Ok, finally a movie that we rented on blu ray, that was actually watchable (every blu ray we rent lately from Netflix is somehow not playing on our Sony blu ray player, and sometimes we have to return them twice to get a working copy, not sure if it’s our player or the DVD’s they’re sending us but it’s really frustrating).  Not only did the blu ray of Shutter Island, the latest Scorsese film noir endeavor, play ok on the player, but it also was a really good, really entertaining movie.

Leo DiCaprio did a great job, as did the rest of the supporting cast. Even Mark Ruffalo, who my husband and I were surprised to see in a relatively big name movie, did a really good job as Leo’s partner Chuck.  The movie is based on a book that I had read already as well, and incidentally, I wasn’t all that big of a fan of the book.  Dennis Lehane’s writing style just isn’t my thing.

However, I love almost every film that Scorsese has ever done, and I’m a big fan of Leo’s acting abilities and have enjoyed him in everything he’s done, so I was pretty sure I’d like the film adaptation of the book.  The movie Shutter Island is about two federal marshals, Teddy (DiCaprio) and Chuck (Ruffalo) who set out to investigate the appearance of a Rachel Solando, a patient at a high security mental hospital called Ashcliffe on Shutter Island.

They soon begin to encounter fishy stories and potentially bizarre experiments that they believe may be carried out on the criminally insane patients at the hospital. Ben Kingsley plays the head doctor in charge, Dr. Cawley.  As Teddy investigates, he begins to suspect that a lot more goes on at the facility than meets the eye, and he can’t stop having delusions of his dead wife, played by Michelle Williams.

He also has repeated delusions about his days at a nazi war camp as a soldier, his murder of unarmed German soldiers along with the rest of his camp, and the ghostly images of a little girl that supposedly was Rachel Solando’s little girl that she murdered (one of three children she murdered).  Throughout the complex weave of Teddy’s experiences and run ins at the island, one does begin to wonder how all of this will come together. I did kind of wonder if I hadn’t read the book if I would have figured it out before the end.

The creepiness and eerie feeling of the book is kept in tact in the movie, Scorsese does a great job of getting a passionate performance out of Leonardo, and the whole supporting cast is pretty much top notch. I’d recommend this one, whether you’ve read the book or not – a very entertaining ride!

I had never really heard comedian Louis C.K. do much standup before I heard him as a routine guest on radio show (well, now, only satellite radio) Opie and Anthony. On the show, I thought he was hilarious, clever, intelligent, and offered a bitter family man view to the mix, whereas Opie, Anthony and Jim Norton were single.  I especially loved that it was no holds barred when he talked about the trials of having a wife and two young kids.  Well, how funny he was on the show was no comparison to the nonstop gut busting comedy he offers on his Chewed Up DVD.

My husband and I watched the whole thing the other night, and I’ve never watched a standup DVD that long without seriously drifting off at some point after the first half hour. I mean, let’s face it, most comedians don’t that much good material to last as long as a full length DVD, but the talents Mr. C.K. does.

He rants on everything from how he hates when people say the phrase “the N word” to how much he hates deer now.  Every single bit of the mundane details, he makes into pure comedy.  He truly has a gift for being totally lewd and crude and yet maintaining his likability, which is rare.

I think to be truly funny, you have to be brutally honest, and he has this all down to a T. Don’t rent or buy this DVD if you like comedians that sugar coat and dumb down their comedy so as not to totally offend and go into the gross out realm, because you’ll probably be offended, and that’s how he likes it.

I give this a five star rating – definitely the best full length standup DVD I’ve seen in a looooong time.

I love Netflix for the most part. It delivers movies right to your door, and their organization of your DVD cue is perfect, making it easy to find movies by their search feature, and adding them with the click of a button is phenomenal. I do however have a few complaints about them. My biggest complaint about Netlfix is that if you have a Blu Ray DVD player, it seems like you have to wait FOREVER for a movie to become available on Blu Ray for you to rent.

If it’s a new release, we have had to wait up to a month to get it. It just keeps saying “long wait’ or very long wait for weeks.  An example is that we have been waiting for Public Enemies ever since it came out, and we still haven’t gotten it. It’s almost not even worth it to rent the Blu Rays, but we have found that we love our Blu Ray player’s picture and sound quality so much more than when we play a regular DVD that we don’t like renting regular DVD’s now if we can get them in Blu Ray format.

I think that Netflix must not have enough Blu Rays in stock, and that is what causes the problem. Well, since a lot of people are converting to Blu Ray players, they really might want to invest in adding more Blu Rays to their collection of available rentals.

I also don’t like how you can’t find any new releases that were just released. It seems like all the movies in their “new releases” section aren’t really new releases, but often have really been out on DVD for months at that point. If I want to figure out what it truly a new release, I go to Amazon.com to see what their new releases are that week, then go and plug that in to the search bar on Netflix to get the movie added to my cue.

Netflix is very affordable and a great service otherwise, but they should try to correct these inconveniences so that they don’t rub people the wrong way and have them defect to the dreaded competition, Blockbuster online.

We just watched Good Fellas, my personal favorite gangster movie (yeah, my favorite isn’t the Godfather, but then again I’m not a dude, which seems to be the largest demographic for die hard fans for that movie) on Blu Ray. It looks and sounds pretty good, I’ll tell you that.  The only thing we noticed was that some of the imperfections of the older film showed through. Like a lot of times, the screen looked “dirty” so it much be the degradation of the film itself was hard to fix in it’s conversion to Blu Ray.

This movie really holds up, but then again, maybe that’s because it’s a period piece that covers an era from the sixties to the eighties. As you all probably know, the movie stars Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco as his wife, Karen.  Ray Liotta plays the real life mob guy turned informant after he feared for his own life, Henry Hill. The movie tells the story of Henry’s modest Irish-Italian upbringing and his early induction into the gangster way of life when he used to run errands and do work for them as a kid.  He loved the gangster life and all the respect and perks that came with it, and so he stuck with it through his adult life.

Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci, the quintessential gangsters, play the main antagonists in this movie, and surprise, the most violent minded. Joe Pesci’s just a complete nut while DeNiro plays more of a careful, cool and calculated murderous personality.  We see Hill getting pinched for the first time, and we also see them all go down for a crime they didn’t even think would matter too much, but it turned out the guy they roughed up had a connection at the FBI, so they all ended up doing time after that.

Where Hill got into trouble was that after being told not to do anything, he starts running cocaine and guns and makes a lucrative business for himself and his wife. When he gets caught, he flips and agrees to enter the witness protection program because he believes that those that were closest to him in the mob have designs to do away with him and his family.

The movie is and will always be a mob classic. Liotta is great, and Loraain Bracco is great as his money hungry wife.  We haven’t watched the extras yet, but from the sleeve it sounds like they added some great extras to the Blu Ray, like interviews with the whole cast and also with Henry Hill himself, so we’re looking forward to watching those!

Trekkie fans everywhere will rejoice.  It was just announced that all 79 episodes of the original “captain Kirk and Spock” episodes of the cult favorite Star Trek will be digitally remastered and re-released. 

The series, when it first aired in the seventies, was actually considered a dismal failure, and only ran for a few seasons due to low viewership, but instead gained a cult following in the eighties followed by a series of popular Star Trek feature movies. 

Even the stars of the show have enjoyed a unique sense of celebrity, with the popularity of Star Trek conventions, movies and a unique brand of quirkiness enjoyed by most science fiction fans.  The series creator Gene Rodenberry, a retired policeman who has since passed on probably wouldn’t like it though. 

He reportedly was somewhat displeased with most of the Star Trek movies and had a definite, specific idea of how the show and movies should look and feel.  Treksters will get to enjoy a new looking Enterprise ship, redigitized to come up more with the times rather than look like an obvious model as it did in the original series. 

Rest assured that the originals will still also be available though, for the true Star Trek officianados whose feathers might be ruffled by any messing with the original.  The new digital remastering is aimed at the younger audience, who has more of an appreciation and affinity for sleeker, more professional looking special effects. 

There’s a new kid in town when it comes to getting movies online – but this time you don’t get the movies mailed to you, the ”Vongo” service allows you to download movies (if I remember correctly from the TV ads, it let’s you do an unlimited amount of downloads in any given month) for about $10 a month. 

I’m wondering if they’re really going to give Netflix a run for their money, or if the internet community is really savvy enough to be able to download such a large amount of movies to make this service worthwhile. 

It probably depends on the capabilities of one’s computer system, and their “know how”, since downloading entire movies can actually take a pretty long time on the older operating systems and older processors.   

They do have an edge over Netflix though, because I think Netflix only allows a certain amount of DVD rentals per month for their $10 per month price for service.  Anyone who knows much about the new Vongo service, feel free to comment!

Frailty is a great movie.  Really.  I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of this movie, including Matthew Mcconaughey who I usually don’t really get into, because I usually think he’s a bit of a method actor.  Bill Paxton delivers a great performance too, as the father of the two sons we go back in time to story tell about.  Matthew Mcconaughey, we know, is one of the sons, but we’re not entirely sure which, although we are led to believe in one direction throughout the movie. 

It’s a story about perspective, about religion and faith, and the difference between true evil and true good, and the struggle in young boys with coming to terms with what they believe their dear old dad is doing – murdering innocent people that he says are “demons”.  If I tell you too much more, I might spoil it for you if you’re thinking of renting it.  Just know this, it’s a good ending, great story telling with interesting and mysterious characters.  Great acting, and good cinematography. 

Grade : A+

OK, first let me say, I’m not quite sure why Viggo Mortensen was not nominated for lead actor in this film, yet William Hurt, who played his brother and was only in the movie for a total of about ten minutes, was nominated for best supporting actor.  In my opinion he may have even overacted a tad.  Viggo was great in this movie.  So was Maria Bello as his wife.  This was a really well done movie by the director of The Fly David Cronenburg. 

It was filmed in what looked like a blue filter, and you had the sense that something terrible was going to happen throughout the whole movie, so the movie did its job.  Viggo Mortensen plays a guy, Tom Stall, who lives in a small town in Indiana.  He seems like your average, mild mannered country boy with a happy little family and farmhouse complete with a horse and old farm trucks, until one day two broke, violent thugs come into his diner weilding guns and threatening his workers and patrons.

Tom suddenly turns into the ultimate killer, blasting one of them with a hot coffee pot and grabbing one’s gun with ninja-like quickness, both of the men were dead.  The story starts there.  From there, Ed Harris, a scarred up thug from the east, comes into town, saying that Tom is actually someone named Joey.  That’s where the trouble starts.  We’re not sure if it’s truly a case of mistaken identity or if Tom Stall is really this trained killer.  I don’t want to give it away, but I highly recommend you Netflix this movie, or rent it – or heck even buy it.  I loved it.