South Park: The Complete Third Season

The fun, comedy, and sheer insanity of what is South Park Season Three blazed across my screen this week, as I delved into The Complete Third Season of the Comedy Central show available now on blu-ray from Paramount Pictures. Over the course of seventeen episodes the small Colorado town of South Park is explored through…

Platoon (1986) – Oliver Stone

Walking away with Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Sound, Platoon is the next recommendation from the Great Movies – 100 Years of Film following my screening of Apocalypse Now. The film serves as a commentary on the horrors of war, even as two sergeants seem to be fighting for the…

The Deer Hunter (1978) – Micheal Cimino

Micheal Cimino’s examination of the effects of war, framed around the Vietnam conflict and a small industrial town in Pennsylvania is the next recommendation from the Great Movies – 100 Years of Film book following my screening of Apocalypse Now. Laying out the scars, physical, mental and unseen that affected those who fought in it,…

12 Years a Slave (2013) – Steve McQueen

What kind of species are we that we can enslave our fellows? There are two scenes in McQueen’s masterpiece 12 Years a Slave, that shook me to my core. The first was a scene in which Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Solomon Northup is left to hang, while life goes on around him, and another when Solomon is…

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991) – Devil’s Due, and Clues

Captain’s log: stardate 44474.5 With an airdate of 4 February, 1991, this episode, written by Philip LaZebnik, from a story by LaZebnik, and William Douglas Lansford, has always been a fun one for me. Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Data (Brent Spiner) find themselves in a mystery when they answer a call from a planet that…

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) – Rian Johnson

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Every time I see those words on a big screen, I get a shiver of anticipation, and if I’m being honest, a little teary-eyed. There is an inherent nostalgia when it comes to Star Wars. I can’t tell you what I had for dinner two…

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991) – Data’s Day, and The Wounded

Captain’s log: stardate 44390.1 Airing on 7 January, 1991, this Data (Brent Spiner)- centric episode did something that hadn’t been done in Star Trek before. It gave us a ‘day in the life’ episode. It also further cemented Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney) in the Trek Universe. Written by Harold Apter and Ronald D. Moore, the…

Dunkirk (2017) – Christopher Nolan

When I saw Dunkirk in IMAX this summer, I came out of the theatre with a one word review, “Wow.” Now Christopher Nolan’s brilliant retelling of the British evacuation from Dunkirk comes home on blu-ray and DVD thanks to Warner Brothers. Running at a taut hour and forty five minutes (Nolan’s shortest film since Following),…