“So this one’s called the ‘glass-bottom boat’…”

Howdy friends! The big DVD this week is Argo, but we’ve got plenty to discuss beyond Ben Affleck and his striking resemblance to that guy from Die Hard.  There’s also flicks starring Keira Knightley, Ethan Hawke, John Cusack and Val Kilmer. We’ve got movies about serial killers, struggling rock musicians, capitalists, and criminals.  We’ve got small apartments and special forces.  There’s a junior high spy, a sushi girl, and even a talking cat!

The DVDs:
Argo
Anna Karenina
Sinister
Fun Size
The Factory
For Ellen
Riddle
The Package
Atlas Shrugged, Part II: The Strike
Small Apartments
Special Forces
Undefeated
Sushi Girl
Junior High Spy
A Talking Cat!?!
Snow Shark

Streaming: Check out your choices here.

One of these films went undefeated at last year’s Oscars.  If you want to know which movie it is, continue reading on the next page.  Two of these flicks co-star Dolph Lundgren.  Continue reading to find out which ones.  If you’ve given up physical media for Lent, click the link above and skip right to the streaming suggestions, but if you do you’ll never know which Oscar-nominated actor gives voice to that talking cat. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day Vince and I were making S’mores and chatting about life, when he pointed out that 2011 was the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War, that era in world history when everyone lived in pants-crapping fear that the U.S. and Russia were going to destroy us all. More importantly than global genocide and the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the Cold War had an undeniable impact on the movie industry, most notably in creating one of the easiest and most overused plot devices of the last 50 years.

Obviously, the Cold War gave us classics like Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, and the entire James Bond franchise. It also gave us The Hunt for Red October and Tom Clancy’s career, as well as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and wherever else Shia LeBeouf and his grandfather Harrison Ford take us. It gave us The Manhattan Project, The Good Shepherd, Thirteen Days, Top Gun, Good Night, and Good Luck, and even Salt, which was a modern reminder of just how hilariously off-the-wall – and flat out terrible – some Cold War films were.

In fact, those are the films that I want to celebrate – the movies that both embraced the terrifying nightmare of global war and laughed in the face of four decades of silent terror. Because without them, we’d probably all be living in mountain bunkers or adapting to our tentacles.

Read the rest of this entry »