Combat! The Complete Fourth Season (DVD)

Image Entertainment releases season four of one of the most complex and interesting war time dramas I’ve ever seen. With a wonderful opening sequence reliant on heavy symbolism involving a soldier’s helmet, and a great cast, “Combat!” is a lot like “Saving Private Ryan.” But if their journey was five seasons long.

And we followed two separate platoons on the field. “Combat!” takes a more subtle approach to the war, with star Vic Morrow and Rick Jason leading their own platoons through the battlefield with episodes that varied between characters. Season four on DVD features all 31 episodes of the fourth season as well as bloopers, audio commentary, and behind the scenes.

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World War Z (2013)

WorldWarZ-PosterWe live in an age of pop culture, where today’s horror fan didn’t so much cut their teeth on horror movies, as they did horror video games. Where older horror fans were exposed to “Dead Alive” or “Cemetery Man,” young horror fans spent their days in the world of “Left for Dead” and “Dead Island.” It’s an age where horror environments are fast moving, stories are simplistic and unchallenging, and monsters are now computer animated polygonal blobs running at us from all corners.

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The Lone Ranger (2003)

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Back in 2003, Warner had the bright idea to pretty much take the “Smallville” concept and apply it to the Lone Ranger. Rather than featuring a very young superhero, we were given a very young pulp hero. Except, they changed everything about the original hero. And tried their best to pass off a white cowboy hat and black mask as cool for modern audiences. There’s even a guitar version of the William Tell Overture in the closing credits. Guitars are cool, right? There’s a reason why Lone Ranger is a pulp character. He’s a wonderful superhero, but adjusted to contemporary style is not going to work.

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Bambi (1942)

Narrative wise, there isn’t much to “Bambi” and its story that garners a lot of subtext or undertones. Bambi is born, he learns about the world, his mom dies, he becomes a man, falls in love, and the end. For the rest of the world “Bambi” is a bonafide masterpiece, but objectively it’s a very stripped down and basic animated movie that feels so much more like an animation experiment than it does a movie.

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The Lion King (1994)

The-Lion-KingWhether Disney did or didn’t plagiarize Osamu Tezuka’s “Kimba the White Lion,” we’ll never truly know. What I do know for certain is that “The Lion King” is still one of the best cinematic experiences I’ve ever had, and my number two animated film of all time. It’s a bold mixture of 2D animation, and amazing CGI that combines to tell a rather adult and complex tale about revenge and destiny.

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Least Among Saints (2012) (DVD)

It’s not often indie dramas can compel and pull off a story so steeped in melodrama without being a cloying sickening glorified TV movie. Thankfully, Martin Papazian’s drama about two mentally unstable outcasts finding one another in the sadness manages to be a fantastic bittersweet drama filled with rich performances all around. Director Papazian manages to bring the film down to a level that doesn’t try for sap and sugary sweet, and keeps its characters grounded enough to where their conflicts and dilemmas feel realistic and warrant audiences empathies.

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Ordinary People (1980)

Guilt is a complex anomaly in the human psyche. It’s remorseless, it’s unbiased, it lingers for decades, and many times it takes on different forms. It can take on the form of blame, and it can form into blame of the most unlikely people, just to make sense of the senseless in our lives. In the face of tragedy some people just need to point fingers and blame the innocent just to help us cope with a horrible trauma, and the same can be said for the characters featured in one of my favorite dramas of all time.

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