List Price: $19.95 Our Price: $13.97YOU SAVE $5.98!
Buy it
DVD Public Access
"What's wrong with Brewster?" asks the smiling devil-behind-blue-eyes Whiley Pritcher (Ron Marquette), a well-mannered, clean-cut drifter who has his own public access talk show. Brewster is a rural community with a secret under its bland surface of rural small town normalcy (a less insidious but more enigmatic reflection of Blue Velvet), and Whiley becomes an instant celebrity as he stirs it up with gossip and name-calling. But that's not his goal--or at least it doesn't appear to be. But then Whiley is an enigma in every sense of the word, a walking stream of aphorisms masking something creepy under his false front. The first film by the director Brian Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie shared the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance but received little attention until their second collaboration, The Usual Suspects, became a smash a few years later. While it's not as accomplished or clever as that hit, it shares the mysterious sense of purpose and eerie undercurrent of unease. Ron Marquette plays Whiley with pinched smugness, empty smiles, and calculated utterances, and Singer and McQuarrie leave his motivations and identity a complete mystery. That mystery makes Public Access both maddening and memorable. --Sean Axmaker
This is the first feature-length film the writer/director/music team who brought us the quirky and enjoyable "Usual Suspects." The opening shot of this film suggests the hero's (?) agenda is tied to paving the way for an electronics manufacturer. A stranger enters a seemingly small and reasonably happy town. He has a fair pocketfull of money and proceeds to buy time on the public access channel and produce his own show. He asks "What is wrong with Brewster?" Soon he is getting calls from the citizenry with minor complaints. Of course things begin to escelate and the complaints become larger and more pointed. Soon, the once contented town is not so content. Though it appears the stranger has a job to perform, certain of his actions make the viewer ask just what type of person is he and how does he feel about what he is doing. The director, Bryan Singer, pretty much leaves the viewer hanging at the end as he did in The Usual Suspects. You just aren't quite certain what has happened and you'll end up with too many points unanswered. Though not quite as much fun as its successor, it's still quite an impressive first outing. It is also rumoured that the lead, Ron Marquette suffered an emotional disorder that caused him an extreme amount of discomfort in viewing himself on the screen. He subsequently committed suicide after seeing himself in this film. (Boy did HE pick the wrong profession)
One of the finest American musicals, this 1944 film by Vincente Minnelli is an intentionally self-contained story set in 1903, in which a happy St. Louis family is shaken to their roots by the prospect of moving to New York, where the father has a better job pending. Judy Garland heads the cast in what amounts to a splendid, end-of-an-era story that nicely rhymes with the onset of the 20th century. The film is extraordinarily alive, the characters strong, and the musical numbers are so splendidly part of the storytelling that you don't feel the film has stopped for an interlude. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Director(s): Vincente Minnelli - Alan D. Courtney - Roy Mack DVD Release Date: Released the 06 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $26.98 Your Price: $18.99YOU SAVE $7.99!
Buy it
At the top of his game, Stephen King has a real gift for mining monsters--zero-at-the-bone horror--out of everyday faces and places. Adapted from a novella in the 1982 collection that also spawned Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil looks at first as if it might draw authentically enlightening terror from the soul-cancer that makes blood relations of a Southern California golden boy (Brad Renfro) and an aging Nazi war criminal (Sir Ian McKellen). Turned on by a high-school course about the Holocaust, Todd Bowden (such a bland handle for this top-of-his-class sociopath!) tracks down Kurt Dussander, a former Gestapo killer hiding in the shadows of sunny SoCal. Blackmailing the old man into sharing his firsthand stories of genocide, the teenager... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Brad Renfro - Ian McKellen Director(s): Bryan Singer DVD Release Date: Released the 13 April 1999 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $9.95 Your Price: $9.95YOU SAVE $0!
Buy it
After a string of mediocre movies, director Tim Burton regains his footing as he shifts from macabre fairy tales to Southern tall tales. Big Fish twines in and out of the oversized stories of Edward Bloom, played as a young man by Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge, Down with Love) and as a dying father by Albert Finney (Tom Jones). Edward's son Will (Billy Crudup, Almost Famous) sits by his father's bedside but has little patience with the old man's fables, because he feels these stories have kept him from knowing who his father really is. Burton dives into Bloom's imagination with zest, sending the determined young man into haunted woods, an idealized Southern town, a traveling circus, and much more. The result is sweet but--thanks to the director's dark... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Tim Burton DVD Release Date: Released the 27 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.94 Your Price: $13.49YOU SAVE $6.45!
Buy it
Blessed with timeless humanity, grace, and heartbreaking compassion, Ikiru is one of the most moving dramas in the history of film. Legendary director Akira Kurosawa is best remembered for his samurai epics, but this contemporary masterpiece ranks among his greatest achievements, matched in every respect by the finest performance of Takashi Shimura's celebrated career. Shimura, who nobly led the Seven Samurai two years later, is sublimely perfect as a melancholy civil servant who, upon learning that he has terminal cancer, realizes he has nothing to show for his dreary, unsatisfying life. He seeks solace in nightlife and family, to no avail, until a simple inspiration leads him to a final, enduring act of public generosity. Expressing his own thoughts about death and the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Takashi Shimura - Nobuo Kaneko Director(s): Akira Kurosawa DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $39.95 Your Price: $35.96YOU SAVE $3.99!
Buy it
Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is trash for connoisseurs. From his opening gambit (including a "Shaw-Scope" logo and gaudy '70s-vintage "Our Feature Presentation" title card) to his cliffhanger finale (a teasing lead-in to 2004's Vol. 2), Tarantino pays loving tribute to grindhouse cinema, specifically the Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti Westerns that fill his fervent brain--and this frequently breathtaking movie--with enough cinematic references and cleverly pilfered soundtrack cues to send cinephiles running for their reference books. Everything old is new again in Tarantino's humor-laced vision: he steals from the best while injecting his own oft-copied, never-duplicated style into what is, quite simply, a revenge flick, beginning with the near-murder of the Bride... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Quentin Tarantino DVD Release Date: Released the 13 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.99 Your Price: $14.99YOU SAVE $5!
Buy it
