Screenhead

Here are the 9 winners corrie (14), Susan Varney (19), Gena (30), Jessica Rogers (61), Janice (111), Brenda Park (117), Denis Howard (126), Steve M. (141) and Michelle Rosborough (144). Congratulations everyone!!!

The Guardian, the dramatic legal TV series starring Simon Baker, on DVD with the First Season in a 6 disc set, including all 22 first season episodes. In stores now from Paramount and CBS Home Entertainment.

The Guardian is truly a captivating legal drama starring Simon Baker (The Mentalist), is available now on a six-disc DVD set featuring all 22 riveting first season episodes from CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment.

When a hotshot corporate lawyer has a run-in with the law and is sentenced to 1,500 hours of community service, he becomes The Guardian – a part-time child advocate at Legal Aid Services, where one case after another is an eye-opening instance of kids caught up in difficult circumstances. The Guardian garnered a host of industry acclaim with Simon Baker earning a Golden Globe nomination for the lead role.

All right, folks, strap in and keep your remotes handy because today I’m going to talk about Heat, one of the longest movies you’ll ever love.

The folks out at Warner Brothers sent me a copy of Heat, and you might be wondering why I’m talking about a movie this old.  Well, it’s not like some of you haven’t heard of it, but it was just released on Blu-ray, so we’ve got a responsibility to cover it.

Heat features Val Kilmer and the gigantic concentrated awesome heap that is Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the same movie.  It’s about a career thief who leads a team of thieves through an incredible robbery that nets the team just over a million and a half bucks in bearer bonds.  The bonds were insured, so the only real victim here is the insurance company, and we’ve all been able to agree that they could have used a kick in the slats since 1995 anyway.  Anyway, the fun really starts when the team tries to sell back the stolen bonds instead of laundering them.

Heat is a long–VERY long!–and incredibly involving tale of deceit, thievery and murder that’s actually very engrossing.  I’d actually seen this one maybe five or six times over the last (nearly) fifteen years, so it was a welcome treat.  But you will have to brace yourself adequately.  Clear your calendar, get your snacks together in advance, because this is a LONG movie.  Nearly THREE HOURS worth of long, in fact.

But the critical takeaway here is that it’s also really, REALLY exciting.

The Screenhead Ten Scale loves my taste in movies and hands this a seven out of ten for being a solid actioner with a lot of twists, even if it’s a bit too long.

Well, folks…bad news.  Terrible news in point of fact.

Apparently, Herr Doktor Uwe Boll hasn’t had enough of destroying video game to movie translations yet, because he’s somehow gotten access to the Far Cry series.

A trailer has emerged, and man, is it a doozy.  It has all the hallmarks of a Herr Doktor film–halfassed plot, weak dialogue, and lots of explosions.  The trailer doesn’t look too bad, but I’ve seen enough decent trailers built out of horrendous movies.  Naturally I’ll reserve judgment until the actual product emerges, but you’ll excuse my skepticism.

This IS, after all, Herr Doktor we’re talking about here.  Seriously, does the guy have any GOOD movies to his credit?  Sure, Postal was a riot but even that was still pretty weak. It’s hard to imagine a Boll movie going over well at all.

And of course, we have the trailer right here for you, so settle in and enjoy this newest wreckage in the making.

’Tis the season to join the King Family, once christened America’s first family of song, in an all-new television special celebrating their tuneful holiday TV spectaculars in Christmas With the King Family, on DVD today! 

In celebration of the 45^th anniversary of their ABC debut, join the King Family on DVD for the first time ever as they take a heartwarming look back at their classic specials in this all-new holiday TV event, coming to public television soon from Polly O Entertainment.  In clips unseen for decades (now digitally remastered), The Kings perform a cavalcade of classic showstoppers, while sharing personal, behind-the-scenes memories in contemporary interviews. 

The music and spirit of Christmas comes through on Christmas with the King Family. It’s pure holiday entertainment that every family will enjoy together every Christmas season. 

Screenhead has 4 copies of Christmas with the King Family to give away.  So, post your name and we will pick the winner Thursday, December 10, 2009. 

Lions Gate and Massify are linking up to create a partnership aimed at finding the next great filmmakers.

We all know who Lions Gate is, but you may not be familiar with Massify, the world’s largest online film production network.  The Lions Gate Incubator Project, LINC, gives Lions Gate access to Massify’s huge talent pool.  They’re already getting a project ready for launch within the next few weeks, a “high-concept, male-driven comedy short” that will be developed into a feature length production later.  Here’s the word from Lions Gate:

“There is a revolution of new ideas in filmed entertainment online,” said Curt Marvis, President of Digital for Lionsgate. “We intend to be at the forefront of accessing this enormous and largely untapped source of fresh talent and original new voices. Just as we are always looking for ways to monetize our content in a broadband environment, we are equally committed to using new media platforms as a source of new content. Massify’s large and talented community of filmmakers make them an ideal partner to bolster our online initiatives.”

Smart move for Lions Gate–they need to find the next Saw before someone else does, and the More of the Same plan you’re seeing at places like Universal just doesn’t seem to be holding up.  After all, GI Joe STILL hasn’t made its shooting budget back yet despite having sold a hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of tickets at last view, whilst the dirt-cheap Paranormal Activity took in a whopping hundred-plus on a shoestring.

All aboard for A Thomas & Friends Holiday Special with Trainloads of fun, snowmen and Christmas trees. This Special Edition DVD includes a collectible and exclusive Holiday train, available on DVD November 3, 2009 from Lionsgate Home Entertainment.

It’s a perfect time for Christmas movies to start coming out, seeing as the decorations have been up in the stores since like September.  And so, we’re tackling Four Christmases today, a movie that shows that sometimes, time with the family is the best gift of all.

Even if you don’t notice it at first.

This time, a young couple who’s not terribly interested in getting married, usually manages to duck their family obligations around the holidays by making up elaborate stories and going off to various getaways instead.   But a surprise San Francisco fogbank socks in the airport irrevocably, and so the four are left forced to spend Christmas in the last place on earth they want to…with their families.

Families.  FOUR of them.  Both of their families are divorced, and thus, they’ll have to spend four Christmases in just one day.

What’s so unnerving about this movie is that it veers so wildly between hilarious and awkward that it almost can’t decide whether it’s supposed to be funny or uncomfortable.  It’s like the fat kid at school…he’s trying desperately to be funny, but it’s actually just about as sad.

Each of the families is deranged for its own reason, and believe me, they’re deranged.  The least of the deranged is a family of backwoods amateur ultimate fighters.  It gets worse from there.

It’s awkward.  It’s painful, in spots.  But it’s also got a lot of humor and warmth to it.  There’s lots to enjoy here.  We’ve all seen this kind of thing before. This is Christmas at its absolute.  Family, friends, lovers, growth.  Life.

Four Christmases is like LIFE.

And as such, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives this strange little allegory a six out of ten.  There’s lots to like here, and there’s lots to feel uncomfortable about.  It IS life.  Take it for what it’s worth.

It’s a surprise to say but Expired, which The Asylum sent me a copy of,  may well be the scariest thing that The Asylum has ever released, and it’s not even a horror flick.

See, apparently, sometime while I wasn’t looking, The Asylum started to go after offbeat comedies and romantic drama, and it’s the latter that we’ll be referencing today.  Expired, however, is a romantic drama of the worst sort–the kind that won’t stop hurting.

In Expired, two horrendously deformed personalities–a total doormat of a woman and a complete jackass of a man–manage to find each other and engage in a tumultuous relationship that takes them through fights and death and bereavement and a horrendous New Years Eve featuring karaoke that has probably been banned by the Geneva Convention.  But will these two prove a match made in Hell?  Or will they realize that they’re both complete wastes of life and go their separate ways?

I’ve never watched a movie that hurt quite so badly as Expired did.

I spent insane amounts of time screaming at my television.  I never wanted a character dead quite so many times, either, as I wanted THESE two dead.  They were like needles.  Needles in my EYES.  By the hour mark I was shrieking in agony, wishing this would finally end.

And eventually, it did.  But by then, I was feeling so badly for pretty much everyone involved, but most badly for myself who had to sit through this misery tour, that I was glad to eject the DVD it came on.

I wondered, what kind of masochist would subject themselves, voluntarily, to watch a movie where a guy tries to score with a woman literally the SAME NIGHT HER MOTHER DIED.  And what kind of cynic would fail to be amazed that she ACTUALLY LET HIM GET SOME.

And it’s like this for the whole movie.  It’s a hundred and seven minutes of some of the most horrendous relationship I’ve ever seen.  These two halfwits make Bobby and Whitney look like Ozzie and Harriet.

Oh, sure, you want to believe that they’re both getting better, in their way.  And you can actually start to see that, after a fashion.  But it’s just too little, too late.  The damage is done.  This movie is downright painful to watch for entirely too little payoff.

The Screenhead Ten Scale’s off in a corner retching right now, but it told me to pass on that it gave this horrendous misery tour a two out of ten.  Wait…it just said something about “rewarding effort”, which is fair enough.  It DID try, after all.  It just didn’t end well at all.

So the crew out at The Asylum dropped me a copy of Megafault, part of the Sci-Fi Channel (I will NOT call it SyFy)’s big lineup of generally horrendous disaster movies.

And as it turns out, it’s nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.

In this one, horrible science combines with B-list actors to bring us the Megafault, a geological phenomenon that suggests a never before seen fault so large it runs the breadth of the United States from roughly West Virginia to the Ring of Fire.  And after a round of dynamite in some mountaintop removal work, somehow, the fault activates (they don’t really explain this well at ALL) and starts tearing hell out of the United States.  So now, the government’s got to find a way to fix this before half the country is torn apart.

I say that Megafault isn’t really a bad movie; it’s just kind of confused.  See, it watches like it was scripted by a really, REALLY overstimulated twelve year old who just started screaming plot elements whilst on a Mountain Dew and Pixy Stix rush.

Things seem to happen almost at random with this one, explosions, people falling into fault lines, people bursting into flame, the world’s biggest avalanche…and all of it seemingly in aid of an absolutely ridiculous core concept.  It’s fun, just like watching that overstimulated twelve year old run around would be fun.  But you wouldn’t want to have to take him home with you either.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale admits that it had a good if confused time, ignores the godawful science involved with this (seriously, even Doctor Venture would know this was a dumb idea) and gives it a fair-enough six out of ten.

Call it another casualty of the Great Recession, folks, but MGM is weighing its options in the face of horrendous losses.

As much as we’d all like to blame their lone theatrical release for the year (Fame!  Nobody cared about it…nobody watched this crap!  Fame!  Go ahead, sing along! It’s fun.)  for being the millstone around MGM’s neck, as it turns out, it was weak DVD sales that brought down the beast.  MGM had a monster library of titles, weighing in at over four thousand titles, and now it’s all up for bids.  Also up for sale is the James Bond franchise, and even the roaring lion logo.

Interestingly, though, it may not be as up for sale as we think–seems that MGM’s creditors are taking a pass on collection action for a while, and meanwhile, MGM’s pumping all the cash it can scrounge into its upcoming movies Red Dawn, the Hot Tub Time Machine and The Zookeeper.

Oh, sure, they’re pretty fair releases…a remake and two good comedies featuring solid comedy actors…but enough to save the studio?  Scuse my lack of conviction on that one.

But only time will tell if MGM will still be selling off all its assets or if this year will turn it around.