DVD Collectors Online

Saving Face, a review by Tom

Title: Saving Face
Year: 2004
Director: Alice Wu
Rating: R
Length: 97 Min.
Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.85
Audio: English: Dolby Digital 5.1, French: Dolby Digital Surround, Commentary: Dolby Digital Stereo
Subtitles: English, French

Stars:
Joan Chen
Michelle Krusiec
Lynn Chen
Jin Wang
Guang Lan Koh

Plot:
When 48-year-old widow Hwei-Lan Gao (Joan Chen) informs her less-than understanding father she's pregnant, he banishes her from Flushing until she remarries or proves Immaculate Conception. With nowhere else to go, Hwei-Lan moves in with her grown daughter, Wil (Michelle Krusiec), a Manhattan doctor who doesn't want a roommate, especially since she's met Viv (Lynn Chen), her sexy young lover. So Wil does what any dutiful child with an expectant, unmarried mother on her hands would do: she proceeds to set Hwei-Lan up with every eligible bachelor in town.

Extras:
Closed Captioned
Commentary
Deleted Scenes
Featurettes
Scene Access

An entertaining movie. We have the lesbian daughter, who begins a new relationship at the same time her widowed mother moves in with her, after she is kicked out of the grandparents house, because she got pregnant out of wedlock at the age of 48. Boy looks she great for a 48 year old woman! She is the left one on the cover in the wedding dress. She was 43 years old in real life at the time of filming.

I just noticed, that the main character (the one on the right), is played by Michelle Krusiec who played the older Molly in the DS9 episode "Time's Orphan".

Rating:

(From Lesbian Movie Marathon on March 15th, 2009)

Chanbara Beauty, a review by dfmorgan

Chanbara Beauty

Year: 2008
Director: Youhei Fukuda
Cast: Eri Otoguro, Manami Hashimoto, Chise Nakamura
Overview: Based on a hack-n-slash video game series, the story revolves around a scantily-clad girl named Aya (Eri Otoguro), her little sister Saki (Chise Nakamura), and a mysterious gun-toting leather chick named Reiko (Manami Hashimoto) who must protect their dystopic metropolis from a marauding zombie attack. This itchy, twitchy, finger-popping, head-lopping hoedown will leave you absolutely breathless!

Watched: 21st. Aug 2010
My Thoughts: A mad scientist trying to prolong life is producing zombies from his experiments. An encampment has been overrun by zombies when a cowboy hat wearing girl arrives with her sidekick. Aya (Eri Otoguro) takes on the mass of zombies and manages to despatch many of them with her sword. Aya continues to fight on and is then joined by a leather clad girl, Reiko (Manami Hashimoto), armed with a self-loading shotgun. It turns out that Aya is looking for her younger sister, Saki (Chise Nakamura), who is being used by the mad scientist whilst her sidekick is looking for his sister who had been abducted by Saki. Reiko meanwhile is looking for the mad scientist so the three join together in their quests.

My Rating: An enjoyable little diversion for a 3

Dave

(From Dave's DVD/Blu-ray Reviews on August 22nd, 2010)

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The Complete First Season marathon, a review by DJ Doena

Synopsis: It's the year 1999 and Judgement Day hasn't happened - yet. Sarah and John are constantly switching aliases and living placaes. But one day two cyborgs have still found them: One comes in the form of a young girl called Cameron and she was sent to protect John. And the other is a classical terminator. They try to escape him but in the end there's no place they can hide, just another time.

My Opinion: To fully enjoy the show one has to put it in a parallel universe to the movies. It's similar to the Highlander movie (There can be only one!) and the series. While I liked the general general idea of the show I had a problem with some story elements. For example: Cameron took the other cyborg out with a power surge. In my unprofessional opinion two minutes should have been enough to somehow destroy him or at least to damage him severely - he can't resist after all. And some of the stuff in the vault seemed unlikely, too. Even if I knew how to build a microchip in 1965 there wouldn't be the the technology (wafers etc.) to actually do it. But they had to find a way to push the series forward to today and it was fairly ok.
So I like the story but one mustn't think to much about the logic.

Synopsis: They jumped eight years into the future, into 2007. And now all three of them need new identities to blend in. Cameron leads Sarah to a group of resistance fighters who were send back by John to destroy Skynet before it goes operational. But when that fails they have to visit an old friend. Meanwhile John explores the technological differences between 1999 and 2007.

My Opinion: The writers are obviously not very burdened with the complex issues that go with time-travel. It seems that whenever they need it they will send people back and forth through time as if nothing could disrupt the timeline. But if that were so then we would be back on the concept of a time-loop as the movie Terminator had present it (It has always happened that way and always will be, there's nothing we can do about it). But Terminator 2 had thrown that overboard and declared that the timeline can be changed and (as Doc Brown explained it in Back to the Future 2) that will result in another timeline. I also had a problem with that "Zombie Terminator" who can obviously walk without its head attached - I thought the "eyes" were its optical sensors?
Another thing I noticed: I don't know how far ahead the pilot was shot and what they thought would happen after it, but I didn't have the feeling to see a Mrs. Dyson or a detective who was eight years older than in the pilot. They should have used a better mask to make them look younger in the pilot (Look at Bruce Boxleitner in Babylon 5: In the Beginning!)
Too bad Enrique had to die, I would have liked it to see Tony Amendola (Master Bra'tac in Stargate SG-1) more often.

Synopsis: Sarah is looking for former employees of Cyberdyne Systems to check whether they are continuing the Skynet project or doing something else dangerous. Connor and Cameron pose as siblings in their new school and try to blend in.

My Opinion: Is it my imagination or did the metall skeleton of that terminator look a bit too shiny? He had been blasted to peaces and has lain in the garbage. Which brings up another question: How did he get there in the first place? He wasn't within the time bubble and thus hasn't travelled with the others. What happend to that bank building in the last eight years and why has no one ever found the skeleton or the head - which lay quite open on the side of the street?
And when Sarah burned down Andy's house the fires looked digital - and fake. Don't they have the money anymore to burn down a real, wooden facade?

Disc 1 - My Opinion: The show is enjoyable, the characters are fine. But as you can see the show opens a can of questions for me and they bother me because that makes me thinking that either the writers didn't see this problems or they thought the viewers wouldn't notice or that the viewers wouldn't care. None of which is really an acceptable answer in my opinion. But I will continue to watch and see how it unfolds.


And now I can read your comments (This is my first time watching of T:SCC) and can add myself to the list of reviewers.

(From Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The Complete First Season marathon on January 14th, 2009)