new on DVD: ‘Stardust,’ ‘The Simpsons Movie,’ ‘Balls of Fury,’ ‘The Last Legion,’ ‘Illegal Tender,’ ‘Alien Apocalypse,’ ‘The Man with the Screaming Brain’
See it:
• Stardust [buy it]. From my review:
I wish I could be more enthusiastic about Stardust. I like it just fine: it’s sweet and amusing and nicely diverting. And it’s colorful enough and clever enough and jam-packed enough with all sorts of pretty to wonder at that if this is your kinda thing, it’s definitely worth seeing on a big screen. But it’s not the next Princess Bride, as many of a geek persuasion have been suggesting.
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See it...now that it’s on DVD:
• The Simpsons Movie [buy it]. From my review:
This is very funny, especially for fans of the TV show, and especially in the first half hour or so. Oh man: the smackdowns of American idiocy -- in the realms of entertainment, politics, cultural attitudes, everything -- were coming so fast, and I was laughing so hard at them, that I couldn’t keep up writing them all down for Totally Quotable.
Skip it:
• Balls of Fury [buy it]. From my review:
Funnily enough, though -- and it’s the only thing funny about this dreadful excuse for a comedy -- the movie itself has tiny balls. It’s got no nerve, no guts, no daring... no balls. It does have a lot of ethnic stereotyping, the lazy screenwriter’s go-to cliché when he can’t think of anything actually funny. Oh, and it also has multiple crotch injuries, the lazy screenwriter’s other go-to cliché. It has a fat guy who is supposed to be funny because he’s fat, and a foul-mouthed elderly man who is supposed to be funny because he’s a foul-mouthed elderly man. It has moments of humiliation revolving around suggestions of gay sex, which are supposed to be funny because they suggest that some men like to have sex with other men, as if this were a newsflash. But there’s nothing actually, you know, funny.
• The Last Legion [buy it]. Remember those hilariously cheesy sword-and-sandal flicks of the 1960s? This is like that, except it’s about King Arthur as a kid.
• Illegal Tender [buy it]. It’s like a soap opera about drug dealers, and it doesn’t realize that it’s supposed to be silly instead of so darn serious. C’mon, crack a smile, at least...
• Alien Apocalypse [buy it]. This Sci Fi Channel Original movie is terrible, but not in a good. Still, I spotted my boyfriend Bruce Campbell this one, because it was unthinkable that he’d gone into this with foreknowledge of how bottom-of-the-barrel bad it was. But then came:
• The Man with the Screaming Brain [buy it]. Another jaw-droppingly, unironically bad Sci Fi Channel Original. I was seriously wondering whether our Bruce had been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with a pod person, but those new Old Spice commercials have made me feel a little better about him getting back on his feet...
