Category: Thoughts

Jackie Chan’s First Strike and Lady Gaga’s New Album

Well, I am still here, settling into a new project and realizing I have a little time to write about what I am working on.  It’s not a crazy amount of time obviously, but with the holidays coming up, people are starting to disappear quite frequently.  Which will leave me some “free” time.  Anyway, let’s take a look at what I have received recently and plan on writing up a review on in the next few weeks.

Continue reading “Site News November 2024” →

This column is a cross between some somber feelings and hopeful ones.  I don’t need to tell you, but most people jumping onto this site will notice that nothing has been written on here for about a month and a half.  There are obvious reasons for that and I will go into them shortly.  But the major thing here is I’m not giving up on this site, things might change and until events especially in my work life settle down, you might not hear from me for a while.  Trust me, I much rather be writing than pretty much anything on the planet (except for time with my wife and son).  Everything else and everyone can seriously screw off.  However, in order to have money, some of those activities must continue.  Maybe someday my writing will actually produce money (for me) instead of just taking it.  This will all become hopefully clear in the next few paragraphs.

Continue reading “Site News August 2024” →

April was not the month writing wise I was hoping for.  While I did put forth three reviews, two were music releases and I didn’t progress my “Kurt Russell” project any further despite my intentions.  I can’t say that project will have any progress in May either because I have at least four reviews coming up.  However, those four releases are pretty exciting and only one will be music related.  Let’s talk about it.

Continue reading “Upcoming Reviews for May 2024” →

A quick one here.  I have added a Kurt Russell (my favorite actor) review page which contains copies of every single one I’ve written whether it was here or on Upcomingdiscs.com.  Obviously, a lot of these are old reviews and thoughts about his movies which probably need to be updated.  Especially the part where there are two reviews for Escape from LA, one for the 4K and one for the blu-ray.  In reality, I should only keep the one for the blu-ray because the 4k one only contains pieces of my previous review mixed in with comments that I didn’t write.  However, I wanted to go ahead and just export it all, make a page and then clean it up a little later.  There are gaps here I would certainly like to address and I want to add to this obviously over time.  What I don’t want to do though is watch a bunch of Kurt Russell movies in a row and then don’t touch anything for a couple of years.  That’s not really conducive.  Any ideas, feel free to leave comments on this post.  Enjoy.

3/6 Edit – After cleaning it up and playing with it, I think I have it like I want.  I don’t like the thumbnails as small as they are but then I have to consider mobile.  Of course, keep in mind there are two ways to access Kurt Russell reviews, one by the side bar on the right (that will give you the page format) and then the table format is the menu on top.  Table format is sortable by title, film score and publish date (default).  Any ideas to improve are most welcome.

Hi folks, I’m sure some of you wondered if the site had died or perhaps something happened to me.  I am glad to say that neither of those things happened.  Well, I say that with baited breath since the month of February and up until today I pretty much was going through some major depression issues that led to some tough times.  Tough times where I did not care one way or another what happened to me and distanced myself from my family that I such deeply love.  As you can see, I did not write for a solid month, nothing about movies, nothing about music, nothing about my celebration of both Miley Cyrus and Kylie Minogue winning Grammys.  Was that freaking great or what?  I called the Miley Cyrus one, you can go back and look if you don’t believe me.

Continue reading “Upcoming Review for March 2024 and Explanation of Absence” →

Hopefully, most of you have read my reviews on the The Wailing 4k as well as The Man From Nowhere 4k.  If not, I’ll wait.  Read it?  Okay, good.  Now, in both of these reviews there was one thing that was critically missing.  The Dolby ATMOS track despite being advertised on both of the cases was very much missing from the new track.  Instead, what we received was the original 5.1 track from the respective blu-rays.  Much to my surprise, Well Go is sending out replacement discs.  I filled out my online form recently, was asked for a proof of purchase and a mailing address which I naturally provided.

What I didn’t expect was later that day, I received a notice from USPS Informed Delivery saying that the shipping label from Plano, Tx (where Well Go calls its home) was already produced.  If this holds true, I could be seeing the new discs in a week or two, maybe sooner.  Very excellent news, and of course I would take the time to update everyone on how they sound.  Hopefully, it’s not replacing the 5.1 track and rather sitting alongside it.  But the news had me excited and I thought I would share it with you.

By the way, if you have your own discs of these two movies in 4k and want to replace your own copies, just go over to https://wellgousa.com/contact-us. Fill out the form, and then they should send you an email within a few hours where you can attach your proof of purchase along with a mailing address.  Anyway, that’s it, I wanted to share that tidbit of wonderful news.  Enjoy.

I really hope everyone had a nice holiday, full of presents and moments that make this season always a little special.  It’s time to get back to work and I will have for you three reviews at the very least in the month of January.  These discs are provided to me because of the fine people at Upcomingdiscs.com.  Once again, it seems like I’ve drawn the foreign language straw and every single one of them is in French.  Two French films from the late 70’s/early 80’s and a sequel to a wonderful French animated film from GKids and Shout Factory.  Let’s take a brief look at these films. Continue reading “Upcoming Reviews for January 2024” →

Hopefully all of you enjoyed my reviews from the middle of October until the beginning of November.  I would like to say that I got more things to review from Upcomingdiscs.com but things do tend to get stalled during this time of year so unfortunately I do not.  I did receive a note earlier this week that I might have two gift sets coming to me from Shout but that won’t be until sometime in December.

Those sets are the Masaaki Yuasa: Five Films Blu-ray set and Evangelion: 3.0+1.11 Thrice Upon a Time Collector’s Edition.  Now, there is absolutely no guarantee I will get those sets, and I will frankly be surprised if they do show up on my doorstep especially with the holiday season.  Even if I only get one of these two sets, I will be overjoyed as they are very nice collections. (More after the jump).

Continue reading “Upcoming Reviews for November/December 2023” →

Unlike the previous month, this month when it comes to reviewing is almost certainly going to be way more productive.  To this point, I’ve already snuck in two Film reviews for Paw Patrol and A Haunting in Venice in which I can’t remember the last time I went to the theater in two straight weeks.  I don’t know if I’m going to sneak in any other movies but while I was at  A Haunting in Venice, I did see posters for the re-release of A Nightmare Before Christmas and something called Inspector Sun as possible films to see with my wife and son.  Obviously, if we went to the former, I probably would not write a review, but it’s still worth mentioning.

However, it looks like that I’m getting four discs from Upcomingdiscs.com to review this week.  Most of it is from Film Movement, but I am getting one 4k as well.  I don’t think I will be able to slide in any other reviews on my own (unless I go to the theater for something else), but it all depends on how quickly I finish these four first.  I have also provided a link to more information if you are curious about these films and don’t want to wait for my reviews.

Passion (2008) – Blu-Ray from Film Movement – This one I have wanted since I knew it was going to be available.  From the same director, I greatly enjoyed Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and need to watch Drive My Car (have the Criterion copy from the last B&N sale) but I just haven’t had the time.  The added fact is that Film Movement rarely does blu-rays (I mention this all the time in my reviews) and so the fact that they are releasing this one in blu-ray is certainly something to take notice of.

The Night of the 12th (2022) – DVD from Film Movement – This is a French mystery film that looks 200% up my alley considering my reviews of such films like The Third Murder and Unidentified.  Now thankfully if I do like it a lot, it has been released in Blu-Ray but I would have to import from the UK.  It might surprise you but I do not own a region free Blu-Ray player and bypass region restrictions with my Panasonic 4k player which has a nifty top menu feature that gets around those things about 75% of the time.  I’ve literally had a region free player on my Amazon wishlist for a very long time.  Mostly because I have no idea where to put it.  Anyway, should be an excellent film.

Cracked (2022) – DVD From Film Movement – Most of you know I don’t really review Horror movies.  It’s not my thing, especially when there are a couple of people on Upcomingdiscs that are FAR more gifted with the genre than I’ll ever be.  However, neither of them to my knowledge really want to dive into foreign horror films which is where I get the call so to speak.  See my review of Seire earlier this year.  So this is a Thai film about some scary pieces of art.  Not sure what to think or even if I’ll like it, but it has an interesting premise and Asian horror films really are top notch typically.

Mortal Kombat Legends: Cage Match (2023) – 4k from Warner Bros – One of these things is not like the others.  But seriously, I have watched just about everything Mortal Kombat animation or live action since the very first movie in 1995.  The animated features have always been something of a mixed bag but they always deliver on the action and really make use of the 4k format.  This should be no different and also deals with my favorite character not named Scorpion in Johnny Cage.  Cage was the unsung hero of the first live action film (and what they did with him in the 2nd film was absolutely ridiculous), and I can’t wait to see this one.  I know picture and audio will most likely not disappoint but I’m hopeful that the story is interesting enough.  I still need to see Snow Blind by the way, that should be a Black Friday type title somewhere for sure.

Anyway, thought I would share those four with the regular readers of this site.  Feel free to drop your comments below and enjoy!

I looked at my calendar this morning and was amazed that we are already a week into August.  What makes this worse is that my reviews/posts have been completely non-existent since I finished up the run of Police Story reviews.  It was a major project for myself and I was so glad I finished it.  I even had a side project that I was going to include as part of that franchise but while the discs materialized, I couldn’t find what I wanted to on the subject and my plans got derailed for the moment, at least until I get some hardware that should help things.  It’s a long story.  Then I had the idea to review Millennium Mambo, a recent Kino blu-ray release, and that also went by the waste side.  But there is some hope in the next week or so that I should have a few reviews to bring to you.

Continue reading “Where the Heck Have I Been for the Last Month?” →