DVD Collectors Online

The Wrong Man, a review by Tom

Title: The Wrong Man
Year: 1956
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Rating: PG
Length: 101 Min.
Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.85
Audio: English: Dolby Digital Mono, French: Dolby Digital Mono, Italian: Dolby Digital Mono
Subtitles: Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, Italian

Stars:
Henry Fonda
Vera Miles
Anthony Quayle
Harold J. Stone
John Heldabrand

Plot:
The Wrong Man is like 'and' unlike any other Alfred Hitchcock movie. The story packs tension, the images are spellbounding and the dilemma genuinely frightening. But this time the master of suspense dramatizes the harrowing true experiences of a man tried for crimes committed by a lookalike robber.
Henry Fonda plays musician Manny Balestrero, a man full of visible but unspoken rage at his wrongful arrest.
Vera Miles is his distraught wife Rose, driven to madness by the ordeal. And the right man to bring the unsetting facts of the case to vivid screen life with documentary precision is Hitchcock. He made New York City a star of the film and cast real-life Balestrero case witnesses in small roles. He shot in many actual locations, among them the Stork Club, Manny's jail cell and Rose's sanitarium.

Awards:

AFI

1956

Nominated

100 Years... 100 Thrills (2001)

Extras:
Featurettes
Scene Access
Trailers

I just don't seem to get into the Hitchcock movies. This movie executed well, even though I feel that the female lead is overacting. In many scenes I feel like she is the embodiment of the many parodies you see about bad acting. Henry Fonda is great though.

Rating:

(From Alfred Hitchcock Marathon on October 10th, 2009)

Transformers: Age of Extinction, a review by Dragonfire

Transformers: Age of Extinction

I saw the first three Transformers movies and mostly enjoyed them overall, though I had issues with all of them.  I wasn't that...ummm...enthused about seeing this one, but I ended up going anyway.  I mainly went because it had been so long since I had seen one.  There just haven't been as many movies out this summer that I was interested in.  So I went to see this.  It is ok as a mindless action movie, but that's about it.

The plot is wafer thin, dealing with a secret division of the CIA hunting down all Transformers even though the Autobots were supposed to have immunity or something like that.  Cade Yeager is a struggling inventor who finds Optimus Prime.  That puts him, his daughter Tessa, and her secret boyfriend Shane in the middle of a new mess. 

This is another typical Michael Bay movie, which means there is an overload of action scenes and CGI while the the plot suffers.  Some of the action scenes are cool, but it gets to the point where it loses the cool factor.  The movie is 3 hours long.  3 hours.  The previous Transformers movies were really a bit long, and this one is even longer.  There is nowhere near enough plot to justify the movie being this long.  After a certain point, all the giant robots fighting each other scenes all blend together into a big ol blurry, jerky mess.  Bay again uses jerky camera work and quick cuts during action scenes, making it all but impossible to keep track of who is who at times.  A few of the new Transformers change into some really awesome cars, including a Bugatti Veyron, but they are barely in the car forms, so it is a huge waste.  What's the point of one of them turning into a Veyron when he spends less than 5 minutes total in that form, and when he is in that form, the camera bounces around too much to really show the car.  During scenes when the cars are driving, there are these sweeping shots used that don't focus on anything really.  It is annoying, but typical for Bay.

The human characters are all new for this movie.  Most of them are really flat and not that interesting.  Cade is ok and Mark Walhburg is an improvement over Shia LaBeouf.  Tessa is annoying, whiney, and not likable at all.  She made me miss Megan Fox's character from the first two movies.  The different Transformers are like they have been, though the new ones introduced in this movie don't get much attention.  Harold Attinger is the main villain of the movie and Kelsey Grammer is good in the part.  Stanley Tucci turns every so often and adds some comic relief.  There are a lot of attempts at humor that just don't work and a lot of product placements that can be slightly jarring. 

Transformers: Age of Extinction is an average mindless action movie.  It manages to be entertaining overall, but it could have been a lot better.  Something is done that seems to be an obvious set up for another movie and since this one has made buckets of money, there is little chance that Bay will change anything and actually give the plot attention.

3 out of 5 stars

I did post a longer review on my movie blog.

Transformers: Age of Extinction


(From Transformers: Age of Extinction on August 3rd, 2014)

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Marathon, a review by DJ Doena

Synopsis: Jakes observes the new arrivals on the station to get ideas for his stories when his sight falls upon a very interesting woman who also notices him. Later she approaches him and somehow she can help him to write the best story of his life. But there's a price tag attached. Meanwhile Lwaxana comes to DS9 again - and she's pregnant. She's hiding from her husband who wants to take their son when he's born as it is custom in his culture.

My Opinion: The part about Jake was ok, I really liked to see Meg Foster again, she has so fascinating eyes. But what I really liked was Lwaxanas part. This was unfortunately the last appearance of both Majel Barrett-Roddenberry as well as Lwaxana Troi on any Star Trek series (except for her role as "Federation computer voice"). Once again Lwaxana managed to get Odo out of his brooding skin, they had much fun together. And I liked how Odo pledged his love to her in the fake wedding ceremony when it was clear that his pledge wasn't at all fake.

Synopsis: The klingon attacks on the Cardassian Union had devastating effects on its economy and the Federation agrees to deliver industry-size replicators to the Cardassians. But Cmdr. Eddington and Starfleet Security fears that the Maquis could intercept them and Sisko and his crew try to prevent that. But there's another problem: Captain Kasidy Yates, Sisko's girlfriend, may be a smuggler for the Maquis.

My Opinion: It was the ideal plot to get Sisko distracted, especially because it was true. And I must say, when I watched it for the first time, I was surprised that Eddington was the traitor. Until the revelation he behaved in this episode as he has always done since his introduction in the third season and thus his mask was perfect. But I am also glad that we are going to see Penny Johnson again, it's good to see that at least some officers can have a releationship beside their duty.

Synopsis: When the Defiant returns they find that the station has been attacked and one of the upper pylons has been destroyed. It was an attack by Jem'Hadar but they didn't bother to destroy the station because they were searching for some technical equipment. The Defiant pursuits them and encounters yet another Dominion vessel under the command of the Vorta Weyoun. The other Jem'Hadar have gone rogue and try to activate an iconian gateway. The iconian star empire was destroyed over 200,000 years ago. But they had a means of traveling across the galaxy without the use of spaceships. Such a gateway mustn't fall into the hands of renegade Jem'Hadar or every planet within the Federation would be in danger and even the Dominion could come crashing down. So Weyoun and Sisko forge an alliance to destroy the gateway.

My Opinion: This episode was good to show the contrast between the philosophy of Jem'Hadar warriors and Starfleet personnel. And of course I liked the introduction of Weyoun even though they killed him in the end and then had to find a way to bring him back in future episodes. Luckily other producers aren't as quick with killing people. Imagine Joss Whedon would have actually killed Spike on his first appearance in School Hard!
What bothered me a bit was that the writers outnumbered the heros by quite a number (10:1 was it?) and then neither showed that many enemies nor presented a solution how they did actually win against such a force. 2:1 or 3:1 would have been more realistic without compromising the plot.

Unfortunatley this episode was cut in Europe because the british BBFC demanded a cut when the Jem'Hadar First broke the neck of the Second as punishment because he disobeyed an order.

Synopsis: Bashir and Dax beam down on a planet where the entire population is infected by a disease that has been there for over two centuries. The Dominion engineered this virus as a punishment, it marks its victoms with lesions and it's always deadly when the Quickening comes. Bashir tries to help and to find a cure.

My Opinion: This episode was without any action or any fights in it and I thought it was a good change of pace. It's obviously very Bashir-centered but I really like his dedication, his unwillingness to give up even if the task seems impossible. But I also thought that it was a good decision that he didn't find a cure, just a vaccine for unborn children. It becomes unrealistic when doctor X in series Y goes to planet Z and always finds a cure where others have failed for ages. This way it was half a happy end and the perfect closing scene was that he still hasn't given up.

(From Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Marathon on January 11th, 2009)