Ahhh, Ginza. Gamblers paradise and gamblers hell. Land where the walls are littered with nudie pin-ups.

As skilled with a pool cue or cards as she is with a sword, Nami (Meiko Kaji) returns to her old stomping grounds with a serious goal in mind: find her father's killer. Before she can even get her sandals on Giza concrete, Nami defends a young woman, Hanae, from some scurrilous gangsters. Hanae's father had a run of bad luck and sold off his unwilling daughter to cover gambling debts. Nami takes up the cause of winning, literally, Hanae's freedom, so her first steps back into Ginza society instantly draw the ire of the local crimelord Aiboshi. Nami gets Hanae a job as a nightclub hostess in a joint run by an old friend, Miyoko. She also crosses paths and finds an ally in low level pimp, Ryuji (Sonny Chiba).

Aiboshi makes Nami an offer she should not refuse, to be his card dealer, which she lik...Read the entire review

The Movie
In the fall of 1995, I spent a semester away from college for an internship in Colorado Springs. That Halloween, I went to a local Walmart to buy supplies for my costume: yellow face paint, a yellow swim cap, black pipe cleaners, yellow dishwashing gloves and giant blue sweatpants. I was Homer Simpson, and I looked killer--although the cheap paint left a yellow glow on my face a few days afterward (my friend went as Spider-Man, and he had a blue hue).

I hadn't thought about that Walmart since, but there's a troubling story in Sole Journey involving anti-gay sentiment that brought the store's memory back to my mind. To think this could be the ex...Read the entire review

In 1971 with the two Wandering Ginza Butterfly films, actress and soon to be eternal cult icon Meiko Kaji made the switch from Nikkatsu Studios to Toei. The Ginza Butterfly duo would be a primer between her Stray Cat Rock youth gang films and the two series for which she would become most well known, the Lady Snowblood and Female Convict Scorpion films.

After spilling some gangster blood in a gang battle, Nami (Meiko Kaji) is sentenced to prison and emerges three years later ready to live a somewhat straighter life, as straight as one can get when you've been raised in the low level crime world. Her main goal is to atone for her crime that left the gangster's wife alone without a breadwinner, sick, and with a child to raise. Nami first reconnects with her uncle, who runs a pool hall, a place where she practically grew up and honed some serious skills. Through Ryuji, a low...Read the entire review

THE DVD

While "I, Robot" was a massive moneymaker for all participants involved, I don't know of anyone who exited the theater ecstatic with the results. Well, director Alex Proyas is back on the sci-fi chain gang, this time tackling the apocalyptic thriller "Knowing." A broad, leisurely jumble of Alfred Hitchcock-style suspense architecture and a dreary, paint-by-numbers Sci-Fi Channel Original, "Knowing" only seems to extract two reactions: nail-biting and eye-rolling. Proyas misjudges the material to both frightening and facepalm results, leaving "Knowing" a frothy brew of pleasing chaos and absolute absurdity.

Dealing with the heavy psychological burden of spousal loss, MIT professor John (Nicolas Cage) watches over his young son Caleb (Chandler Canterbur...Read the entire review

Dragonball: Evolution is a bad movie, but its brand of awful is so specific, the film is practically a time capsule. After the Star Wars trilogy, lots of 1980's filmmakers with grand ideas, limited talent and smaller budgets cranked out terrible, family-friendly fantasy films. Their mark is distinctive: silly, myth-based stories, shoddy-but-charming makeup and physical effects, and expansive but cheap-looking sets backed by obvious matte paintings. Dragonball: Evolution feels so much like those films, it's hard to believe it wasn't made 25 years ago, unearthed by modern movie producers, and stuck in theaters with a fresh coating of awful CGI.

Just like most 80's fantasy heroes, Goku (Justin Chatwin) is a whiny-yet-cocky, spiky-haired loner. He spends h...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM

AUTHOR'S DISCLAIMER: I am not someone who can be considered an opera fan. I'm not saying I hate opera, merely, I have never been able to find any time to see an opera live. My experience with opera mainly consists of having heard a number of recordings and viewed a few performances on home video or public television. In this review, please don't expect detailed analysis of the individual performers. All I offer is an outsider's view on one particular production. Thank you.

"Don Giovanni" is Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte's operatic telling of the Don Juan legend. This particular stage production, directed by Francesca Zambello, was performed at the Royal Opera House in London, in late 2008. The entire production runs approximately three hours, with the two acts split evenly across two discs.

The first thing that shocked me about this opera, was the immedi...Read the entire review

The Movie:

For whatever reason, people seem to be fascinated with sharks. There's something sinister about them, their eyes look soulless and their reputation as some of the world's deadliest killing machines obviously gives them a truly ominous vibe. At the same time, they're also rather beautiful in their own strange way. This fascination has lead to an onslaught of programming geared towards these creepy creatures, which has been airing now for two decades semi-regularly on The Discovery Channel. Image has packaged up six 'Shark Week' programs and slapped them onto a pair of DVDs, and thus we have the Shark Week: Greatest Bites collection. Past releases have been thematically linked, which made sense, but this time around the selection is more of a hodge-podge culled from various popular Discovery Channel programs such as Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters, programs that...Read the entire review

THE FILM

Men and women in drag. It's a cinematic institution dating back to the origins of Hollywood. Nearly all the top stars have shared in the pastime at one point in their careers, and the practice, while faintly controversial, has become a staple of the industry. "Ladies or Gentlemen" documents the pop culture history of cross-dressing on film, avoiding a collegiate atmosphere of determined research and painstaking example to have a little fun with the subject. It burns through top screen hits and memorable appearances to showcase the titans of the drag world and how they've shaped an unlikely entertainment subculture.

While only 53 minutes long, "Ladies or Gentlemen" packs much information in its tiny running time. Narrated with joyful vocal reach by RuPaul, the documentary liberally bounces around, spotlighting the highlights of drag cinema. The examples are obvious, but pr...Read the entire review

Eddie "Fitz" Fitzgerald (Robbie Coltrane) is a brilliant psychologist. He is able to read people with ease, discovering their motivations, fears,and weaknesses.  He can analyze and diagnose a person almost instantly. He can do this to everyone but himself.  Fitz is a deeply troubledperson, whose personal life is spiraling downward out of control. Anyone can see what is wrong except himself.  He is addicted to alcoholand tobacco.  He gambles heavily, and lords his great intelligenceover everyone.  That causes him to have few friends, and a very strainedrelationship with his family.

Fitz' psychological skills make him very useful to the police though. He has an exceptional eye for detail, and is able to examine a crime sceneand recreate what happened with an uncanny ability.  ...Read the entire review

The Product:
Somewhere between the underground and the pop charts, the industrial surge in the '70s - '90s and the megaton media stardom of the last ten years sits Trent Reznor and his surrogate band, Nine Inch Nails. Like Prince, another multitalented hyphenate who practices one genre (soul) while exploring the rest of the musical medium, the dishy doom and gloom poster boy with a penchant for melody mixed with noise has always been enigmatic and hard to define. One moment he's pumping out atonal tributes to bondage and blood rituals. The next, he's crafting classic ballads and full blown dance trance tracks. In an attempt to decode this seemingly undecipherable personality, Sexy Intellectual Home Video has released a two hour plus take on Reznor, his career, and the creative forces that came before, setting the stage for the movement and the musician's eventual rise to late 20th century pr...Read the entire review

Of Time and the City (2008), the first film from acclaimed English filmmaker Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives) since 2000, is a documentary that could be described as an essay film, memory piece, or tone film, and which Davies describes as "a love song and a eulogy." All of these descriptors are apt. The film is Davies' personal narrative recalling the Liverpool of his youth. He spent the first quarter century of his life there, and it's this period from 1945-1970 that preoccupies his attention here and throughout much of his work as a filmmaker.

Of Time and the City is a bittersweet film of nostalgic reverie for a densely-populated working-class city with streets filled with children and the elderly, and factories and shipyards humming with the...Read the entire review

The Product:
Certain genres are stained by their cultural surroundings. Film noir, for example, will always sit in that uneasy time between the end of World War II and the brightness of white flight late '50s suburbia. It's a combination of old world crust and new age alienation, crime and punishment typically metered out in amoral, unpleasant doses. Try as they might, it's tough for the modern mindset to make this mannered motion picture style work. For every Sin City there's a Spirit (though this critic actually loved both Frank Miller efforts), for every well intentioned film student soaked in a classroom loaded with classics, there's abundant visual clich s and shallow Sam Spade-lite scripting. A good example of this cold contemporary approach comes in the form of The Perfect Sleep. From the Raymond Chandler rip-off title to the love of location over cinematic logist...Read the entire review

Normally, I hope the movies I end up watching will be good, but while subjecting myself to Bundy: A Legacy of Evil, another in a long line of questionable direct-to-DVD "true life" serial killer movies (most of which are undoubtedly not good), I found myself desperately wishing the movie was actually better at being awful. The film hits all of Hollywood's terrible "serial killer" bases with the absolute bare minimum of enthusiasm, limply attempting to get the audience to invest some emotional interest in Corin Nemec's portrayal of the infamous murderer, but even with a marked improvement about halfway through, its inability to settle on a point about its subject robs it of a point or purpose. With a little more verve, it might have been entertaining in a late-night-cable kind of way, but it ends up being a meandering waste.

After a brief prologue, we dive right into the worst parts of t...Read the entire review

The Three Stooges Collection enters prime Shemp territory with Volume Six - 1949-1951, a set of 24 two-reel comedies in which an impressive 14 of the shorts - more than half - are new to DVD. This is a big change from all previous sets; the vast majority of shorts in those had been previously released. But from this point forward, through the remaining "Shemp Years" (1947-55) and the final two-reelers with "third stooge" Joe Besser (1956-57) fans will be treated to mostly heretofore unreleased material, shorts shown infrequently on television, and many never available even on VHS.

This collection is also something of a battle royale between increasingly bitter rivals Jules White (1900-1985), the veteran comedy producer-director in charge of Columbia's short-subject department, who during this time was also in charge of one unit, while relative neophyte producer Hugh McCollum (1900-68),...Read the entire review

Two relatively new Poirot TV-movies, along with a good series retrospective, come to DVD in Agatha Christie's Poirot - The Movie Collection - Set 4. The set includes Mrs. McGinty's Dead and A Cat Among the Pigeons (both premiered in the United Kingdom in September 2008), along with a 47-minute episode of Super Sleuths featuring interviews with the show's cast, including not just star David Suchet, but also Hugh Fraser, Philip Jackson, and Pauline Moran, who've been absent from the series since 2002.

Acorn Media's set isn't cheap - at $49.99 (SRP), that's expensive for two 90-minute mysteries and a documentary - but the good news is that the movies are uncut and in their proper 16:9 enhanced widescreen aspect ratios, which was not the case with some of the earlier Poirot movies released by competitor A&E. (Just how the series ended up getting licensed to ...Read the entire review

Intriguing British espionage series. Acorn Media has released Callan - Set 1, a deceptively titled collection of the 1967 - 1972 cult spy thriller's third season ("series"), and the first in color. Starring Edward Woodward of U.S. television's The Equalizer fame, Callan - Set 1 won't hold any surprises for devotees of the espionage genre (particularly since the "suspicious/paranoid/emotionally-spent/morally-conflicted-yet-deadly-efficient-government-agent" ground has been pretty well trampled since 1970, the year of this season), but it's intelligently done and well-acted by the excellent cast.

Edward Woodward plays David Callan, the top operative for "The Section," an ultra-secret British intelligence agency that handles delicate matters of...Read the entire review