Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields) directs this fuzzy effort at a David Lean-like epic without David Lean’s sense of emotional proportion. Lean’s most important screenwriting collaborator, Robert Bolt, in fact wrote The Mission, which concerns a Jesuit missionary (Jeremy Irons) who establishes a church in the hostile jungles of Brazil and then finds his work [...]
Posts Tagged ‘tom-keogh’
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown [VHS]
Posted by admin on October 8th, 2011
Charlie Brown gets rocks in his trick-or-treat bag, Linus awaits a visitation from the Great Pumpkin in his terribly sincere pumpkin patch (while the adoring little Sally sits tight with him), Snoopy falls asleep, Lucy harasses Schroeder, and Pig-Pen kicks up a dust storm even beneath his costume in this classic television broadcast. Funny stuff, [...]
Posted in VHS 
Tags: charles-schultz, classic-television, dust-storm, funny-stuff, pig-pen, pumpkin-patch, television-broadcast, tom-keogh 
No Comments »Top Gun (Blu-ray + Digital Copy)
Posted by admin on September 19th, 2011
Jingoism, beefcake, military hardware, and a Giorgio Moroder rock score reign supreme over taste and logic in this Tony Scott film about a maverick trainee pilot (Tom Cruise) who can’t follow the rules at a Navy aviation training facility. The dogfight sequences between American and Soviet jets at the end are absolutely mechanical, though audiences [...]
Richard Scarry’s Best ABC Video Ever! [VHS]
Posted by admin on September 6th, 2011
A delightful tool to help kids learn their letters, Richard Scarry’s Best ABC Video Ever finds Busy Town pals Huckle and Lowly Worm discovering that it’s Alphabet Day at school. Their teacher, Miss Honey, invites her students to join in a spirited rendition of “The Alphabet Song.” Next comes a series of 26 vignettes developed [...]
Posted in VHS Tags: alphabet-day, alphabet-song, busy-town, lowly-worm, miss-honey, richard-scarry, spirited-rendition, tom-keogh, video-series No Comments »Scarlet Pimpernel: Literary Masterpieces [VHS]
Posted by admin on August 26th, 2011
It’s tough trying to beat the 1934 version of the popular adventure-romance story, starring Leslie Howard as the 18th-century British hero who poses as a fop in London society but runs a secret mission to rescue the doomed in Robespierre’s Paris. But this 1982 television version, starring Anthony Andrews (Under the Volcano) as the Pimpernel [...]
Gone With the Wind [VHS]
Posted by admin on July 4th, 2011
David O. Selznick wanted Gone with the Wind to be somehow more than a movie, a film that would broaden the very idea of what a film could be and do and look like. In many respects he got what he worked so hard to achieve in this 1939 epic (and all-time box-office champ in [...]
Posted in VHS Tags: art-direction, clark-gable, greater-glory, leslie-howard, tom-keogh, vivien-leigh No Comments »In-Laws [VHS]
Posted by admin on June 29th, 2011
This 1979 comedy is absolutely indispensable for fans of Peter Falk, Alan Arkin, or Andrew Bergman, who wrote the film’s screenplay and went on to direct The Freshman and Honeymoon in Vegas. (Let’s forgive him for Striptease.) Arkin is extraordinarily funny as a dentist who quickly grows skeptical about the wild claims of his daughter’s [...]
Posted in VHS Tags: alan-arkin, andrew-bergman, arthur-hiller, banana-republic, bizarre-adventure, cia-agent, comic-mind, love-story, perfect-chemistry, peter-falk, tom-keogh, tse-tse No Comments »Sesame Street – The Best of Elmo [VHS]
Posted by admin on June 23rd, 2011
The Sesame Street character has fun singing some catchy new songs (you and your toddler just might, too), explaining the difference between light and heavy, having a laugh over pictures and numbers, and sharing the screen with a good-natured Whoopi Goldberg and Julia Roberts. Of the various Elmo videos, this one really does have the [...]
Posted in VHS Tags: having-a-laugh, julia-roberts, little-ones, new-songs, sesame-street, sesame-street-character, tom-keogh, VHS, whoopi-goldberg No Comments »Streets of Fire [HD DVD]
Posted by admin on July 18th, 2010
Walter Hill’s updated (1984), highly stylized take on biker movies still looks like a determinedly eccentric project that happens to work at times, but not at others. Michael Paré plays a biker who agrees to rescue his ex-girlfriend (a rocker played by Diane Lane) from kidnappers (led by Willem Dafoe). The ensuing battle against a [...]
Posted in HD DVD Tags: amy-madigan, diane-lane, ex-girlfriend, fever-dream, HD DVD, loud-music, rick-moranis, ry-cooder, spanish-subtitles, springsteen-fan, tom-keogh, willem-dafoe No Comments »Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy [Blu-ray]
Posted by admin on July 10th, 2010
Filmmaker Robert Zemeckis topped his breakaway hit Romancing the Stone with Back to the Future, a joyous comedy with a dazzling hook: what would it be like to meet your parents in their youth? Billed as a special-effects comedy, the imaginative film (the top box-office smash of 1985) has staying power because of the heart [...]
