I’m a sick individual. I eat babies and I take hours out of my day to sit on my couch with a cool Coors sixteen ouncer and cheer wildly for that forest fire to wipe out the west coast. I like Snapple’s Diet Ginseng Tea and I buy DVDs on an hourly basis. DVDs are an addiction.
For some, this addiction can start with the first purchase of a DVD. This disease starts out when an unsuspecting consumer buys one of their personal favorite movies and then slowly branches out to other genres. Before a DVD addict can make heads or tails of their growing collection of Joel Schumacher films, they find themselves using they’re lunch breaks to rape the computers of the new and improved Mann Library to order the entire Michael Bay collection (Armageddon, The Rock, Bad Boys). My addiction alone has boosted the DVD market and subsequently landed the country in a state of economic boom, and so, as I near my 60th DVD I’d like to review this weeks new DVDs and stop any of you from succombing to this entertainment plague.
The only movie worthy of any sort of praise this week is the Mel Gibson blood-soaked action movie that has continued to inspire people to piss off native Scottish people by imitating their accents and then yelling “Freedom.” Braveheart is a movie made for dolby digital sound and 16:9 digital video. It is a testosterone-fueled, tour de force of violent revenge and powerful revolution. Unfortunately, the rest of the week’s DVD freshman are less fit for anyone’s video collection.
This week, Supernova comes to digital video. James Spader (Stargate) and Angela Basset (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) team up as the endangered passengers on a spaceship taken hostage by a crazed bad guy. Though you never learn why the bad guy is crazed, you don’t really need to find out. The whole movie is ruined by it’s special effects that could have been mastered by Ed Wood. The movie sets look like they’re held together by Elmer’s glue and the background music sounds like a burnt copy of a John Williams b-side. WARNING!!! This movie should only be used as a means of keeping your RA busy while you and your roommates do bong hits in the common room.
This week also welcomes the sequel to the world renowned movie 2001: Space Odyssey. 2001’s successor, 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a poor excuse for a follow up to its ground breaking predeccessor, which was written by sci-fi guru Arthur C. Clarke and directed by legend Stanley Kubrick. Whereas 2001 was a movie about the evolution of man towards a celestial state where he triumphs over the greatest of his own creations, 2010 is the story of 3 guys on a futuristic road-trip to Jupiter. The movie’s saving grace is that two of the guys making their way to Jupiter are Roy Schnieder (Jaws) and John Lithgow (Harry and the Hendersons). The two proven actors produce excellent performances but the only thing that saved this movie from being thrown into the gorge was its loose attachment to the Kubrick masterpiece. Perhaps director Peter Hyams should have added a lesbian sex scene to make the deep space snoozer less empty minded.
People who suffer from DVD addiction will not think twice before clicking the “buy” button and having these two examples of cinema shit shipped to their door via 2-day UPS. I did, and as much as I’d like to return them for the price I bought them at, I’m lucky to live in a world with ebay, where I can resell them for double the price to a midget in Ohio. As much as I’d like to say that I don’t have a problem and that these are the last pieces of Hollywood crap I’m going to purchase, I am constantly battered by the notion that “Denial isn’t just a river and Eygpt” and next week marks the release of The Haunting.
Archived article by Bradley Werner