Back Seat Producers

In my quest to find a fight film to unseat Raging Bull as the greatest movie of all time (everybody take a drink—podcast joke people, come on!) I stumbled upon the 36th Chamber of Shaolin.
Originally titled “Master Killer” when it was released in the USA on VHS at some point after its Asian theatrical release [...]

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I relish the golden age of cinema we live in.
Many may disagree, longing for the 60’s or 70’s. But honestly, where else can you get the ultimate vision of every director for almost any film you’ve ever taken seriously? The answer is only in DVD-land.
As a result, we now have Lucas’ THX 1138 in its [...]

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A while ago, I saw a trailer on a DVD for Ladrón Que Roba a Ladrón and immediately thought, “That looks like a Latino Ocean’s 11.” Turns out I was wrong. It’s more like a Latino Ocean’s 13. For me, that’s a very good thing.
The plot revolves around two thieves in L.A., Emilio, [...]

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Remove the live concert footage and the nonessential (I hesitate to call them gratuitous) sex scenes, and 9 Songs ceases to be a movie and becomes a film short.  There’s not a lot of story here.  I can’t even call it a character study, because we barely learn anything about Matt and Lisa, the [...]

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Written by Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue, Directed by Joel Schumacher 
Bravery is shaping up as my theme of the week over at Girls with Glasses.  And this woman tops them all, hands down.  Joel Schumacher (“Lost Boys” and “Batman & Robin”) directs and Jerry Bruckheimer (“Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Pearl Harbor”) produces this serious, [...]

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Howdy!  To all regular (and not-so-easily-categorized) readers of “Back Seat Producers,” I send greetings!  Tony and the gang have invited me, Melanie Young, on as an estrogen-heavy contributor of DVD reviews.  I’ll be attempting to post here a couple times a week, though I also post daily over at my regular blog: http://glassesgirls.blogspot.com - which I [...]

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Gonna Change Your Way of Thinking
Joel Gilbert’s documentary on Bob Dylan’s sudden conversion to Christianity is an authentic, detail-oriented and thought-provoking work. It is a must see for fans and casual viewers alike. The subject-matter alone is fascinating and remains, thirty years from its occurrence, a little told story about the already mythic and mysterious [...]

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Children’s movies normally aren’t my thing. I’m not a kid (although some people might disagree), I don’t have any kids, I don’t hang out with any kids, so the movies aren’t marketed towards me. I hold no disdain towards kids movies, but normally the films I watch demand more from me as a viewer.
Nim’s Island [...]

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It’s 1999. An alien race known as the Tenctonese lost a transport ship full of slaves five years ago. They crash-landed onto the third planet of a solar system, and haven’t been heard from. Until now. A beacon has been transmitting a hailing frequency, and the Overseers (the higher class of Tenctonese) send a reconnaissance [...]

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Another review that I didn’t get posted because of the future of the show being in flux, having now listed to the latest episode, I want to sort of time this right and put it up before the show with a couple of additional notes coming from having just watched it again on DVD as [...]

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OK, I’m actually holding out to buy this on HD-DVD when it hits on March 18th, but I couldn’t wait to see it any longer, so I bought the rental of this through the Xbox Video Store last night. It’s available in Standard and High Definitions, and for these rentals, it’s pricier than normal. [...]

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Superman - Doomsday is the first in DC’s direct-to-DVD animated features utilizing some key storylines from DC Comics rich history. This one starts it, and then next year will see Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier and then Marve Wolfman’s and George Perez’s Teen Titans story The Judas Contract following that. If Superman - Doomsday [...]

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Magnolia Entertainment has done a fine job lately of bring over some very cool Asian cinema to both theatres and DVD lately. With releases like The Host and Tears of the Black Tiger we get some highly entertaining looks at other cultures, all wrapped up in very good films. The Host was a [...]

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The year is 1855 and the location is Thailand. Thailand has just entered into a treaty that brings them into the forefront of world trade. But farmers can’t keep up the production with their normal resources, so they need more buffalo brought into pull their plows. Buffalo traders are happy to [...]

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(I didn’t see any movies at all in theatres this weekend, and while I do have a DVD review or two coming up in the near future, there are three movies coming out on DVD this week that are all highly worth seeing: The Host, Zodiac and Renaissance. the following reviews have appeared [...]

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