Elf: Ultimate Collector's Edition (DVD)

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Anyone in the market for a nice gift set this year may want to refer to the “Elf: Ultimate Collector’s Edition” set, a nice gift pack that will make a nice stocking stuffer for anyone who genuinely enjoyed Will Ferrell as an overgrown adopted Elf who goes in to the real world when he leaves the North Pole. “Elf” is really the only Will Ferrell movie I actually enjoy mainly because Ferrell is so unlike Ferrell here. He’s much more innocent, much more likable and never plays on his whole inept shtick he’s used to milk his film career since leaving Saturday Night Live. Now an apparent Broadway Musical (Ah, Broadway, you’ve sold your soul), this original film is a delightful and often hilarious fish out of water film about finding yourself after a life changing revelation, and trying to maintain innocence and optimism in a world filled with misery and cynicism.

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Malice in LaLaLand (2010)

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Lew Xypher’s porn “Malice in LaLaLand” is a wildly visual and unique porn flick that takes the entire Alice in Wonderland tale to a whole new level. Sure, it’s basically a fuck flick, but it’s also a very original and surreal trip in to the psyche of a young girl named Malice who is locked in an insane asylum and through her sub-conscious manages to travel in to LaLaLand where she confronts unreal monsters, wild creatures, and hot women all of whom inhabit this world. What’s interesting is that this world Malice travels may or may not be in all in her head, and she manages to escape the confines of her asylum with the help of a mysterious rabbit that breaks her free and helps her find the rabbit hole that brings her in to this journey of the mind.

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Winter's Bone (2010)

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936full-winter's-bone-posteRee Dolly is smart enough to know not to have sex at her young age and have a child. She is in a world of poverty and goes to school with friends who are barely out of puberty and strapped down with a baby. The tragedy though is with her mother being basically an invalid incapable of caring for herself, Ree is forced to be a mother anyway for her baby brother and sister, both of whom can barely cook let alone fend for themselves. It’s a horrible sick irony that plagues the life of Ree, the oldest of three children who is basically the mother, daughter, and guardian of her household, forced to live day by day and is often so desperate she has to rely on the neighbors to feed her family and give them electricity, but is too proud to ask for a hand out.

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Aiming at Nikita

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So far this is the third variation of the Luc Besson spy thriller masterpiece “La Femme Nikita,” and the more variations we see of it, the more the actual point of the premise is loss. We had “Point of No Return” a remake with Bridget Fonda I think I’d rather forget if only for being a piss poor adaptation of Besson’s film and for becoming a relatively obscure nineties fixture that put some nails in to Fonda’s career coffin. Then there was the basic cable spy thriller starring Peta Wilson that I really never bothered to watch mainly because it felt like a version of “Mission: Impossible,” and now there’s “Nikita.”

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Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens [Hardcover]

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Pretty-Things-bookIn celebration of the theatrical release of “Burlesque,” Harper Collins publishing releases a hardcore massive compendium of tributes and explorations in to the final generation of burlesque and the art of the seduction where revealing barely anything often is much more arousing than revealing it all. In the process though, it deems it loud and clear that a PG-13 film about Burlesque makes about as much sense as a PG movie about pornography. It’s absurd since while the book is an amazing look in to the final hurrah of Burlesque it’s also a pretty revealing look in to what made Burlesque so attractive from female performers who were skilled contortionists, to others who had some rather rotund and gigantic breasts who excelled at teasing men with what they didn’t see under their sweaters and tassels.

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Salt (2010)

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url21I’m still trying to decide what about “Salt” annoyed me more, the goofy turn of events in the second half that had me gawking in sheer disbelief, or the insistence by the writers to include an ending that fades to black right in the middle of a big turn of events as if to leave a “To Be Continued” assuring audiences that there will be a sequel. Not only is this trend absolutely obnoxious (I pay to see whole movies, not parts of movies), but if there really is no sequel to “Salt” (god willing), then the entire closing scene is just a pointless wide open door left for us to presume what occurred after the writers decided we’d had enough story for now.

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Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

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For the past four films, director Paul WS Anderson has taken what was once a very entertaining horror franchise and turned it in to a series of movies fetishizing his wife and doing nothing more than further his muse-like view on her. We nearly saw her naked in the first movie, she was a bad ass in the second, a goddess in the third movie, and in the fourth we’re given an army of Milla’s, presumably a concept Anderson got his jollies off of. That said “Afterlife” is a movie that continues to drag on this wasted concept and posit the question: Why is Umbrella continuing their research if about ninety-nine percent of the world consumed by hellfire and the walking dead? What do they further have to gain beyond being evil for the sake of being evil?

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