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Sep 13, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Justin LaLiberty |Jack Moulton |Big Picture |Big Trouble
“Fuck DVD” is how Kevin Smith chose to begin the Criterion Collection LaserDisc commentary for his third feature film, Chasing Amy. At the time, heading toward the end of the 1990s, home video was in a state of flux, ebbing and flowing between the hoard of general consumers clamoring for sell-through-priced VHS tapes and ardent home theater junkies eager to acquire the latest and greatest technology to show off the superiority of their deluxe systems.
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Aug 2, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Justin LaLiberty |Katie Rife |Dominic Corry
Starship Troopers cold opens with a television recruitment ad featured on the Federal Network, what will rather clearly be realized as the fascist television of the future. We see legions of soldiers, mostly young people, enlisting to “do their part!” to save the world by joining the mobile infantry before abruptly changing channels to show us a “bug meteor” being destroyed by intergalactic defense systems.
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Jun 10, 2024 | 
screenslate.com | Justin LaLiberty
When Nickelodeon Movies was unleashed in the summer of 1996 with Harriet the Spy, an adaptation of the revered 1964 novel by Louise Fitzhugh, the studio received top billing. The film’s official one-sheet positioned Nickelodeon as the film’s main attraction, rather than lead actress Michelle Trachtenberg, co-star Rosie O’Donnell, director Bronwen Hughes, or Fitzhugh herself.
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May 23, 2024 | 
screenslate.com | Justin LaLiberty
At the very least, it is safe to say that Ray Dennis Steckler’s idiosyncratic carnival horror film, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?,had one of the most memorable titles to adorn a film in 1964, perhaps only matched (or bested) by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
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Apr 22, 2024 | 
screenslate.com | Justin LaLiberty
After directing three paranoid and voyeuristic thrillers—The Bedroom Window (1987), Bad Influence (1990), and the box-office hit The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)—director Curtis Hanson pivoted to something decidedly more grandiose and action forward. On paper, Hanson’s The River Wild (1994) is an old-fashioned adventure film shot on location at river rapids in Montana and Oregon.
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Sep 6, 2023 | 
screenslate.com | Justin LaLiberty
Universal Pictures put a lot of faith, and money, into Waterworld, their summer tentpole for 1995. At that time it was the most expensive movie ever produced, with costs soaring past $235 million after prints and advertising, a budget soon eclipsed by James Cameron’s much more lucrative seafaring adventure Titanic (1997).
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Aug 31, 2023 | 
screenslate.com | Justin LaLiberty
Following up 2003’s unapologetically brash, career defining spectacle, Bad Boys II with a much more restrained, utopian sci-fi film is likely not what audiences, critics, or industry pundits expected from Michael Bay in 2005. The Island may not reach the R-rated excessive thrills of Bad Boys II’s increasingly wonton parade of urban slaughter, but it gives Bay a 120 million dollar budget to create a near future that is as sterile as it is brimming with opportune violence.
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Aug 15, 2023 | 
screenslate.com | Justin LaLiberty
In 1998, when Lethal Weapon 4 was unleashed in American multiplexes, Eastern talent was increasingly prevalent in Hollywood studio action films. The 1990s saw the first American films made by John Woo (Hard Target, 1993), Ringo Lam (Maximum Risk, 1996), and Tsui Hark (Double Team, 1997), all of which starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, as well as Jackie Chan’s breakthrough into the U.S. market, Rumble In the Bronx (1995).
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Jul 24, 2023 | 
screenslate.com | Justin LaLiberty
John Carpenter, a noted western genre fan, famously modeled his sophomore feature film, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), on Howard Hawks’s iconic oater Rio Bravo (1959). So it’s not surprising that he opens up his late-’80s sci-fi film They Live (1988) as many cowboy films have begun: with a down-on-his-luck drifter making his way through town set to a twangy score (composed by Carpenter and his frequent sonic collaborator Alan Howarth).
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May 4, 2023 | 
letterboxd.com | Justin LaLiberty |Mitchell Beaupre |Big Picture
Flash forward fifteen years and we could be considered to be living in yet another Golden Age of home video. The HD wars are long behind us, Blu-ray has had a very healthy run (and is still going) and DVDs, at least for serious collectors, are a relic of the past (and the $5 bin at big box retailers).
