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He's Just Not That Into You, a review by Tom

Title: He's Just Not That Into You
Year: 2009
Director: Ken Kwapis
Rating: 12
Length: 129 Min.
Video: Widescreen 2.35
Audio: English: Dolby Digital TrueHD, English: Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles: English

Stars:
Ben Affleck
Jennifer Anniston
Drew Barrymore
Scarlett Johansson
Justin Long
Jennifer Connelly

Plot:
Remember that really cute guy who said he'd call...and didn't? Maybe He's Just Not That into You. An all-star cast looks for love and finds laughs in this savvy, sexy, right-now romcom. Based on the runaway (like some guys you know) bestseller by Sex and the City series writers Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, He's Just Not That into You sparkles with zingy aha moments any survivor of the dating wars will recognize. See it with someone you'd like to love.

Awards:

BMI Film & TV Music Awards	2009	Won	BMI Film Music Award	Cliff Eidelman
Teen Choice Awards	2009	Nominated	Choice Movie Actress - Comedy	Jennifer Aniston

Extras:
Deleted Scenes
Featurettes
Trailers

At the beginning of this movie I was really bored. I was tending to a bad rating. But after half an hour it picked up and in the end I enjoyed it somewhat.
This movie shows again, that having an all-star cast does not necessarily help to make the movie good. Even supporting roles are familiar faces.
I knew that Drew Barrymore had a rather small role, but even for that the role was really minor. She only pops up twice or so.

Rating:

(From Tom's Random Reviews on December 27th, 2009)

Tokyo monogatari, a review by Hal

Tokyo monogatari: The Criterion Collection (1953/Japan) Home Vision Cinema, Janus Films, The Criterion Collection (United States) Director: Yasujiro Ozu Writing: Length: 135 min. Video: Full Frame 1.33:1 Audio: Japanese: Dolby Digital: Mono, Commentary: Dolby Digital: 2-Channel Stereo Subtitles: English

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Stars:
Chishu Ryu as Shukichi Hirayama
Chieko Higashiyama as Tomi Hirayama
Setsuko Hara as Noriko
Haruko Sugimura as Shige Kaneko
Nobuo Nakamura as Kurazo Kaneko

Plot:Extras:

• Scene Access
• Audio Commentary
• Feature Trailers
• Featurettes
• 2-Disc Set, Tribute to Ozu, Essay, 8-Page Liner Notes

I found this film to be very slow getting started, but eventually I became more engaged as it went along.  One of the things that bugged me was the physical quality of the film.  I expected Criteria would have done a lot more "cleaning up" and I found the quality of the lighting, especially for the indoor scenes to be extremely annoying because of its inconsistency, displaying light "blooms" and then darkness in waves and reminding me of silent films from the '20s, rather than a movie made in 1953.

All that aside, the story was compelling, as we see the parents shuffled from the child to child and then to a daughter-in-law and ultimately to a hotel/spa because the children were "too busy".  It is a story that has become all too familiar in this country, but it was unexpected because of the culture and time frame in which it is told.  Not being all that familiar with Japanese culture, I was nonetheless very surprised at the absence of emotion.  Although the children demonstrated great respect for the parents, there was little warmth or caring, except surprisingly from the daughter-in-law, whose husband (the actual child of the parents) had died 8 years earlier in the war.  It would seem that their lives were being governed more by duty than anything else.

The scene of the one son (who was closest) arriving too late, hit a little too close to home as the same thing happened to me, but for a different reason.  It brought back some very strong emotions.

The moral of the story is an old one, but it is one that we continue to ignore everyday as we get wrapped up in our own "busy lives" and forget the things that are truly important in this life.  Very sad!

There are some beautiful scenes and, for me, Setsuka Hara (Norika)  provided the best performance of the lot.  This is a great film that everybody should see.

Rating: 4.5

(From The Movies From Within My Lifetime on March 28th, 2011)

I Love Lucy: The Complete Series, a review by addicted2dvd

Season Discs:
- Flubs
On every disc of the set that contains episodes they have this feature. The bulk of the episodes was recorded live in front of an audience. Because of this some mistakes made it to air. This feature points out many of these mistakes. It is a fun extra. One of my favorites... and one I felt I had to watch on every disc.
- Lost Scenes
- Deleted Scenes
- Featurettes
- Original Series Opening
- Original Animated Sequences
- Script Excerpts
- Production Notes
- Lucy Radio Series: My Favorite Husband (Several Episodes)
- Guest Cast Info
- Promotional Spots
- Original Cast Commercials
- Desilu / Westinghouse Sponsor Presentation
- Audio Commentary on episode Lucy and Superman, Lucy does the Tango & Country Club Dance

Bonus Disc
- Colorized version of "Lucy Goes to Scotland"
pretty obvious what this is. They colorized an episode from season 5 for some reason
- I Love Lucy:  The Movie
In 1953 with the TV show being so successful, Desilu decided to create a theatrical movie by stitching together three episodes from the first season (The Benefit, Breaking the Lease, and The Ballet.)  Some extra material was filmed to join the episodes together and an intro was created. The movie was never released, since studio execs thought it would hurt the box office results of Lucy and Desi's film The Long, Long, Trailer, which was in release at the time.  Shelved, the movie was forgotten until it was discovered 50 year later.
- A three minute Kinetescope excerpt from The Ed Wynn show
The first time Desi and Lucy appeared on TV together was as guests on The Ed Wynn show  in 1949.
- Phillip Morris introduction to First Episode
The disc concludes with the Phillip Morris introduction, by John Stephenson on the set of the show, to the first episode of I Love Lucy.


The Packaging:
The first thing you notice about this set is how it is packaged. Which while it is a fun thing... you don't feel too confident that the disc themselves are safe the way they are stored. Being in a multiple disc cardboard envelope I worry about the possibility of the discs getting scratched. I really like the good hard outer box... but instead of those accordion style cardboard envelopes... I would of preferred something more like THINpak cases for the discs protection. No I haven't had any problems with these discs. But I do worry a bit and feel the need to be extra careful.



The Show:
This sitcom really is a timeless classic. I absolutely loved the seasons 1-6. These were the original concept I Love Lucy half hour episodes. There was many... many episodes that I literally laughed out loud watching. To many great, hilarious moments to even attempt to list here. Though I will mention one of my favorite episodes being where Superman comes to Little Ricky's Birthday Party.

When the show went to hour length and named changed to the Lucy Desi Comedy Hour I felt  it went a bit downhill. I don't really feel that it could handle the hour long format as well as it did the half hour format. Sure I still enjoyed it. But it just seemed to lose some of the charm it had in the half hour version.

One thing this series became famous for is getting big named guest stars... most the time playing themselves. Some of the big names that showed up in this series includes....

- William Holden
- Eve Arden
- Ross Elliott
- Cornel Wilde
- Rock Hudson
- Harpo Marx
- Richard Widmark
- John Wayne
- Charles Boyer
- Bob Hope
- Orson Wells
- Claude Atkins
- George Reeves
- Cesar Romero
- Betty Grable
- Danny Thomas
- Red Skelton
- Milton Berle
- Ernie Kovacs

Half of these people I never heard of before myself.. but they seemed to be big in their time. Between the 2 versions of the series there is 194 episodes in this set to enjoy. Not to mention the tons of extras listed above. This set is definitely a lot of bang for the buck!


Over-all this is an excellent release for a great classic sitcom. I bought this series back in May of 2009... as I bought it as an early birthday present to myself. It took me till today to finish watching all the episodes. And there is still a ton of extras I still have to watch. The quality of the episodes looks great. though a couple of the extra I looked at could have used some more cleaning up. But this is a set I definitely would recommend if you were a fan of this series.



(From I Love Lucy: The Complete Series on July 22nd, 2010)