DVD/TV Series Review: The Good Place: Season 2

 

+++Warning, this has spoilers from season 1, but no major season 2 giveaways+++

The 13-episode second season of The Good Place aired from fall 2017 into winter 2018. It picks up immediately after the reset that ended season 1 when the group finds out they are really in The Bad Place and have been torturing each other. It does not really follow the format of season 1. I will not spoil all the details of season 2; however, the bulk of the season is focused on the group trying to get into the real Good Place.

The show continues to be well-written and acted. All the "core" group returns, and some of the more ancillary season one characters have a more significant role this year. That said, not everyone who made guest appearances last year returns this season. It sticks to the format of primarily being a comedy, which does not take itself very seriously but also ties in some emotional moments. The cast gets along well or can fake great chemistry, which is essential given the show's format. Unlike season one, it does not end on a cliffhanger this year and does leave a lot of leeway going into season three for what direction the show will go in.

The DVD set is a two-disc set that is very bare-bones. The extras include a commentary track on one episode, a seven-minute gag reel, and a special effects reel that lasts less than a minute. What was included was good, but not nearly as much as what season one had, and there are no closed captions. And, of course, it is one of the shows for which no blu-ray set is available.

This is a great option if you are looking for a great comedy that is still under the radar. Despite being about the afterlife, it has no religious overtones. It deals more with philosophy and what it means to be good and bad. That is the serious part of the show. It is mostly really absurd humor and, like I said, does not take itself all that seriously. You definitely want to watch season one because it is not a show that you can easily just jump into and have it make sense. All the episodes are chapters in a long story, and everything connects together. The mediocre DVD release aside, it is worth checking out even if you just stream it.

Blu-Ray/Movie Review: The Shawshank Redemption

 

The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 thriller/crime drama starring Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Clancy Brown, Bob Gunton, and William Sadler. It was adapted from a story by Stephen King and directed by Frank Darabont. The film did not get much acclaim during its initial run in the theater but took off on home video after being nominated for several Academy Awards. It is a fairly basic story. A man named Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins) is convicted of murders he did not commit and sent to prison for life. He ends up at Shawshank prison, run by a corrupt warden and thuggish guards, befriending a fellow inmate named Red (played by Morgan Freeman), who also narrates the movie. Andy hatches an elaborate escape plan that no one, including the viewers, is aware of until the end of the movie.

The Blu-Ray's A/V transfer is good, but the movie did not get an extensive HD restoration. The Blu-Ray features several extras, including a director's commentary track on the movie, a few different behind-the-scenes and making-of features, a roundtable discussion with Robbins, Freeman, and the director of the movie on The Charlie Rose Show, and more. There is a ton of great material for those who like going through the bonus features.

Overall, the movie is well-written and acted. It was cast perfectly, from the leads to many character actors filling out the supporting roles. It is a combination of a prison movie, a period piece, and a buddy movie. There is not a ton of action, but some moments of action are mixed within the drama. It is a movie where the "good" guys are bad and the "bad" guys are good, at least partly. It is definitely worth the 2+ hours of time to watch it.

4k-UHD/Movie Review: A Quiet Place

 

A Quiet Place is a 2018 film with a twist on movies with themes of unseen monsters, alien invasions, etc. The twist is that the monsters in this movie are blind but have super hearing and kill anything that makes noise. The movie stars John Krasinski (who wrote the screenplay and directed the film), his real-life wife Emily Blunt, Noah Jupe, and Millicent Simmonds, playing members of a family in what is essentially a post-apocalyptic world in which many humans and animals have been killed. Those who have survived have to be perfectly quiet, communicate via sign language, and can only talk if they are near something that is making more noise than them.

It is a very different movie, especially as a horror movie, because there is minimal sound. Of course, sound is critical to the thrills in most horror movies, and in this one, it is the absence of sound, including background sounds. Even the soundtrack is very understated. The movie pulls off what most TV shows cannot, namely, having little to no dialog between the actors yet still managing to tell a compelling story.

The 4k set is a two-disc set with a UHD  disc and a regular Blu-Ray disc. The movie looks great in the UHD format. What the film lacks in sound, it makes up for in visuals and special effects. The UHD disc has just the movie, and then there are about 35 minutes (give or take) of behind-the-scenes and making-of featurettes on the regular Blu-Ray. Overall, the film is well written, very well acted, and tells a unique story on an old theme of a creature-based horror movie. It is definitely worth checking out.

4k-UHD/Movie Review: The Invisible Man

 

The Invisible Man is a 2020 horror/thriller. It is an updated version of the Invisible Man story, which has undergone several different on-screen iterations. It stars Elisabeth Moss (from Mad Men and The Handmaid's Tale), Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer, Michael Dorman, and Oliver Jackson Cohen. It was directed by Leigh Whannell, a writer on some of the movies in the Saw franchise. The story involves a woman leaving her abusive boyfriend while he stalks and terrorizes her. The invisibility part comes in with him being an optics expert who builds a suit that allows him to appear invisible. From there, it is a decent thriller. While it does have some twists and turns, the ending is predictable if you pay attention all the way through. It is violent and bloody in a couple of parts, but it is not anywhere near as gory as the Saw movies, which often went overboard on the gore.

The 4k set is a two-disc set with a UHD disc and a regular Blu-Ray disc. The movie looks and sounds great in the UHD format. There are some beautiful views of Australia (where the film was shot), which doubled for San Francisco (where it was set). The extras are all included on the UHD disc, including deleted scenes, a few behind-the-scenes features, and a director's commentary. Outside the commentary track, the bonus features amount to about a half hour's worth of material. What was included was good, but it was not extensive. Overall, the movie is good but not great. It is well-acted, and the writing is good, even if a bit predictable. It is not an award-winner by any means (not that it tries to be), but it is worth checking out if you are looking for a suspense movie to watch to kill a couple of hours.

Star Wars: Shadow Fall An Alphabet Squadron Novel

 

Shadow Fall, published in 2020, is the middle book of the Alphabet Squadron trilogy of novels written by Alexander Freed that follows a "B-team" group of characters in the aftermath of the Rebel's victory at the Battle of Endor. Much like the Rebels TV series, it mentions some of the "main" Star Wars characters but is set around a group of outcasts who form a fighter squadron tasked with trying to mop up the remaining Imperial threat. Specifically, an elite squad of Imperials called Shadow Wing. The story is set in a new system whose central star has collapsed into a black hole. It focuses on a few of the main characters established in the first novel, expands some on their backstory, and mixes in a decent amount of action, both set on the ground and in fighter battles.

Like the first one, this book suffers a bit from not including any of the main characters from the original trilogy. Even an appearance by Leia, Han, or Luke would have made the story a bit better. I know the author was telling a story about how the war affected those other than the Skywalkers and other main characters, but I think that could still be accomplished by including them in limited roles. Given that there really has not been (as of the original writing of this review) a novel that really details what Leia and Luke were doing in the immediate aftermath of their victory at Endor, using the ancillary novels as a setup for those stories (kind of like what the Aftermath Trilogy did), would have been good.

The hardcover version of the book is just under 400 pages. It is a similar length and has a similar tone to the first novel. If you enjoyed the first novel, you will probably enjoy this one as well. Along the same lines, if you did not like the first novel or were lukewarm to it, you will probably feel the same way about this one. I would probably not ever re-read this one unless I just wanted to read all the canon material over again. Nor would I say it is a must-read for those who pick and choose which novels they read. That said, it is a good ancillary story set in the Star Wars universe and is enjoyable if you accept that you will not get anything about what Han, Leia, Luke, Lando, etc., were doing during the events in the book.

DVD/Movie Collection Review: The Star Wars Trilogy

 

This one is one of the original DVD sets of the original Star Wars trilogy. It was a good set and had a lot of good bonus material, including the great Empire of Dreams documentary, that outlines the making of the entire original trilogy, with a ton of archived material. The only real drawback, and the reason that I got rid of the set when the blu-ray set came out, was that it does NOT include the original releases of the movies as they were shown in the theaters. You just get the special edition releases with all the edits and additions that Lucas did to the movies for the 20th anniversary of the original movie and leading up to the release of the prequel trilogy. Of course, Lucas famously hated the movies as they were originally released because they did not have the look he was going for because of the limitations of special effects when they were made. And, once the movies were released with all the digital effects that were available for him to use in 1997, he vowed that the original movies would not be released again. Now that was not quite true because there was a very horrible DVD release of the original movies that you can find online for an exorbitant price, but long ago went out of print. But, it was basically a transfer from the laserdisc release of the movies, that looked horrible, and a lot of people never bothered getting them. So, the only "easy" way to see the original versions of the original trilogy movies remains to this day on VHS for those old enough to have purchased the old VHS tapes and kept them all these years (and who still have a working VHS player). And, it does not seem that Disney is ever going to release the original versions of the movies as well, even though it easily could given that it owns the rights to everything Star Wars. So, assuming you have upgraded to blu-ray, 4k blu-ray, or switched to streaming, there is no reason to get this set anymore.

Blu-Ray/Movie Review: Short Circuit

 

Short Circuit is a comedy from 1986 starring Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg, Fisher Stevens, Tim Blaney, Austin Pendleton, and G.W. Bailey. Chances are, if you were a kid in the 1980s, you loved this movie. For those who have not seen it, yet somehow stumbled on the page for the DVD or Blu-Ray, it is about a robot called Number 5 that was designed to be a military weapon, programmed with artificial intelligence which, after being hit by lightning, becomes "alive". As I mentioned above, it stars 1980s staples Steve Guttenburg and G.W. Bailey from the Police Academy movies and Brat Pack member Ally Sheedy. Fisher Stevens played the comic relief sidekick as an assistant to Guttenburg's engineer/programmer character, who built and programmed the robots.

The movie definitely toes the line between adult and kid movies. The robot definitely appeals to kids, but there is a lot of swearing and off-color humor, mostly sexual jokes made by Stevens' character. So, it is probably not something you would want a really young kid to watch, but I think it is acceptable for kids who are 10, 11, or 12 years old and up. While rated PG, it could have easily been hit with a PG-13 rating. There is no nudity or sex in the movie; however, the closest is Sheedy in a bubble bath with everything covered.

The Blu-Ray release was very bare-bones. There are no bonus materials or extras. The AV transfer is of minimal quality, with the original aspect ratio of the movie presented, so if you have a large screen, it will play basically in a box in the middle of your screen. Not exactly widescreen, but not fullscreen either. Overall, it is a good comedy, that also blends some drama along with a bit of ethics and morality thrown in there. The writing and acting are okay for what it is, but neither are award-winning by any means. It flows around an hour and a half in length. For those who grew up in the 80s and probably watched it at least once on VHS, it is a good nostalgia trip down memory lane.