Archive for: Steven Spielberg

Let’s Make a Deal With ‘Lincoln’

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It’s hard to imagine that anyone who’s deeply interested in the Civil War didn’t make it to the theaters to see Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln during its incredibly successful run up to the Oscars, where Daniel Day-Lewis stomped the competition to win Best Actor but the movie lost out to Argo in most of the other major categories.

Lincon is out now on home video. They sent us the 4-disc Blu-ray/DVD/Digtial copy combo pack, but it’s also available to rent or buy digitally from iTunes and Amazon or you can get a 2-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack or a single-disc DVD.
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Lincoln’s Cure for Slavery

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president and the new trailer makes the case that ending slavery was the president’s main motivation for fighting the Civil War. Lincoln is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book A Team of Rivals and features a screenplay by Tony Kushner, alongside performances by Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Hal Holbrook. The movie arrives in theaters in limited release on November 9th and everywhere on November 16th. +Continue Reading

Medal of Honor: Pay Attention

All of you with short attention spans need to focus here because we’re going to talk about Medal of Honor: Warfighter and get into some gray and not-so-gray areas about war gaming. One of the coolest things we saw at E3 last week was the preview version of the new game but not everyone in the media understands how awesome Warfighter should be when it hits stores in October.

The backstory for you newcomers: Medal of Honor was originally a sort-of-square WWII game inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. It got a modern Afghanistan-set reboot in 2010. Warfighter continues that theme but adds 12 different Tier One units from 10 different countries to the multiplayer version. +Continue Reading

Hero Horse of the Great War

Is Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (out now on a Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy combo pack) an epic family film about horses or a the filmmaker’s long-awaited take on the horrors of World War I? Hard to say, really.

How you feel about this one kind of depends on how much you credit the horses with the ability to convey real emotions. If you’re a big fan of the characters in Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers or The Pacific, you’re likely to have some issues with Joey, the horse whose journey anchors the movie. +Continue Reading

Total Recall Recall

Even though we sort of knew that Underworld director Len Wiseman was making a new movie version of Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” and decided to reuse Total Recall as the title, it was easy to ignore the idea until this trailer showed up yesterday.

The first Total Recall gets remembered as one of the best Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and one of the last good movies director Paul Verhoeven  made before he totally lost his mind on Showgirls. The new version has Colin Farrell taking over for Arnold, Kate Beckinsale in the Sharon Stone role and Jessica Biel taking over for Rachel Ticotin. +Continue Reading

Spielberg Talks War Horse

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Movie studios can be very sensitive about reviews. UTR saw a screening of War Horse last week and we have some very strong opinions about the movie. However, there’s an embargo on reviews until the release date so we had to agree to keep our mouths shut until December 25th before we saw the picture.

That’s in spite of the fact that the theater was full of Family Values bloggers and veterans groups who’ve already Facebooked the hell out of their thoughts about the movie. +Continue Reading

Jurassic Park Trilogy Comes to Blu-ray

If you’ve been waiting for Jurassic Park to arrive on Blu-ray, it’s here if you’re willing to buy the Jurassic Park Ultimate Trilogy (with bonus digital copies of all three movies) or cough up a few extra bucks for a gift set that adds a bonus toy dinosaur.

The box set is loaded with extras, including a comprehensive new six-part documentary about the making of all three movies plus all the old featurettes from earlier DVD releases are included. The new transfers are spectacular, especially the audio: the dinosaurs sound scarier in your living room than they did in the theater. The movies are a little more complicated. +Continue Reading

George Lucas Strikes Back

Be prepared for a few unpleasant surprises if you bought the new  Star Wars Blu-ray box set. Of course, some people just can’t believe that Lucas would ever endorse this kind of thing, so here’s an alternate theory about the destruction of The Force.

Spielberg’s War Horse

Everyone who’s been waiting for Steven Spielberg to make another war movie to follow the classic Saving Private Ryan can look to the Christmas release of War Horse.

Figuring out a way to make a World War I film is always complicated, but Spielberg has decided to approach the war through the story of Joey, a horse pressed into service by a British officer. WWI was the last European war to feature a cavalry since advances in weaponry didn’t really give animals much of a chance in battle.

Anyway, lots of swelling John Williams music and moody photography here in the trailer but not much sense of how the story will play out. It’s getting released at the end of the year, so the folks who made it think it’s going to attract some Oscars.

Inventing the Modern Western

When’s the last time you paid money to see a Western picture at the movie theater? Two new movies aim to change America’s viewing habits.

Cowboys & Aliens, coming next summer, is directed by Iron Man’s Jon Favreau and stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. Having James Bond and Han Solo fight UFOs in the Old West might get a few kids to see their first Wild West shoot-‘em-up. +Continue Reading