Reviews by Friends of Customeright

Fardreamer says "Beevor's D-Day is bound to be a classic on the WWII campaign" about Antony Beevor - D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

Fardreamer — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:39:38 GMT

A few months ago, while I was flipping through one of my issues of Time magazine, I came across a glowing review for Antony Beevor's newest book, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.

In a nutshell, the Time article caught my eye because the Battle for Normandy, which started off with the largest amphibious operation in history and culminated with the liberation of Paris almost three months later, has fascinated me since I was old enough to read excerpts of Cornelius Ryan's 1959 classic work about June 6, 1944, The Longest Day, in old copies of Reader's Digest.

The term "D-Day" has come to be forever linked to that fateful June morning in which paratroopers and soldiers from a multinational alliance landed along a 50-mile stretch of coast in the French region of Normandy, and many excellent books and documentaries have focused on the 24-hour period of the initial landings.

I've read quite a few of those, including The Longest Day and Stephen E. Ambrose's 1994 D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic...

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Fardreamer says "Coruscant Guard is nice depiction of minor Star Wars soldier" about Hasbro Star Wars - Power of the Jedi Coruscant Guard

Fardreamer — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:35:47 GMT

One of the more visually striking images from Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi is seen when the evil Emperor (Ian McDiarnid) arrives at the second Death Star aboard a sleek Imperial Shuttle.

Before the Galactic Empire's supreme ruler and senior Lord of the Sith disembarks, we see a squad of red-robed Imperial Royal Guards, their faces hidden from view by helmeted masks with black eyepieces that allow them to see everything around them.

The Red Robes, as the Royal Guards are colloquially known, don't have any dialogue in Return of the Jedi or the two Prequels in which they're glimpsed; they're basically there to give audiences a strong visual counterpart to Star Trek's "red shirt" security guards or those SS guards seen protecting Adolf Hitler in documentaries and movies about World War II and/or Nazi Germany.

In Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace, however, there is no Galactic Empire and Emperor Palpatine is still just the recently-elected Supreme Chancellor of the Republic,...

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Fardreamer says "Lectric Shave helps guys shave closer with electric razors" about Williams Lectric Shave Pre Shave Original Green Tea

Fardreamer — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:04:08 GMT

As a guy who has periodically alternated between the neat-and-clean shaven look and the Ernest Hemingway-wannabe bearded "writer" one, I have used many shaving products ever since my first unwelcome whisker appeared on my face when I was 16 years old.

At first, shaving was a breeze. All I needed to do was use my first Norelco electric shaver and do a quick pass on the cluster of whiskers that popped up, dandelion-like, on my chin.

Later, though, my beard got more developed and thicker (especially in my cheek and neck areas), and I had to figure out which method of shaving worked best for me even when I let my beard grow to look either older or more intellectual. (I still needed to shave parts of my face then, or else I ended up looking like Lon Chaney, Jr. in The Wolfman.)

Now, although I use both the "wet" (disposable razor-and-shaving cream) and "dry" (electric razor-only) methods of facial hair removal, I've always leaned toward the dry one because I don't like the inevitable nicks...

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Fardreamer says "Mission Impossible II: Nice story, but cartoonish sequel" about Mission: Impossible II

Fardreamer — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:57:34 GMT

In 2000's Mission: Impossible II, Cruise returned as Hunt and screenwriter Robert Towne teamed up with former Star Trek: The Next Generation writer-producers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga to write a screen story set around action sequences already conceived by director John Woo.

Woo, of course, is a filmmaker who is known for his high-octane and choreographed action sequences, so it's not surprising that he would have come up with such scenes as the opening titles' rock-climbing by Ethan Hunt or a climactic confontation between Hunt and guest-villain Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott).

This time around, Ethan Hunt is assigned to team up with a beautiful thief named Nyah Hall (Thandie Newton) in order to stop Ambrose from getting his hands on Chimera, a man-made super-virus that kills its victims in less than 24 hours unless they're injected with Bellerophon, an equally man-made cure.

Towne, who wrote Chinatown, borrows a plot element from Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious when he has Mission...

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Fardreamer says "Pixar's WALL-E is a funny, touching out-of-this-world love story" about Wall-E

Fardreamer — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:26:17 GMT

Ever since I was around 13 or so, I've resisted going to Walt Disney-produced movies of any genre, in seventh grade I was teased a lot by the older kids when I told them I'd gone to see one of the Disney live-action comedies (The Apple Dumpling Gang, if memory serves). The guys (most of my friends at the time were boys, since I was so darn shy with girls then) rolled their eyes at me and said I should go see movies along the lines of Jaws, Grand Theft Auto or The Omen instead.

"Those are real movies, Alex," they'd say almost in chorus, "not that Walt Disney stuff. That's for babies."

Of course, as an adult, I have seen quite a few of the really great post-1970s Disney animated movies, including The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Tarzan and The Lion King.

I still don't go to see too many animated movies when they hit the multiplex, partly because my moviegoing budget is really limited, but also because I tend to notice that much of what Hollywood releases is either too formulaic...

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Fardreamer says "One star is way too good for lame Jaws: The Revenge" about Jaws 4 - The Revenge

Fardreamer — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:48:15 GMT

One of the many sad truths about being a constant movie watcher and film reviewer is that for every good movie that comes to a local multiplex near you, there are usually two or three fair-to-middlin' ones and quite a few bad apples in the same cinematic menu.

Sure, what might be a good moviegoing experience for me doesn't necessarily mean it will be for some. For instance, I honestly like the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy which was out in theaters between 1999 and 2005, while others honestly and earnestly don't. Conversely, I don't like Michael Bay movies along the lines of Pearl Harbor or Transformers, and yet I've come across reviews that defend those films with an equal passion as my write-ups for, say, The Phantom Menace or Revenge of the Sith.

In short, as the old TV sitcom theme song written by Alan Thicke puts it, Different Strokes for different folks.

But there are times when studios, either for financial or artistic reasons, release realy bad movies that most reasonable viewers...

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Fardreamer says "Jaws 3 stinks worse than three-day-old fish!" about Jaws 3

Fardreamer — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 17:48:44 GMT

Although Hollywood studios did make a few movie series (The Thin Man, Andy Hardy, Blondie) in the so-called Golden Era of the 1930s and 1940s, the modern concept of the Big Blockbuster Sequel really didn't emerge until the 1970s, starting with Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part II, followed by Airport 1975, Airport '77, and Jaws 2. And, of course, the phenomenal success of Star Wars and the subsequent The Empire Strikes Back proved to be decisive in the studios' increasing dependence on sequels to make millions of dollars at the box office, especially in years where there are no real "boffo" champs deserving of either critical or popular acclaim.

While all the major studios are prone to make totally unnecessary sequels, Universal Studios is perhaps one of the worst purveyors of Film Sequels from Hell, and one of the best (or is it worst?) examples is Jaws 3, which was originally known as Jaws 3-D.

The third film in The Series That Never Should Have Been a Series actually has the...

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Fardreamer says "Willis is watchable in 1990's otherwise too formulaic Die Hard 2" about Die Hard 2: Die Harder

Fardreamer — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:37:41 GMT

One of the predictable consequences of the success of 1988's Die Hard was 20th Century Fox's decision to greenlight Renny Harlin's Die Hard 2: Die Harder, a spectacularly violent sequel to Bruce Willis' star-making hit about a brave, wise-cracking police detective who goes mano-a-mano with a band of sophisticated criminals in order to save his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia) and other civilians.

The studio's big shots, of course, rarely see movies as works of art but rather as investments for which they expect at least some profit, so when a stand-alone film such as Airport, Jaws, Smokey and the Bandit or Die Hard makes more money than they put into it, the temptation to make them into franchises becomes irresistible.

Although Die Hard director John McTiernan had been tapped to helm the sequel (written by Doug Richardson and Steven E. de Souza), he had to pass because he was working on Paramount Pictures' The Hunt for Red October. Determined to release Die Hard 2 for the summer 1990...

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Fardreamer says "De Palma's Mission Impossible reboot goes on Cruise control" about Mission: Impossible

Fardreamer — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:13:59 GMT

In 1996, 30 years after its debut on the CBS television network, producer Bruce Geller's spy-action adventure series Mission: Impossible followed Star Trek from the small screen into the silver screen when Paramount Pictures released Brian DePalma's film adaptation, which stars Tom Cruise as IMF operative Ethan Hunt and Jon Voight as Jim Phelps.

Because the series was so much a product of the Cold War - proving Nicholas Meyer's statement that "all art reflects the times in which it's created" - storywriters Steven Zaillian and David Koepp and screenwriters Koepp and Robert Towne couldn't simply take stories from the old show and update them for the film.

They could, however, take some of the series' basic premises and one character (Phelps) and try to extrapolate what the end of the Cold War has wrought on the IMF team and its leaders now that the Iron Curtain has fallen and their roles and missions are being redefined.

The big issue faced by Zaillian, Koepp and Towne was this: Tom Cruise's...

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Fardreamer says "Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is quirky, violent Vietnam War film " about Full Metal Jacket

Fardreamer — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:26:56 GMT

Before I bought Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket on DVD last year, I had only seen the movie once before - when it was released in theaters in 1987.

I was still in college then, a journalism major and - at the time - copy editor of my junior college campus' student newspaper. But because I had been the paper's Diversions editor during the previous semester, I still wrote entertainment-related articles or reviews if the section needed me to do so.

I went to see Full Metal Jacket with my friends Betsy Matteis and Richard de la Pena; we had met in elementary school in the 1970s and remained close until Betsy moved to Alabama several years ago and (sadly) Richard's death at the age of 41 (cancer).

At the time, many Hollywood studios were releasing "combat experience" movies about the Vietnam War, a topic they had either ignored or danced peripherically around by focusing their attention on the post-war experiences or the home front dramas (The Deer Hunter, Coming Home) of the veterans. ...

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Fardreamer says "Great Fox War Movies is decent but lacks exciting extras" about Great Fox War Movies - The Longest Day/Patton/Tora! Tora! Tora!

Fardreamer — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:42:55 GMT

I've been watching movies for as long as I can remember and been collecting them for 25 years, first on VHS tapes after I bought my first VCR in 1984 and on DVD since 1999.

Like many film buffs, I embraced the DVD (and its successor format, the Blu-ray) not only because it has much better audio and video playback, but also because the slimmer packaging takes up less shelf space than the bulky videotapes did when they were the only available home-video format.

I also like DVDs/Blu-rays because they can often be bundled in box sets that contain three or four movies which are either (a) multi-movie sagas along the lines of The Star Wars Trilogy or the Indiana Jones series, or (b) stand-alone movies that are nevertheless thematically linked to a specific genre or topic.

Another nice (or perhaps not-so-nice) thing about DVDs is that if the first release version of a movie in the format - usually dating from the late 1990s to the first few years of the Oh-Ohs - was skimpy on extra features,...

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Fardreamer says "Kobayashi Maru is a tepid look at Star Trek's 'no-win' test " about The Star Trek #47: The Kobayashi Maru Books

Fardreamer — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:20:56 GMT

One of the coolest things about J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie is that it gave Star Trek fans the "true" story of how Cadet James T. Kirk beat - on his third attempt - a test designed to pit future starship commanders against a "no-win scenario" intended to be a test of character rather than "a fair test" of a student's command abilities.

In the Star Trek universe, the Kobayashi Maru scenario (first seen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) is a required test that all Command-track cadets at Starfleet Academy must take to see if they have the "right stuff" to someday take the "center seat" of a starship as its commanding officer.

In The Kobayashi Maru, Julia Ecklar (who is also one of the team of writers which uses the pen name L.A. Graf) does describe how James Tiberius Kirk beat the "no-win scenario," but in a very superficial manner, since her vignette set in 2254 delves into why Kirk gets frustrated with the simulation, the effects of his "reprogramming" of the Academy computer, and...

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Fardreamer says "Power of the Force Han Solo figure is a cool collectible" about Hasbro Star Wars - The Power of the Force Han Solo (CommTech Chip)

Fardreamer — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:07:52 GMT

Han Solo (CommTech) action figure:

Although Kenner had created a basic Han Solo figure based on his appearance in 1977's Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope (aka Star Wars) in its "Vintage" collection, the only "variants" were accidental; the 1978 figure came with either a "big head" or a "little head" due to inexact molding issues. The collection which focused on A New Hope (1978-early 1980) never bothered with Han Solo (in Stormtrooper Disguise) or Han Solo (Death Star Escape); it wouldn't be until The Empire Strikes Back collection (1980-early 1983) that Han would get a better head mold and different outfits.

By the mid-1990s, however, several factors contributed to a change in policy by the "suits" in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to make various versions of the same character as he, she, or (in the case of droids and aliens) it appeared in different sequences in one movie.

The biggest factor, of course, was that the decade between the Kenner POTF1 and the Hasbro/Kenner POTF2 runs had...

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Fardreamer says "You'll be saying 'Yippee-ki-yay' with Willis in 1988's Die Hard!" about Die Hard

Fardreamer — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:56:50 GMT

It's hard to believe that, as I write this, more than 20 years have passed since 20th Century Fox released director John McTiernan's seminal action movie Die Hard, which not only put Bruce Willis on the "action hero" map, but also "inspired" a plethora of copycat movies which usually involved terrorists, an enclosed space and one or two good guys determined to stop the bad guys.

Die Hard itself launched three sequels over a 19-year span of time, all of them starring Willis as the sardonic New York City police detective with a penchant for snappy quips and a particular talent for disposing of bad guys in skycrapers, airports, federal banks and even an entire city.

It will blow you through the back wall of the theater

The story takes a basic Western-movie plotline (lone hero faces off against a band of menacing black hats) and pulls it forward into the late 20th Century. N.Y. Detective John McClane (Willis) arrives in L.A. for a Christmas vacation with his estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia)...

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Fardreamer says "Out-of-this-world conspiracy is at heart of Capricorn One" about Capricorn One

Fardreamer — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:54:52 GMT

Americans - for good or ill - seem to thrive on conspiracy theories.

Since the founding of our nation in the late 18th Century, many Americans have espoused or believed in all kinds of conspiracies, beginning with the notion that Freemasons were a threat to American civilization itself to the totally outlandish accusation that President George W. Bush's Administration had a hand in planning and carrying out the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The three biggest myths of U.S. history in the 20th Century are (1) that Franklin D. Roosevelt knew the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was coming and did nothing to stop it so the U.S. could enter World War II; (2) there was a vast government conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy (for various reasons); and (3) that the Apollo Program to land men on the moon was secretly halted after 1967 and that the subsequent lunar landings were faked.

Now, I seriously doubt those conspiracy theories, and I'm relatively sure that writer-director...

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Fardreamer says "Up is a heartwarming film by the animators at Pixar Studios!" about Up

Fardreamer — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:57:45 GMT

Although I have watched, perhaps, hundreds. if not thousands, of movies of all types (ranging from adult films to Z-grade Westerns) since the mid-1960s, I've never really been a fan of "family fare" or animated movies.

Perhaps this reluctance to like anything that smacks of kid-friendly fare stems from the razzing I suffered when, in the fifth grade, I remarked that I had gone to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarves when Walt Disney Pictures re-released it in theaters in one of those "once in a blue moon" Special Engagements. I, like many others before and since, had loved that first of the Disney classic animated films, but lots of my friends considered Disney movies "baby stuff" and totally uncool.

So even though I've seen some of the last batch of 2-D Disney Classics (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King), I tend to ignore tons of movies which are animated or are produced/released by Walt Disney Pictures.

For some reason, though, I've liked quite a few of...

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