DVD Review For The Week 21/6/11-27/6/11

I didn’t watch many movies this week, but these are the ones I did.

True Grit- This might become my favourite Coen Brothers film. It’s really strong, especially the first 40 mins or so, before they hit he trail, but it’s all good. I was wondering if this young girl in the main role is really that good, or if she’s just something like that in real life, but I guess after watching it again, and checking out the special features, she’s just that good. Definitely someone to keep an eye on. The special features were of the kind that are really interesting, but not that in-depth, and far too short. The Coen Brothers don’t make any appearances in them or offer a commentary, which I guess is their choice, but I’d sure like to hear them talk about their work.




Fighting Mad- This is one of the films from my Mill Creek 50 Martial Arts Movies pack that I bought a while ago. Just a disc I picked at random, I didn’t know anything about it, but while watching it, I realised I’d heard about it somewhere, maybe from the Machete Maidens documentary, or some other doco about blaxsploitation. The story is a nice revenge tale, about a guy who is betrayed by a couple of his army buddies on their way back from the Vietnam War, so they don’t have to split their illegal booty three ways, and one of the other guys has the hots for his wife. Anyway, he washes up on the shore of an island, which has two Japanese soldiers on it, still there from WWII. So they nurse him back to health, and train him in the ways of the samurai. Lucky he washed up on that island, or he’d have no hope of getting revenge. Anyway, the two other guys, are busy becoming a big noise back in America, killing a lot of people and generally not being very good, until this dude comes back and brings all their plans falling down around them.
So considering the quality of this print, and where and when it was from, I thought it was pretty good. I enjoyed it, though I did have to wonder at his lack of ability to deliver a killing blow a couple of times to the main 2 bad guys. They got heir just deserts in the end, but that must’ve been really annoying for our hero to be so close and to miss them, a couple of times.


Conquest of the Planet of the Apes-I wasn’t really paying attention to this too much, really just had it on while I was working on other things, but I felt like revisiting the series a bit with the upcoming PotA film. I like it, even though it’s in not in any way remotely feasible for monkeys to be so mass trained in roles of servitude. But it’s cool, you got a bunch of chimps and gorillas overthrowing their human masters, it’s good fun. There’s a few lines of dialogue from a newscaster in the movie I really want to sample as well, just for the sheer craziness of what he’s saying. Good fun.