this version should please all fans of high-adrenaline action. Director Bay gleefully salts the movie with homages to pop-culture touchstones like Raiders of the Lost Ark, King Kong, and the early technothriller WarGames. The actors, though clearly all supporting those kickass robots, are uniformly on-target, including the dashing Josh Duhamel as a U.S. Army sergeant fighting an enemy he never anticipated; Jon Voight, as a tough yet sympathetic Secretary of Defense in over his head; and John Turturro, whose special agent manages to be confidently unctuous, even stripped to his undies. But the film belongs to Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, and the dastardly Megatron--and the wicked stunts they collide in all over the globe. Long live Transformers! --A.T. Hurley |
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Iron Man (Ultimate 2-Disc Edition) [Blu-ray]
Release Date: 2008-09-30
Sales rank: 7
You know you're going to get a different kind of superhero when you cast Robert Downey Jr. in the lead role. And Iron Man is different, in welcome ways. Cleverly updated from Marvel Comics' longstanding series, Iron Man puts billionaire industrialist Tony Stark (that's Downey) in the path of some Middle Eastern terrorists; in a brilliantly paced section, Stark invents an indestructible suit that allows him to escape. If the rest of the movie never quit hits that precise rhythm again, it nevertheless offers plenty of pleasure, as the renewed Stark swears off his past as a weapons manufacturer, develops his new Iron Man suit, and puzzles both his business partner (Jeff Bridges in great form) and executive assistant (Gwyneth Paltrow). Director Jon Favreau geeks out in fun ways with the hardware, but never lets it overpower the movie, and there's always a goofy one-liner or a slapstick pratfall around to break the tension. As for Downey, he doesn't get to jitterbug around too much in his improv way, but he brings enough of his unpredictable personality to keep the thing fresh. And listen up, hardcore Marvel mavens: even if you know the Stan Lee cameo is coming, you won't be able to guess it until it's on the screen. It all builds to a splendid final scene, with a concluding line delivery by Downey that just feels absolutely right. --Robert Horton |
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Heroes: Season 2 [Blu-ray]
Release Date: 2008-08-26
Sales rank: 51
Rejoin the epic and suspenseful phenomenon as Heroes: Season 2 arrives on Blu-ray Hi-Def! Experience all the new and exciting twists of the astonishing series in this 4-disc set that includes every gripping Season 2 episode. Plus, see what could have been with exclusive bonus features that reveal the untold stories that never aired and an alternate ending to the season finale, where the fate of humanity takes an ominous turn when Peter fails to catch the vial containing the deadly virus. |
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The Nightmare Before Christmas [Blu-ray] + Digital Copy
Release Date: 2008-08-26
Sales rank: 82
Now digitally restored and remastered with state-of-the-art technology, THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS is deeper, darker and more brilliant than ever just as Tim Burton originally envisioned it on Blu-ray Disc Bored with the same old scare-and-scream routine, Pumpkin King Jack Skellington longs to spread the joy of Christmas. But his merry mission puts Santa in jeopardy and creates a nightmare for good little boys and girls everywhere! Hear the genius of Danny Elfman's sensational music in 7.1 Surround Sound as the fantastic talents and imaginations of Tim Burton and Henry Selick come to life in stunning Hi-Def. THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS now even more eerie and extraordinary on Blu-ray High Definition!
Bonus Features
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS is the first full-length stop-motion animated film ever created.
The movie contains more than 227 animated characters.
Santa Claus' head has more than 50 different working parts, and Jack has more than 400 separate interchangeable heads, each handcrafted with a different facial expression.
The smallest working puppet in the movie is a doll from the "real world" Jack visits that is only one inch long.
Sally is wearing a real miniature dress laid on top of foam latex so that the fabric doesn't move too much on screen.
At the height of production, the animators produced only 70 seconds of finished film per week.
To create Halloweentown's twisted look, the design artists often made their sketches using their nondrawing hand.
All-New Blu-ray Exclusive Tim Burton Movie Introduction
Storyboard To Film Comparison
Original Theatrical Trailers And Posters
What's This? Jack's Haunted Mansion Holiday Tour
FRANKENWEENIE (Uncut Version) With New Introduction By Tim Burton
VINCENT Short Film
Tim Burton's Original Poem Narrated By Christopher Lee
All-New Audio Commentary By Tim Burton, Director Henry Selick And Musical Designer Danny Elfman
Behind The Scenes Making Of Tim Burton's THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS
The Worlds Of Tim Burton's THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS Halloween Town; Christmas Town, The Real World
Deleted ScenesFor those who never thought Disney would release a film in which Santa Claus is kidnapped and tortured, well, here it is! The full title is Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, which should give you an idea of the tone of this stop-action animated musical/fantasy/horror/comedy. It is based on characters created by Burton, the former Disney animator best known as the director of Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and the first two Batman movies. His benignly scary-funny sensibility dominates the story of Halloweentown resident Jack Skellington (voice by Danny Elfman, who also wrote the songs), who stumbles on a bizarre and fascinating alternative universe called ... Christmastown! Directed by Henry Selick (who later made the delightful James and the Giant Peach), this PG-rated picture has a reassuringly light touch. As Roger Ebert noted in his review, "some of the Halloween creatures might be a tad scary for smaller children, but this is the kind of movie older kids will eat up; it has the kind of offbeat, subversive energy that tells them wonderful things are likely to happen." --Jim Emerson |
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Batman Begins [Blu-ray]
Release Date: 2008-07-08
Sales rank: 54
Warner Brothers Batman Begins (Blu-ray) "Batman Begins" explores the origins of the "Batman" legend and the Dark Knight's emergence as a force for good in Gotham. In the wake of his parents' murder, disillusioned industrial heir Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) travels the world seeking the means to fight injustice and turn fear against those who prey on the fearful. He returns to Gotham and unveils his alter-ego:'Batman', a masked crusader who uses his strength, intellect and an array of high tech deceptions to fight the sinister forces that threaten the city.Batman Begins discards the previous four films in the series and recasts the Caped Crusader as a fearsome avenging angel. That's good news, because the series, which had gotten off to a rousing start under Tim Burton, had gradually dissolved into self-parody by 1997's Batman & Robin. As the title implies, Batman Begins tells the story anew, when Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) flees Western civilization following the murder of his parents. He is taken in by a mysterious instructor named Ducard (Liam Neeson in another mentor role) and urged to become a ninja in the League of Shadows, but he instead returns to his native Gotham City resolved to end the mob rule that is strangling it. But are there forces even more sinister at hand? Co-written by the team of David S. Goyer (a veteran comic book writer) and director Christopher Nolan (Memento), Batman Begins is a welcome return to the grim and gritty version of the Dark Knight, owing a great debt to the graphic novels that preceded it. It doesn't have the razzle dazzle, or the mass appeal, of Spider-Man 2 (though the Batmobile is cool), and retelling the origin means it starts slowly, like most "first" superhero movies. But it's certainly the best Bat-film since Burton's original, and one of the best superhero movies of its time. Bale cuts a good figure as Batman, intense and dangerous but with some of the lightheartedness Michael Keaton brought to the character. Michael Caine provides much of the film's humor as the family butler, Alfred, and as the love interest, Katie Holmes (Dawson's Creek) is surprisingly believable in her first adult role. Also featuring Gary Oldman as the young police officer Jim Gordon, Morgan Freeman as a Q-like gadgets expert, and Cillian Murphy as the vile Jonathan Crane. --David Horiuchi Batman at Amazon.com 
All Batman DVDs | 
Batman Begins 101: A Comic Book Primer | 
Where Have I Seen Christian Bale? | 
All Batman Comics and Graphic Novels | 
Batman Toys | 
Batman Begins Soundtrack | Stills from Batman Begins (click for larger images) |
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Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series [Blu-ray]
Release Date: 2007-04-24
Sales rank: 64
Actors: David Attenborough Format: Color, Widescreen Language: English Region: All Regions Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Number of discs: 4 Rating Studio: BBC Warner DVD Release Date: April 24, 2007 Run Time: 550 minutesAs of its release in early 2007, Planet Earth is quite simply the greatest nature/wildlife series ever produced. Following the similarly monumental achievement of The Blue Planet: Seas of Life, this astonishing 11-part BBC series is brilliantly narrated by Sir David Attenborough and sensibly organized so that each 50-minute episode covers a specific geographical region and/or wildlife habitat (mountains, caves, deserts, shallow seas, seasonal forests, etc.) until the entire planet has been magnificently represented by the most astonishing sights and sounds you'll ever experience from the comforts of home. The premiere episode, "From Pole to Pole," serves as a primer for things to come, placing the entire series in proper context and giving a general overview of what to expect from each individual episode. Without being overtly political, the series maintains a consistent and subtle emphasis on the urgent need for ongoing conservation, best illustrated by the plight of polar bears whose very behavior is changing (to accommodate life-threatening changes in their fast-melting habitat) in the wake of global warming--a phenomenon that this series appropriately presents as scientific fact. With this harsh reality as subtext, the series proceeds to accentuate the positive, delivering a seemingly endless variety of natural wonders, from the spectacular mating displays of New Guinea's various birds of paradise to a rare encounter with Siberia's nearly-extinct Amur Leopards, of which only 30 remain in the wild. That's just a hint of the marvels on display. Accompanied by majestic orchestral scores by George Fenton, every episode is packed with images so beautiful or so forcefully impressive (and so perfectly photographed by the BBC's tenacious high-definition camera crews) that you'll be rendered speechless by the splendor of it all. You'll see a seal struggling to out-maneuver a Great White Shark; swimming macaques in the Ganges delta; massive flocks of snow geese numbering in the hundreds of thousands; an awesome night-vision sequence of lions attacking an elephant; the Colugo (or "flying lemur"--not really a lemur!) of the Philippines; a hunting alliance of fish and snakes on Indonesia's magnificent coral reef; the bioluminescent "vampire squid" of the deep oceans... these are just a few of countless highlights, masterfully filmed from every conceivable angle, with frequent use of super-slow-motion and amazing motion-controlled time-lapse cinematography, and narrated by Attenborough with his trademark combination of observational wit and informative authority. The result is a hugely entertaining series that doesn't flinch from the predatory realities of nature (death is a constant presence, without being off-putting), and each episode ends with 10-minute "Planet Earth Diaries" (exclusive to this DVD set) that cover a specific aspect of production, like "Diving with Pirahnas" or "Into the Abyss" (the latter showing the rigors of filming the planet's most spectacular caves, including the last filming ever officially permitted in the "Chandelier Ballroom," a crystal-encrusted cavern found over a mile deep in New Mexico's treacherous Lechuguilla, the deepest cave in the continental United States.) With so many of Earth's natural wonders on display, it's only fitting that the final DVD in this five-disc set is devoted to Planet Earth: The Future, a separate three-part series in which a global array of experts is assembled to discuss issues of conservation, protection of delicate ecosystems, and the socio-economic benefits of understanding nature as a commodity that returns trillions of dollars in value at no cost to Earth's human population. At a time when the multiple threats of global warming should be obvious to all, let's give Sir David the last word, from the closing of Planet Earth's final episode: "We can now destroy or we can cherish--the choice is ours." --Jeff Shannon More Planet Earth 
Planet Earth on HD DVD | 
Planet Earth on DVD | 
More BBC DVDs | Stills from Planet Earth (click for larger image) |
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Kill Bill - Volumes 1 & 2 [Blu-ray] (Amazon.com Exclusive)
Release Date: 2008-09-09
Sales rank: 11
Kill Bill: Volume 1 Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1, is trash for connoisseurs. From his opening gambit (including a "Shaw-Scope" logo and gaudy '70s-vintage "Our Feature Presentation" title card) to his cliffhanger finale (a teasing lead-in to 2004's Vol. 2), Tarantino pays loving tribute to grindhouse cinema, specifically the Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti Westerns that fill his fervent brain--and this frequently breathtaking movie--with enough cinematic references and cleverly pilfered soundtrack cues to send cinephiles running for their reference books. Everything old is new again in Tarantino's humor-laced vision: he steals from the best while injecting his own oft-copied, never-duplicated style into what is, quite simply, a revenge flick, beginning with the near-murder of the Bride (Uma Thurman), pregnant on her wedding day and left for dead by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS)--including Lucy Liu and the unseen David Carradine (as Bill)--who become targets for the Bride's lethal vengeance. Culminating in an ultraviolent, ultra-stylized tour-de-force showdown, Tarantino's fourth film is either brilliantly (and brutally) innovative or one of the most blatant acts of plagiarism ever conceived. Either way, it's hyperkinetic eye-candy from a passionate film-lover who clearly knows what he's doing. --Jeff Shannon Kill Bill: Volume 2 "The Bride" (Uma Thurman) gets her satisfaction--and so do we--in Quentin Tarantino's "roaring rampage of revenge," Kill Bill: Volume 2. Where Vol. 1 was a hyper-kinetic tribute to the Asian chop-socky grindhouse flicks that have been thoroughly cross-referenced in Tarantino's film-loving brain, Vol. 2--not a sequel, but Part Two of a breathtakingly cinematic epic--is Tarantino's contemporary martial-arts Western, fueled by iconic images, music, and themes lifted from any source that Tarantino holds dear, from the action-packed cheapies of William Witney (one of several filmmakers Tarantino gratefully honors in the closing credits) to the spaghetti epics of Sergio Leone. Tarantino doesn't copy so much as elevate the genres he loves, and the entirety of Kill Bill is clearly the product of a singular artistic vision, even as it careens from one influence to another. Violence erupts with dynamic impact, but unlike Vol. 1, this slower grand finale revels in Tarantino's trademark dialogue and loopy longueurs, reviving the career of David Carradine (who plays Bill for what he is: a snake charmer), and giving Thurman's Bride an outlet for maternal love and well-earned happiness. Has any actress endured so much for the sake of a unique collaboration? As the credits remind us, "The Bride" was jointly created by "Q&U," and she's become an unforgettable heroine in a pair of delirious movie-movies (Vol. 3 awaits, some 15 years hence) that Tarantino fans will study and love for decades to come. --Jeff Shannon |
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Terminator - The Sarah Connor Chronicles - The Complete First Season [Blu-ray]
Release Date: 2008-08-19
Sales rank: 175
The mother of all destiny. Her son, the future leader of mankind. Their protector, a terminator from the future. Together they must take back the future as Sarah Connor (300's Lena Headey) prepares her son to fight the war against machines determined to annihilate the human race. The clock is ticking. Can they stop Judgment Day? The man-vs.-machine tale that's thrilled millions gets a reboot in this series set after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Now the battlefield has shifted to the present. Will John Connor (Heroes's Thomas Dekker) seize his destiny? Will a cell phone salesman's chess program evolve into Skynet? Can the sweet but deadly cyborg (Summer Glau of Firefly) be trusted? Answers – and the fight for the future – are here and now. |
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The Proposition [Blu-ray]
Release Date: 2008-08-19
Sales rank: 170
The Proposition is a visually stunning tale of loyalty, betrayal and retribution set on the frontier. In the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the Outback, Charlie Burns is presented with an impossible proposition by local law enforcer Captain Stanley: the only way to save his younger brother Mikey from the gallows is to track down and kill Arthur, his psychotic older brother. Meanwhile, Captain Stanley has other problems to contend with. Having given up their comfortable life, he is desperate to shield his innocent wife Martha from the brutalities of their new surroundings. He also faces mounting pressure from renegade natives and his superior Eden Fletcher to bring order to the region. An uneasy sense of foreboding grows as events close in and each character faces a punishing moral dilemma that leads to a murderous climax... |
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The Godfather - The Coppola Restoration Giftset (The Godfather / The Godfather Part II / The Godfather Part III) [Blu-Ray] [Blu-ray]
Release Date: 2008-09-23
Sales rank: 77
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