Posts Tagged ‘Warner Bros’

  
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

iPod App Review: “Stuck Genie”

by Jeff Giles

appicon_stuck_genie1Stuck Genie (Warner Bros., 2009)
purchase this iPod app (iTunes)

There’s a seemingly limitless number of them, but the rules for most iPod game apps are essentially the same: they have to be affordable enough to trigger a regret-free impulse buy, they need to be colorful enough to grab our attention, and they have to be simple enough to get the hang of in a few minutes (or less). Warner Bros.’ latest entry into the app arena, the intriguingly titled Stuck Genie, goes three for three; it sells for $1.99, boasts the sort of bright, cartoony graphics that iPod game developers (and consumers) seem to love, and its mechanics are simple enough for anyone with one finger and two minutes to master.

stuckgenie_031-266x4001The premise is simple too, pitting the player against the mischevious Puzzle Genie, who has challenged you to free his captives by pushing a ball through a series of mazes via click and drag. In each maze, you need to collect a handful of other balls, which is accomplished by simply bumping up against them. Get them all before your time runs out, and you’ve completed the level. Repeat as necessary.

If this sounds like a premise in need of a twist, don’t worry — Stuck Genie gives you one, in the form of a series of mazes that require you to pick up the balls in a certain order, then rotate the shapes you create in order to get around corners and through passages. The developers did a fine job of ramping up the difficulty at odd intervals, too, allowing the game to lull you into a pattern of gameplay before delivering an unexpected jolt that inevitably produces colorful bursts of profanity. I picked it up quickly, and so did my 10-year-old nephew; like any good iPod game, it’s great for short bursts of concentration when you’re stuck without anything else to do, difficult to put down and easy to resume. (Word of warning, though — simply hitting the home button on your iPod and leaving the game won’t save it; you need to exit and save manually if you want to retain your progress.)

For fans of colorful puzzle games with deceptively simple mechanics, Stuck Genie delivers 73 increasingly infuriating levels of action for under two bucks. What else do you want?

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Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Blu-ray Review: “Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director’s Cut”

by Jeff Giles

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director’s Cut (40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition) (2009, Warner Bros.)
purchase from Amazon

Good news, home theater-owning former hippies! You can now relive the original Woodstock festival, in all of its muddy, THC-laced glory, through the marvelous magic of a new 1080p hi-def and Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround sound transfer — with an extra disc of bonus performances and assorted extra content — thanks to Warner Bros.’ brand new 40th anniversary reissue of Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning documentary. For once, we’re looking at a title that lives up to the word “ultimate”; not only does this new box collect the four-hour Woodstock director’s cut, but it tacks on two more hours of performance footage, plus another hour of featurettes, plus BD-Live content — and that doesn’t even take into account the box itself, which handsomely houses the movie in a fringe leather case, or its other assorted contents, which include a reprint of Life’s Woodstock issue, a replica ticket, an iron-on patch, a Lucite paperweight, and more. Unlike the vast majority of catalog titles seeing Blu-ray release, Woodstock takes advantage of the new medium’s capabilities; not only do you get a superior picture and sound, but the studio has taken care to add plenty of extra everything, expanding the movie along with its price tag (this set lists for $69.99, but Amazon has it available for pre-order at $48.99 — and their version features an exclusive third disc).

Personally, to put it mildly, I’m not in the target demographic for Woodstock; I’ve never found the ’60s all that fascinating, and although I consider myself a fan of many of the artists who played the festival, the movie has always struck me as a bloated, spaced-out beast of a documentary — the kind of thing you need to have been at Woodstock to enjoy. (Or high.) All that aside, I can’t deny that it’s a beautiful film, and if it seems to go on forever, then it’s just living up to Wadleigh’s original goal; he did, after all, oversee more than 365,000 feet of film, all of which was jealously guarded from Warners executives, and he would have turned in a five or six-hour film if the studio had let him. Like any documentary worth its salt, Woodstock approaches its subject as if it’s endlessly fascinating, and even if you tend to think that seven-plus hours is a mite excessive for a movie about any event, Wadleigh’s enthusiasm is as infectuous as his shots are beautifully framed. Woodstock is as fluid as the spirit of the festival, tumbling from widescreen to split-screen and back again, a visual extension of what was going on all around Wadleigh and his crew. (more…)

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Thursday, March 26th, 2009

DVD News: The Future of Movies Past

by Bob Cashill

Last week, Lance Berry brought word of a death in the DVD rental market. Today, I write of a renaissance in the sales market, at least for “catalog” buyers like me.

Since its introduction in 1997, the major studios have used the DVD format to shore up their bottom lines. The cash cow, which mooed to the tune of $14.4 billion in sales in 2007, is yielding thinner milk these days; revenues are expected to fall to $12.8 billion this year, according to statistics published in the Wall Street Journal on Monday. What’s responsible for the drop?

Me. Back in the day, I couldn’t buy the damn things fast enough. I had three cabinets custom-built to hold them all and have filled them, and I’ve pretty much filled all the nooks and crannies within the cabinets too. (A man needs a special place to house The Bloody Pit of Horror and Dracula vs. Frankenstein.) But my buying has tapered off. I’m meh on Blu-Ray; I’ve seen it, it’s pretty, it pretty much offers the same hits I’ve purchased and repurchased (and repurchased again) in every prior format, and I’m pretty sure it’s the end of the line before everything goes online, which means I can dismantle the cabinets and sell their contents as movie-themed coasters to pay for our baby’s college education. Oh, yes, our little girl — she’s another big-ticket item to outgo our income on.

Leave it to Warner Bros. to figure out a way to welcome me back into the fold. It was the first studio to really capitalize on the format — the first five titles I bought were all WB — and anyone who enjoys movies older than about 2004 owes a tip of the hat to its senior vice president of theatrical catalog marketing, George Feltenstein. Under his direction the studio has done a fantastic job putting out full-to-bursting collections focused on stars (Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum, etc.), themes (its “Cult Camp Classics” line), and even playwrights (a Tennessee Williams box set, from 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire to 1964’s The Night of the Iguana, is a favorite). I’m eager to dip into its third “pre-Code” set, which concentrates on the envelope-pushing career of director William Wellman before content standards were imposed (1933’s Wild Boys of the Road is an unsung Depression-era classic). But over the past year, even WB, whose trailblazing inspired other studios to open their doors, seemed sluggish and unresponsive. I can understand their beating the marketing drum for new and improved 70th anniversary editions of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz this year, but there is more to movie life than Scarlett and Dorothy. “Frankly, my dear …” (more…)

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Friday, March 20th, 2009

The Bigger Picture: From Dreams to Reality

by Arend Anton

79230495Since its inception, this column has at times deviated from the strict parameters that most “movie” columns adhere to. In many ways, my intention has always been to touch on more than the average movie discussion, as it is my belief that there is a link to the world of cinema in every facet of our lives. That said, I hope you’ll forgive me from straying a little further even than normal.

I’ve been working for a small photography agency for the past two and a half years. It has become an almost ideal situation for me. It is only a mile from my home, and I have been able to walk. The pay is better than any job I’ve had. I have my own private office, and very few coworkers to have conflicts with.

A couple weeks ago, I was informed that I am to be laid off, effective April 1st. Talk about a great April Fool’s Day. Maybe the day will come and everyone will pop out of a closet and shout, “Just kidding!” and everything will be all right again. Since there is virtually zero chance of this occurring, I must instead spend my time looking for a new job in what is effectively a flatlining economy.

As Americans, many of us view our jobs like relationships. Our office becomes like a home, and our coworkers like family. Many of us have a difficult time separating our personal lives from our professional ones.

Let’s take that idea, and turn it on its head: Since we are equating our jobs with relationships, I’d like everyone to think of a relationship they’ve had that has ended. It can be romantic or platonic. I’m sure we can all think of a situation in our past that we didn’t want to end, but now are better off for its demise.

Sometimes, to truly improve ourselves, we have to be released from that which we enjoy. There is an expression, often attributed to the writer Richard Bach, which says “if you love someone, set them free.” I know I am not the only soul to have been set free recently.

Therefore, we must all accept the inevitability that we are all in this together. No job is entirely safe right now, a fact that I overlooked until it was too late. What I think is happening right now is akin to a reset button being pushed. We have come so far in our excess that the only way to move forward again is from the starting line. (more…)

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Sunday, February 15th, 2009

DVD Review: “Body of Lies”

by Jeff Giles

Body of Lies (2008, Warner Bros.)
purchase this DVD (Amazon)

Ridley Scott directing Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in a big-budget action epic — it’s gotta be a surefire box-office phenomenon, right? Nine times out of 10, probably — but unfortunately for Scott, DiCaprio, and Crowe, not to mention the folks at Warners, last year’s Body of Lies proved the exception, landing with a thud behind Beverly Hills Chihuahua and only earning back its $70 million budget with its overseas grosses. Why? It’s about the war, stupid — specifically, the War on Terror, which has proven to be commercial poison for a long list of movies that includes In the Valley of Elah and Stop-Loss.

It would be nice if I could tell you that Body of Lies didn’t deserve its fate, and that it was better than your average explosions-in-the-desert thriller, but I can’t; really, at bottom, it’s everything you’d expect from Ridley Scott — an intricate, moderately paced, old-fashioned espionage flick, with the same slick cinematography and beautiful shots of stuff blowing up you’ve seen in action movies for the last 25 years. This sets it apart from the rest of the Iraq-inspired movies of the last few years, insofar as it’s got an old-school ’80s setup lurking beneath its ripped-from-the-headlines storyline, but ultimately, neither Scott nor screenwriter William Monahan (who adapted the David Ignatius novel) can come up with a movie that really works, either as an action thriller or a political statement.

It isn’t for lack of pedigree. In DiCaprio and Crowe, Scott has two of the more capable leads he could have asked for, but the material doesn’t play to their strengths — DiCaprio, for starters, is never all that believable as Roger Ferris, the globetrotting CIA agent who understands the Arab world better than his oily boss, Ed Hoffman (Crowe). Farris is a sensitive, morally conflicted action hero — sort of a cross between, say, Alan Alda and Sly Stallone — the type of character who’s delivering heavy-handed diatribes against the American execution of the war when he isn’t running from explosions or getting into alley fights. He’s a rather transparent vehicle for the movie’s message, in other words, and in order to deliver it successfully, he needed to be played sensitively — in other words, certainly not with the silly drawl DiCaprio gives him. It’s enough to take you out of the movie during some of its most crucial moments, which is a shame, because by combining good old-fashioned action with current events, Body of Lies had the potential to be something special. (more…)

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