Tag: Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Fall

BLU-RAY REVIEW:

Lionsgate;
Thriller;
Box Office $7.24 million;
$29.96 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray;
Rated ‘PG-13’ for bloody images, intense peril, and strong language.
Stars Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Mason Gooding, Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

It may not be the most innovative film in terms of storytelling, but Fall definitely earns points for an intriguing central plot device that just can’t help but be unnerving.

The story involves a young woman named Hunter (Virginia Gardner), who is a bit of an adrenaline junkie convincing, her best friend Becky (Grace Carlone Currey) to join her in climbing an abandoned steel antenna tower in the middle of the desert. Hunter and Becky used to be avid climbers together, but Becky hasn’t gotten out much since her husband died in an accident a year earlier.

The tower being old and rusted, the only ladder to the top collapses as soon as the girls make it up, leaving them stranded on a tiny platform 2,000 feet in the air with no way to get down, and no cell phone signal to call for help.

The solutions they can try are thwarted by a series of unfortunate events, such as a pair of campers who spot them deciding to steal their car rather than go for help.

With time running out, gravity a constant threat, and swarming vultures awaiting their inevitable fate, the girls must confront both their fears and some personal demons if they hope to survive.

It’s not the most sophisticated plot, and anyone who has seen enough of these films is going to recognize elements that are well known from other movies, starting with an opening scene that is very similar to that of another climbing movie, Vertical Limit. Heck, the premise itself is just an “Open Water” movie set on a tower. But the film does its job well, maintaining viewer interest in the characters while keeping viewers uncomfortably on the edge of their seats.

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The Blu-ray includes a good 15-minute making-of featurette that shows a lot of the challenges of filming in the desert, such as heat and bugs, but also how modern visual effects and editing made the low-budget production easier to pull off during COVID, such as avoiding reshoots to adjust the swearing in the film to bring it a rating that would make it more accessible to a wider audience.

A good commentary from producer-co-writer-director Scott Mann and producer James Harris delves into more details about some of the guerilla filmmaking techniques used, such as buying equipment from Best Buy only to return it when the production was done with it.

Other extras include the film’s trailer, and a music video for the song “I Have Never Felt More Alive” by Madison Beer, though it’s just clips from the movie with superimposed song lyrics.

‘The Walking Dead’ Season 10 Due on Disc July 20

Lionsgate will release The Walking Dead: The Complete Tenth Season on Blu-ray Disc and DVD July 20.

The collection includes all 22 episodes from the extended 10th season, in which the collected communities prepare for war against the brutal Whisperers. Additional episodes include the flashback episode “Here’s Negan,” which presents the origin story of the fan-favorite character played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

The season also sees the departure of Michonne, played by Danai Gurira, and the return of Maggie, played by Lauren Cohan.

Other cast members include Norman Reedus, Christian Serratos, Samantha Morton, Melissa McBride, Josh McDermitt, Seth Gilliam, Ross Marquand, Cooper Andrews and Khary Payton.

Blu-ray and DVD extras include audio commentaries and an “In Memoriam” featurette. The Blu-ray will also include digital copies of the episodes.

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Supernatural: The Complete Series

BLU-RAY REVIEW:

Street Date 5/25/21;
Warner;
Fantasy;
$329.99 86-DVD set, $359.99 58-disc Blu-ray;
Not rated.
Starring Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, Misha Collins, Alexander Calvert, Katie Cassidy, Lauren Cohan, Mark A. Sheppard, Mark Pellegrino, Jim Beaver, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Samantha Smith, Adrianne Palicki, Kathryn Newton, DJ Qualls, Felicia Day, Osric Chau, Lauren Tom, Alaina Huffman, Courtney Ford, Sterling K. Brown, Kurt Fuller, Curtis Armstrong, Ruth Connell.

It may be a cliché to say they don’t make ’em like they used to, but it’s an idiom that certainly applies in the case of “Supernatural.”

The series stars Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles as Sam and Dean Winchester, brothers who spend the show traveling the country in a black 1967 Impala hunting monsters, demons, ghosts and other supernatural beings. Their quest to find their father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and find their mothers’ killer introduces them to a wider world of demon hunters, magic and divine beings who hold the fate of reality in their hands. At one point, the characters even become animated for a crossover with Scooby-Doo (in season 13).

Running an amazing 15 seasons and 327 episodes, the series began in 2005 on the old WB network, its last year before it merged with UPN to become what’s now known as The CW. Airing on the lowest rung of the network ladder certainly helped it flourish, as it became the longest-running American sci-fi/fantasy TV series in history with its 11th season, surpassing WB/CW sister series “Smallville,” which had run for 10 seasons and 217 episode, outpacing another 10-season sci-fi series, “Stargate SG-1,” by three episodes. The British side of the genre has produced “Doctor Who,” of course, with separate runs of 26 and 12 seasons (and an upcoming 13th), but with shorter episode lengths in the classic era and fewer episodes per season in the modern.

That’s the kind of output the TV industry just isn’t interested in sustaining anymore, beyond the handful of legacy procedurals that are sticking around on the networks. Between cable and streamers and the short attention spans of audiences, three- to four-season runs of 10 episodes apiece are much more the norm now.

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The massive complete-series Blu-ray disc set efficiently repackages all the previously released individual season sets, as well as the new 15th and final season set, and all the bonus material that entails.

The set comes in the form of a handsome outer box housing seven thick Blu-ray cases, packed two seasons per case, except for the seventh case which contains the final three seasons. Each of the first six cases house eight discs (except for case two, which has seven discs for seasons three and four), while case seven has 10 discs in total. This distribution pattern left no room for the season 15 bonus disc, which is instead housed in its own separate cardboard sleave at the end of the stack, alongside a booklet containing an episode guide, photos from the series, production artwork, and notes to the fans from series creator Eric Kripke and executive producer Robert Singer.

It’s a slightly awkward configuration but seemingly unavoidable without either splitting up one of the seasons into two separate cases, inventing an 11-disc case, or putting the four discs of season 15 in its own case and making the overall box bigger. All in all it’s just a minor infringement on any OCD some fans or collectors might have.

Among the extras on that final disc are a featurette about the series finale, a documentary about the show’s strong themes of family, and a look at the Winchesters as American heroes in the vein of folklore archetypes. There’s also a gag reel, a retrospective of all 15 seasons, and highlights from the show’s 2019 San Diego Comic-Con panel, which due to COVID-19 canceling the 2020 event turned out to be the show’s last.

In the final extra, a lucky fan wins a replica of the show’s iconic Impala.

The set does not include Supernatural: The Anime Series, which was released on Blu-ray in 2011.

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Rampage

BLU-RAY REVIEW: 

Street 7/17/18;
Warner;
Action;
Box Office $98.58 million;
$28.98 DVD, $35.99 Blu-ray, $44.95 3D BD, $44.95 UHD BD;
Rated ‘PG-13’ for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief language, and crude gestures.
Stars Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Akerman, Jake Lacy, Joe Manganiello, Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

Movies based on video games often run into trouble when the screenwriters deconstruct the original premise of the game to the point where it either barely resembles the source material or loses the sense of fun that made the game popular to begin with.

On the other hand, some arcade games have a premise that is so basic that a convoluted screenplay is almost required to translate it into a movie.

Rampage, based on the 1980s Midway smash-em-up game that gave players the option to play as one of three mutant creatures attacking a city, manages to find a balance between the two extremes, using an evil corporation storyline to explain how a gorilla, a wolf and an alligator mutate into giant monsters and lay waste to Chicago.

The film jettisons the game’s notion that there are people who morph into the creatures — an aspect of the game’s constant replayability — in favor of a storyline involving a gorilla expert (Dwayne Johnson) caught up in a corporate conspiracy to weaponize genetic engineering.

The script doesn’t delve too deeply into the tropes it needs to use to get to the meat of what the game is about, and that’s giant creatures attacking everything around them, eating people, destroying buildings and causing all-around mayhem.

Johnson is pretty much settled into his generic action-star persona at this point, to the degree that his character has a name but it doesn’t much matter what it is. This is his third collaboration with director Brad Peyton, following Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and San Andreas, and the pair demonstrates a reliable confidence in delivering audience-pleasing action that doesn’t rely on over-complicating the storyline.

Likewise, Jeffrey Dean Morgan isn’t doing much more than a more benevolent take on his smarmy Negan character that made him a popular mainstay on “The Walking Dead.” But, again, it’s all in service to the central concept of getting the giant animals to a big city and trashing it.

And once they do get to Chicago, oh the destruction is glorious. It almost serves as a preview of the eventual King Kong vs. Godzilla movie. The filmmakers also took care to layer in several subtle references to the game mechanics, as revealed in one of the Blu-ray’s behind-the-scenes featurettes, the six-minute “Not a Game Anymore.”

Other featurettes, running between 10 and 12 minutes each, include a look at the stunts, the designs of the monsters, the attack on Chicago and the development of the Gorilla, George.

The Blu-ray also includes a nearly three-minute gag reel and more than 10 minutes of deleted scenes, including an excised cameo from San Andreas co-star Alexandra Daddario.