This is an interesting film to see on DVD since it was initially shown in theaters only once, in March 1970. It consists primarily of news footage shot of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr dating from 1955, when he began attracting significant media attention, through 1968 when he was assassinated. Interspersed throughout are short segments shot in a studio for this film release, of celebrities of the time (Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Ben Gazzara, Charlton Heston, James Earl Jones, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Anthony Quinn, Clarence Williams III, and Joanne Woodward) reciting quotations from other African-American writers which are not cited. Since its initial showing, it has since only been seen in edited form until this DVD release from Kino using a restoration by the Lib...Read the entire review

Being the further adventures of the seven girls at Pittsburgh's Abby Lee Dance Company, and their moms. I reviewed Season 2 Volume 1 previously. To recap, this is a "reality" series whose real star is dance coach Abby Lee Miller, who apparently is well-respected in her field but comes across here as very abrasive, berating her students at times while showing a little compassion occasionally. The students' mothers for some reason are required to be present, usually watching the lessons and rehearsals from a room above the studio while saying what they dislike about Abby.

I thought the first volume was a train wreck, since so much time was spen...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In Hotel Transylvania, Count Dracula is portrayed as sympathetic and misunderstood. Voiced by Adam Sandler (who does a decent job with the voice, staying in character and not diverting into his somewhat annoying high-pitched mode as he's done elsewhere), his main goal in life is to be a good father to his daughter Mavis (voiced by Selena Gomez) after her mother has died. The events that led to her death have led him to distrust all normal humans and teach his daughter to fear them, saying that they will do terrible things such as steal her candy. He then finds a location far from human activity and builds the castle-like Hotel Transylvania as a place where all monsters can vacation in peace. Every year on Mavis' birthday, he invites all the monsters there fo...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Jack and Diane is a great example of why I love to watch movies without knowing very much about them beforehand. The only thing I knew about this going in was that it was a love story between two girls, which it is, but it's got some weird stuff going on. Since you're reading this review, you likely do want to know a bit more about it so I'll tell you without spoiling too much.

Juno Temple (daughter of director Julien Temple) is Diane, in New York visiting her aunt before heading off to school in Paris for a year. She meets Jack, played by Riley Keough (granddaughter of Elvis Presley- really!) and they quickly fall in love. Jack is mu...Read the entire review

"Dance Moms" is a "reality" type show for the Lifetime cable channel, dealing with a group of dancers ranging from ages 7-13 (two of them sisters) at the Abby Lee Dance Company in Pittsburgh, PA, and of course their moms who are along for the ride. Abby Lee Miller is apparently a highly sought-after dance instructor because many of her students have gone on to professional dance careers. It isn't made clear how these students and their mothers got onto this show- I searched around for an explanation but could not find one. It appears that some of them were already students here before the show began, but have also heard some were chosen through auditions for the show's producers. Whatever the case, Abby teaches the kids dance routines in the studio while their moms watch through a ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Despite being numbered, Death Race 2 and 3 are prequels to 2008's Death Race, which was based on 1975's Death Race 2000 (produced by the great Roger Corman, who has been executive producer on the current Death Race movies). Death Race 3: Inferno picks up shortly after Death Race 2 ends. The basic premise is that prisons have been taken over by private, for-profit corporations and one way for them to make money is to hold brutal to-the-death races between inmates, which the public pays to watch on cable TV or the internet. There are few rules- cars are equipped with weapons so that racers can kill those who might otherwise beat them, and any inmate who can win five races is released from prison. Luke Goss stars as Carl Lucas, the "star" driver in these races. In Death Race 2 he was disfigured in an explosion during one race, and...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The title of Guns, Girls and Gambling doesn't quite describe this movie- there's a good amount of guns, but only a few girls and only one real scene of gambling. Christian Slater (with his usual mannerisms) stars as "John Smith" who visits a casino on Indian land, hoping to win some money on slots or meet a girl but strikes out on both. On a whim he decides to enter an Elvis Presley impersonation contest (the casino even provides his costume). He performs for an audience of about five people (and very briefly, as the film's budget didn't seem to allow licensing for many Elvis songs), but doesn't win. The participants (Gary Oldman who wins the contest, along with Tony Cox, Chris Kattan and Anthony Brandon Wong) are friendly enough with each other however to stick around and play poker in a VIP room afterwards. Trouble arises when an ancient tribal mask kept in the office of th...Read the entire review

17 Girls or 17 Filles in its proper French is a fictionalized account of a true incident that happened in Massachusetts in 2008 where a group of high-school girls decided to get pregnant at the same time and raise their children together. The story begins when Camille (Louise Grinberg) unexpectedly becomes pregnant and after thinking it over, decides she is going to keep the baby. She tells her friends "I'll have two lives- one at school and one with the baby. I'll have someone who loves me my whole life, unconditionally." Word of her pregnancy quickly gets around school in the French town of Lorient, and another girl named Florence (Roxane Duran) tells Camille that she is also pregnant. This gets Florence into Camille's circle of friends who didn't l...Read the entire review

"Anger Management" is a sitcom for the FX cable channel starring Charlie Sheen. A brief note at the end of each episode states that it is based on the movie of the same name, but does not show any resemblance. Sheen plays a character also creatively named Charlie who was once a major-league baseball player but had to leave due to his anger issues. Subsequently he becomes a licensed therapist and begins holding group therapy sessions in his living room for others with anger issues (the primary basis for the show) as well as another group therapy at a nearby prison. Although divorced, he remains in contact with his ex-wife Jennifer (Shawnee Smith) mainly for the sake of their daughter Sam (Daniela Bobadilla), who is said to have OCD (Obsessive-Compulsory Disorder). Charlie also has a female friend named Kate (Selma Blair) who has no-strings-attached sex with him, and separately serves as Charlie's own...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The Paperboy is based on a 1995 pulp novel by Pete Dexter, who Sacramentans may recognize from his Sacramento Bee column in the 1980s. The screenplay was written by Dexter along with director Lee Daniels.

The story takes place in a small Florida town during 1969. A sheriff is murdered one night and Hilary Van Wetter (John Cusack) is arrested for the crime but claims to be innocent. Newspaper reporter Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey) is prompted to return to his hometown to investigate the situation along with colleague Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), and stays at his home with relatives including his brother, the title character Jack (Zac Efron). Jack works for Ward's newspaper as a delivery person. Nicole Kidman plays Hilary's fiancee Charlotte Bless (she has somehow fallen in love with him even though she has only met him as a prisoner) who provides Ward with inform...Read the entire review

"The Goode Family" is a short-lived animated TV series from 2009, created by Mike Judge (of "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "King of the Hill" fame) along with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky who were writers for "King of the Hill". The premise of the show is a married couple with two teenage kids and a dog who live in a town called Greenville. They along with most other people in the town try their best to be environmentally and politically correct. Their eating habits are vegan (no meat or other animal products), they drive a hybrid car and then only when it's absolutely necessary, and are adamant recyclers. All 13 episodes are presented here on two DVDs.

The ...Read the entire review

The title character of Cherry Bomb is an exotic dancer (played by Julin Jean) at a club whose name I can't repeat here. The movie gets to its main point pretty early- Cherry is hired to entertain a room full of guys who end up raping her and she ends up in the hospital from it. She finds out that basically nothing has been done to convict those responsible, so she escapes from the hospital as soon as she can and calls on her brother Brandon (John Rodriquez) to help her bring them to justice her way- by acquiring a supply of guns and hunting them down. Although Brandon asks her to think about what she's doing, he still helps her out. Once the bad guys figure out what she's doing, they enlist a large hitman named Bull (Allen Hackley) to take out Cherry and h...Read the entire review

Dog Days is the third movie in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid film series, which is based on the books by Jeff Kinney. Kinney's books are done in the form of the main character Greg Heffley writing in first person, with line-drawn cartoons interspersed. The movies are live action with Greg (Zachary Gordon) narrating some scenes and some animated segments drawn in the same style as the books' drawings are also thrown in. This movie actually takes elements from the third and fourth books in the series, "The Last Straw" and "Dog Days." The main characters from the first two movies are back- along with Greg, there's his mother Susan (Rachael Harris), dad Frank (Steve Zahn), slacker older brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick) and awkward but confident best friend Rowl...Read the entire review

6 Degrees of Hell is a rather confusing horror film, so much so that I had to watch it a second time with the subtitles turned on and reading them to get a better idea of what was going on. The story is primarily about an attraction called the Hotel of Horror, a haunted-house type of deal where people go in and see weird goings-on, actors pretending to be psychopaths carrying fake weapons and stuff like that. (The interesting thing is the Hotel of Horror in this movie is actually a real attraction in Saylorsburg, PA, although the events in the movie itself are fictional.) In the movie, the attraction is run by Jack (Brian Gallagher), who is always looking for ways to make the place even scarier. He finds an old psychic who has a large collection of "haunted objects" collected over her years of experience which she rents out for use at the hotel, but warns him that they really are possessed an...Read the entire review

Content:

"The Universe in 3D" is a 3-disc set, each disc containing one episode of the History Channel series "The Universe". All of these are from Season 6, the entirety of which is available separately in 2D. The basic format of the series is narrated CG animation of planets in space with narration from Erik Thompson, interspersed with comments from field experts. Two of these episodes have a "doomsday prophecy" theme while the last is a little more informational.

The first episode is "Catastrophes That Changed the Planets." This is presented as a countdown of the top ten biggest events in the history of the universe where basically things have crashed into other things, knocking out large pieces of planets or sending them into a different orbit. The first words spoken in this episode are "Throughout its 4.5 billion year history, our solar system has witnessed carnage on a colossal sca...Read the entire review

"History in 3D" is a boxed set comprised of 3 discs which are also available separately.

The first disc is "WWII in 3D", which is a short (44 minutes) but very fascinating look at 3D still and motion picture photography during World War II. Narrated by Tom Wilkinson, he tells how the Nazis used 3D for many of their propaganda photos. Adolph Hitler had commissioned photographer Heinrich Hoffmann to carefully photograph him in what the narrator calls "a God-like stature".

These photos are in black and white, but their depth rivals the quality of anything shot in 3D recently. As those who have been familiar with 3D for a long time know, an early way of viewing 3D pictures was through a "stereoscope", a viewer with lenses that could view cards with the left a...Read the entire review

"The First Christmas", originally aired in 1975, is the latest of the Rankin/Bass animated specials to make it to DVD. This one has not been repeated as much as the others; I saw it one time in the 1970s and never again until now. The main character is Lucas, an orphaned shepherd boy. While out tending to his sheep, he gets struck by lightning. He gets taken in by a convent of nuns, led by Sister Theresa (voiced by Angela Lansbury) and nursed back to health, but they are unable to help his blindness caused by the lightning. He does learn to herd his sheep without sight however. Sister Theresa tells Lucas about past Christmases she remembered with snow. Since it never snows in the area they are in now, Lucas wishes for it to snow there as his Christmas wish.

The Show:

Kung Fu Panda Holiday has just been released on this Blu-Ray/DVD set, but it originally aired in 2010 on the NBC network (with its annoying onscreen logo and more than five minutes of commercials) so this would place it before the movie Kung Fu Panda 2. The holiday in question here is not Christmas (despite a label on the outside of the package saying "New for Christmas") or Life Day for that matter, but the Winter Feast at the Jade Palace. Master Shifu (voiced by Dustin Hoffman, as in the movies) calls on Po the Panda (Jack Black) to be the host of the Winter Feast, to be attended by all the "masters of kung fu". However Po is torn when he wants to invite his "dad" Mr. Ping (James Hong) and Shifu tells him the event is only for the masters. Meanwhi...Read the entire review

The Movie

Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview is a presentation that was briefly shown in theaters of a 70-minute interview with Steve Jobs (with Steve doing 99% of the talking), shot on video for a TV show called "Triumph of the Nerds" which aired in 1996 on PBS in the US and the BBC in the UK, and currently available separately on DVD.

It starts with a short intro with the original interviewer Robert Cringely (who also worked briefly with Jobs at Apple), as he explains that only short clips from the interview were actually used on the show, and the complete master tape was lost in shipment. A complete VHS copy was recently found by Paul Sen,...Read the entire review