DVD Collectors Online

The Cincinnati Kid, a review by KinkyCyborg

The Cincinnati Kid



Title:The Cincinnati Kid
Year: 1965
Director: Norman Jewison
Rating: NR
Length: 102 Min.
Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.78:1
Audio: English: Dolby Digital: Mono, French: Dolby Digital: Mono, Commentary: Dolby Digital: 2-Channel Stereo, Commentary: Dolby Digital: 2-Channel Stereo
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish

Stars:
Steve McQueen (1930)
Edward G. Robinson
Ann-Margret
Karl Malden
Tuesday Weld

Plot:
A few words for anyone who sits at the poker table with the Kid: Read 'em and weep.

Steve McQueen brings his cool fire to the role of the Cincinnati Kid, a small-timer eager to take his chances in high-stakes poker. He gets his chance. Regal, ruthless Lancey Howard (Edward G. Robinson), the elite gambler called the Man, accepts the Kid's challenge. Norman Jewison (In The Heat Of The Night, Moonstruck) directs this taut exploration of back-room gaming, building suspense with each turn of a card. And Ann-Margaret, Karl Malden, Rip Torn, National Board of Review Best Supporting Actress Award winner Joan Blondell and many more comprise a full house of talent. Grab a chair and ante up.

Extras:
Scene Access
Audio Commentary
Feature Trailers
Featurettes
Closed Captioned


Absolutely loved this movie! Great story that some would perhaps draw comparisons with The Hustler... and chock full of great performances.

Steve McQueen, one of the coolest actors who ever lived was great, confident and exuberant in his quest to become The Man when it comes to stud poker. McQueen mastered the look of annoyance in his facial expressions and he employs it often in The Cincinnati Kid.

Edward G. Robinson is Lancey Howard who holds the current title of 'The Man', aged, wizened and unflappable. He's seen it all. I thought he gave a grand and dignified performance. Karl Malden plays Shooter, the troubled friend of The Kid and card dealer of the ill-fated final game. He was stellar as well.

I was utterly shocked to see an almost indistinguishable Rip Torn, just a young pup, playing the scoundrel Slade, a heavy trying to lean on Shooter to fix the game. Quite an unseemly role when compared to most of his crazed comedic roles he is mostly known for today.

Finally I've never been a huge fan of Ann-Margaret as I find she is only a marginal actress at best but I have to admit that she is stunningly sexy in this movie as Shooter's temptress wife Melba. She used that coy, inviting smile of hers to full advantage here.

While the movie took the turn I was expecting during the huge game I was surprised to see the movie abruptly end afterward. I was fully expecting a huge comeback in the form of a rematch but instead it ended, which while surprising, it was not disappointing. It concluded with a satisfying lesson in humility.

Five stars!!!

KC

Rating:

(From KinkyCyborg's Random Reviews 2011 on August 14th, 2011)

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a review by Tom

Title: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Year: 1991
Director: Nicholas Meyer
Rating: FSK-12
Length: 109 Min.
Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 2.00
Audio: German: Dolby Digital 5.1, English: Dolby Digital 5.1, Commentary: Dolby Digital Surround
Subtitles: Arabic, Bulgarian, Commentary, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Turkish

Stars:
William Shatner
Leonard Nimoy
DeForest Kelley
James Doohan
Walter Koenig

Extras:
Commentary
Deleted Scenes
Featurettes
Photo Gallery
Scene Access
Trailers

A great farewell movie for the original crew. Maybe a little to much prejudice involved for supposedly open-minded Starfleet officers.

I always liked the passing of the torch to the Next Generation crew with Kirk's final log entry:
"This is the final cruise of the Starship Enterprise under my command. This ship and her history will shortly become the care of another crew. To them and their posterity will we commit our future. They will continue the voyages we have begun, and journey to all the undiscovered countries, boldly going where no man... where no one has gone before."

Expecially the "where no man... where no one..." part as this reflects the opening narrations of the respective series.

Rating:

(From Tom's Star Trek Movies Marathon on February 3rd, 2009)

Farscape Marathon, a review by DJ Doena

Synopsis: D'Argo has brought an alien onboard who claimed that he could cloak the electromagnetic field of Moya's. They would become invisible to sensors which has become necessary since Scorpius deployed wanted beacons all over the place. Thy make a test run on Farscape-1 and it actually works and then they agree to follow T'raltixx to his home planet, but they have to pass a cluster of five pulsar stars and their light has side-effects on less-developed life-forms. Soon the crew starts to get aggressive and suspicious towards one another but it doesn't stop even after they passed the pulsars. Something else is going on.

My Opinion: The funny thing is that John didn't wear the "armour" shown in the picture above when he was nuts, but when he started to get a clear head again. I love it when fictional characters go crazy and paranoid, it's a lot of fun to watch them: "Why don't you want to show me the record, what are you hiding? ... So now you suddenly want to show it to me? Why? What's on it?" and so on. And why was John the hero of the day? Because Humans have less precise senses and aren't affected as much by the light. Inferiority can help survive.

Synopsis: Chiana finds a Peacekeeper recording device which documents that Aeryn has been on Moya before and that her squadron has killed the former pilot. Aeryn didn't know that it was Moya because she had been on many Leviathans. Slowly she begins to remember what happened back then and how Pilot became Moya's pilot. But she's not the only one remembering, Pilot does it as well and he's not amused.

My Opinion: Everyone has a past and naturally Aeryn's isn't one painted in pink. I really liked the flashbacks because it gave both Aeryn and Pilot more background and once again it wasn't all black/white. OK, Aeryn's past was black, but Pilot's past wasn't exactly white. And again there are some parallels to Stargate SG-1: Both Teal'c and Aeryn had to leave everything behind even though Teal'c's leaving was more a choice than Aeryn's. Both were necessary to get the show moving but both seemed sudden. And both series showed in later episodes such as this one that it wasn't such a sudden move after all. It just seemed that way because we the viewers didn't know their past.


Synopsis: Rygel and Chiana trade for some items and Chiana discovers a picture that seems to depict her. But the picture is changing, it seems to predict the future: First her legs get broken and then she dies in a fire. The crew is still shocked about this when the picture suddenly shows D'Argo and his death. Every attempt at destroying the picture fails and they fear to get picked one-by-one. Back at the trading ship they find out that the picture is a creation by Maldis - the sorcerer who captured John and was defeated by Zhaan.

My Opinion: I'd would have liked to see Maldis longer, he's such a good diabolic character. But to introduce him earlier would have meant to reveal the answer to soon. This way the episode turned from "weird in the beginning" to "really weird in the end". I love it. The special effects may not be so special but you have to have the idea and the ultimately go through with it and tell the story.

Synopsis: The crew is seriously starving and Zhaan begins to blossom (literally). She needs meat or she will die. So Moya lands in the corpse of a Budong*, the greatest space-living creature known. There is a mine and a colony in which Chiana and her brother have lived a while ago. The minerals in the Budong's bones are valuable, but it's dangerous because there live other creatures, too, who feed from the rotting corpse or a miner.

My Opinion: I loved the way John killed the Keedva. It simply had to be a homage to Luke's killing of the Rancor in Return of the Jedi. But I also liked how Chiana was willing to do anything to get meat for Zhaan and how D'Argo couldn't bear it because he cares for Chiana. We've seen traces of this development in previous episodes but after the kiss in the end it's very obvious.

*The classification of the Budong on the Farscape Wiki is also fun to read:
Height of average adult: Big
Average length: Really big
Average wingspan: Really REALLY big

(From Farscape Marathon on April 18th, 2009)