The Movie:

Spun off of the Funny Or Die website created by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay a few years ago, HBO's Funny Or Die Presents now sees its second seasons released on DVD. The half hour show is basically a sketch comedy series that purports to be vintage broadcasts from the Funny Or Die Network. Hosted by the 'channel's' Head Of West Coast Sales And Marketing, Ed Haligan (Steve Tom), each episode contains anywhere from three to eight sketches a piece in addition to Haligan's intros and outros and a network schedule. It's a simple idea but it allows the cast and crew to pretty much toss in anything they want which ensures that the series is, if not always hilariously funny, always weird enough to be worth checking out.

The ten episodes that make up this second season of the show are presented as follows, five per disc:

Episode One: Do You Want To See...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Never be a twentysomething woman

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Sitcoms
Likes: Judd Apatow, Adam, Chris O'Dowd
Dislikes: Most HBO series, obnoxious people
Hates: Sex and the City

The Show
I don't have HBO, so it takes time for me to catch up on their series, but that's not really the biggest of deals. That's because I find most of them are not of interest to me. In fact, the last HBO series I really enjoyed (aside from the animated adaptation of Rickey Gervais' podcasts) was Six Feet Under (though I'm pretty certain I'm going to love The Newsroom whenever I get around to watching it.) I certainly didn't expect Girls to be the series to break that streak, and afte...Read the entire review

The word for a while there was that this was gonna be the end for Eastbound and Down, and if it had been...geez, what a way to go out. All these storylines that had been dangling for the past few years get tied up in a neat, tidy bow,

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58016 Sun, 02 Dec 2012 05:50:21 PST Rent It In 10 Words or Less Quick hits of comedy undone by longer ones Reviewer's Bias* Loves: Half the comedians in this series, sketch comedy Likes: Funny or Die (the site) Dislikes: Comedy that's too hip for the room Hates: Overly-long sketches The Story So Far... FunnyOrDie.com, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's highly-popular website hosting bite-sized comedy from a vast number of funny people, both known and unknown, gave comedians an outlet for concepts too short for TV or movies. But as things have a way of doing, the idea came full-circle, and the creators brought the idea to TV, with a half-hour HBO anthology series of Funny or Die-style material made just for television, hosted dryly by Ed Halligan, Head of W...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=57566 Sun, 25 Nov 2012 06:22:16 PST Recommended A "10th Anniversary Special Edition" seemed like as good a time as any to catch up with a movie I'd always heard positive things about, My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). It pretty much defines the term "sleeper hit," and the Cinderella story behind the film is at least as interesting as the movie itself. Writer-star Nia Vardalos says she had trouble finding work as an actress in Hollywood because casting agents didn't know how to sell her classically Greek features. In response, she wrote a one-woman show adapted from anecdotes she'd tell about her very traditional, proud Greek family, and staged it in Los Angeles. There actress Rita Wilson saw and loved the play, got husband Tom Hanks to see it the next night, and together they co-produced the film adaptation with Vardalos in the lead. It was a critical success and commercial smash. On a modest budget of around $5 million it eventually grossed n...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=57878 Sat, 10 Nov 2012 05:33:24 PST DVD Talk Collector Series Click onimage to view Blu-ray screenshot with1080p Resolution E...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58034 Sun, 09 Sep 2012 23:18:44 PDT Recommended The Series: Hung: The Complete Third Season takes place six months after the events that happened in season two. Ray (Thomas Jane) and Tanya (Jane Adams), who is still his pimp, decide to join forces and start an actual prostitution business. Well, technically it's a wellness center for women that deal in happiness. They are "consultants" in the skin trade. That fiery redhead Lenore (Rebecca Creskoff) will have none of that, seeing as Ray and Tanya pretty much stole her idea, with regards to lifestyle design, she takes matters into her own hands and snags a much younger version of Ray in busboy extraordinaire Jason (Stephen Amell). She'll mold him and control him, but she's gotta sample the merchandise first. There's still the issue with Ray's family responsibilities, namely his children and his ex-wife Jessica, played by Anne Heche. Their story arc throughout season three is mor...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58033 Sun, 09 Sep 2012 13:49:04 PDT Highly Recommended THE SHOW: "I had a beautiful dream about a gumball machine. Can I tell you about it?" Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. I'm sad to see Bored to Death go. Though The Complete Third Season of HBO's literary comedy was a mite sillier than the two seasons that had come before, there is a familiar groove to how the characters get on with one another and the peculiarities of series creator and writer Jonathan Ames' way of portraying the world that always made it good fun to watch. This final season recognizes and focuses on Bored to Death's main assets: the triumvirate of Jason Schwartzman (Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58032 Sun, 09 Sep 2012 11:05:36 PDT Recommended The Series: When we last left our boys from Brooklyn they weren't necessarily on top of the world, but they had hope on making it somehow. Whether it was girl problems, money problems, or just stiff competition, best friends Ben (Bryan Greenberg) and Cam (Victor Rasuk) were focused on getting their fashion careers up and running. How To Make It In America: The Complete Second Season takes us into that direction by having the boys shop their new products from their own clothing line called 'CRISP.' Yes, the line is groovy, hip, priced right, but the competition is stiff. This comes from a new label started by former junkies and all around dirt bags called 'Neanderthal'. The Neanderthal label has cornered the market on hoodies, t-shirts, and what not. They also have a marketing budget and resources to take it to the next level - something that Ben and Cam are seriously lacking. C...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=56737 Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:50:20 PDT Recommended THE SERIES: Boardwalk Empire's premiere in fall of 2010 was met with a mixture of excitement and impossible expectations: here was a show being squarely positioned by HBO as the heir apparent to The Sopranos--created by Terence Winter, one of that show's writers, who brought along frequent directors Timothy Van Patten and Allen Coulter, and even co-star Dominic Chianese--with the extra coup of having that show's uninvolved but oft-acknowledged inspiring force, Martin Scorsese, on board as an executive producer. With that kind of pedigree, it would seem impossible for the show to live up to its hype--and, after the electrifying, Scorsese-directed pilot, it mostly didn't. But few shows on this earth (including, in some of its middle seasons, The Sopranos itself) could satisfy that kind of feverish anticipation. Season two of Boardwalk Empire finds the show stil...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=56084 Wed, 22 Aug 2012 18:50:24 PDT Rent It THE SERIES: It seems very unlikely to me that most people haven't yet heard about this, but just in case: There's an obesity epidemic in the United States, it's taking a huge toll on our individual health and our economic well-being as a society, and it's come upon us quite suddenly, with an extremely sharp increase in U.S. obesity rates over the last 30 years. The coverage of this scourge is all around us, in both serious and frivolous forms (you can read all about it in numerous commissioned, official reports, or just surf channels and scan the supermarket newsstand), so yet another reiteration might seem redundant or even self-indulgent. But HBO Documentary Films' presentation The Weight of the Nation, a four-part series shown on the reliably Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=56092 Sat, 21 Jul 2012 13:40:03 PDT Recommended The Series: A little bit of background info on Cinemax's series, Strike Back. In 2010 the UK's Sky1 channel debuted a six part mini-series entitled Chris Ryan's Strike Back which was based on the author's novel of the same name. It did quite well and a second series commenced, this time in partnership with Cinemax in the United States. In the UK, this second series was called Strike Back: Project Dawn but in the States it was shown on Cinemax as simply Strike Back (which is how we'll refer to it for the purposes of this review). You don't really need to see the original British series to understand this second one (which is good because it's currently unavailable on home video in any format domestically) as apparently only one character from that first series returns and even then it's only for one episode. This is brought up only for informational purposes -...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54532 Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:39:26 PDT Highly Recommended THE SHOW: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the series' promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. The second season of HBO's New Orleans drama Treme takes the series into a comfortable stride, settling deeper into the characters and the city's culture and proving that David Simon (The Wire, Generation Kill) is one of the more expansive creative minds working in television. You have to give credit to the network for their commitment to pushing the boundaries of episodic television in general and for sticking with this show in ...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=55507 Tue, 12 Jun 2012 08:46:29 PDT Skip It THE FILM: Please Note: All of the images used here are from the accompanying standard-definition DVD and are not taken from the Blu-ray under review. Director Curtis Hanson's Emmy-nominated 2011 HBO film, Too Big to Fail, sounded so potentially promising. Sure, Hanson has had a checkered career, but it's had more than its share of peaks, encompassing such worthy accomplishments as L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys. And sure, the huge ensemble cast features some semi-washed-up wild cards (James Woods, Bill Pullman, Matthew Modine) and TV refugees both more (Cynthia Nixon) a...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=56390 Mon, 04 Jun 2012 11:34:54 PDT Recommended THE SERIES: "I'm yelling for society! For everybody! It's not just me!" --Larry David A couple of days after my wife and I started working our way through the eighth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, we were standing in line at a Starbuck's when a woman started chatting with the woman ahead of us, and as they spoke, she casually slipped into the line. "Are you seeing this?" I asked her, and she nodded. "Classic chat and cut." The infraction--of starting a conversation with someone in a line (perhaps even someone you barely know) in order to cut into said line ahead of those how have been waiting--is dramatized and defined by Larry David on the fifth episode of the season, "Vow of Silence," and what David does there is what his show does best: find a slightly obscure but present fact or irritation of modern life, identify it, satirize it, and throw it into the blende...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=55020 Sun, 03 Jun 2012 13:17:57 PDT Highly Recommended Murphy's Law tells us that anything that can go wrong...will go wrong. Unfortunately for the protagonist---and fortunately for the viewer---Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000- ) rarely breaks this law. Drawing comparisons to David's own Seinfeld, this celebration of social ineptitude began with a one-hour HBO special in 1999 and was followed by a regular series the next year. Curb's main attraction lies in its approach to comedy: though the characters themselves are well-defined, the improvised dialogue and interaction is perhaps the ke...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54928 Sat, 12 May 2012 10:38:49 PDT DVD Talk Collector Series "The ghost of my serial-killing ex-fianc just tired tomurder us in our sleep. We're just peachy." -Arlene   TheSeries:   One of my favorite addictive shows, True Blood, isback for another season.  Though it doesn'tseem possible, this fourthseason manages to top the previous year's story.  Thereare more mysteries, another formidablevillain or two, a dollop of humor, and some very unexpected twists thatkeep the show fresh.  Oh yeah, and it'sstill as erotic asever.  The show is still firing on allcylinders and shows no signs of slowing down.   As we left Sookie at the end of last season, she had justdi...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54533 Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:17:54 PDT Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials provided by HBO Films, not the Blu-ray edition under review. I have never seen the groundbreaking 1973 PBS documentary series An American Family, but I have long been aware of it; it's often cited as the first step American TV took toward the televised "reality" that's proven as enduringly popular as it is culturally (and sometimes ethically) troubling. In its own time, it caused widespread chattering-class discussion and criticism, not to mention record ratings for PBS, the network that produced and broadcast it. For the Louds -- the SoCal brood around which the ...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53523 Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:12:33 PST DVD Talk Collector Series What makes for good fantasy? Is it the astonishing assortment of creatures and monsters, or perhaps the display of swords clashing and magic erupting from practiced fingertips? What about the various landmarks and massive cities that dwarf anything we're likely to ever see with our own eyes? If, despite the fact that Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have proved otherwise in the last decade or so, this is where your definition of 'fantasy' begins and ends, don't tell it to HBO. More importantly, don't tell it to George R.R. Martin, author of the highly proclaimed fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire. Sure, Martin has utilized such things to create the fictionalized Earth that plays host to his sprawling epic, but none of it had been introduced at the expense of telling a story, which had never been about catering to a crowd that pined for Hollywood's flashy theatrical gimmi...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53204 Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:44:33 PST Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: The Sunset Limited begins after its inciting action: an attempted suicide. One man (Tommy Lee Jones) tried to toss himself in front of a subway train; another (Samuel L. Jackson) stopped him. That moment is never seen, and, in the opening minutes of The Sunset Limited, it is only mentioned in passing, coded terms. The man who stopped it (credited only as "Black") brings the man he saved ("White") back to his run-down apartment. They sit at his table, across from each other, opposites not only in skin color, but in disposition: Jones's character is an atheist professor, Jackson's a convict reformed by his Evangelical faith. They face each other, and they talk--a flurry of words, ideas, accusations, confessions, dodges. They talk for an hour and half, just the two of them, a pair of men in one unforgiving location. If all of this sounds horribly schematic an...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53206 Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:49:05 PST Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: As a network, HBO certainly doesn't suffer for a lack of recognition (take a look at any Emmy or Cable ACE award nomination list). But not enough praise has been given the company for their increasing interest in documenting solo performances on Broadway--usually by big stars, mind you, but there's still something commendable about the fact that they're bringing high-dollar productions to audiences across the country who might not otherwise see them. That said, Will Ferrell's You're Welcome, America, Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, and Colin Quinn's Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53203 Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:49:05 PST Recommended THE MOVIE: Hmmm, I wonder what could have prompted HBO Home Video to upgrade their 1995 TV movie The Tuskegee Airmen for a Blu-ray release? Looking at their slate for January, we see that it's being accompanied by the new performance film Thurgood (starring Airmen's Laurence Fishburne) and their acclaimed 1991 film The Josephine Baker Story; some kind of pre-Black History Month trilogy, perhaps? Yes, that must be it. I'm certain its January 17th Blu-ray release has nothing whatsoever to do with the theatrical release, three days later, of Red Tails, the George Lucas-financed dramatization of the Tuskegee story. Must be a coincidence! When word first broke that Red Tails, which Lucas had reportedly been trying to make for decades, was on the way, many of us wondered why he'd bothered. HBO had, in fact, made a fine film from the story alread...Read the entire review ]]>