Friday Night Lights (3 out of 5 stars)
Universal/ January 18, 2005

While Friday Night Lights is a somewhat entertaining sports movie, the claim that it is one of the “greatest sports story movies ever made” seems a bit of a stretch. Based on a true story, this underdog football movie is pretty predictable and clichéd and can be a let down at the end. Still, the action is great and there are some compelling performances by fairly unknown actors.
On Friday nights during football season, the world shuts down in Texas as thousands of people crowd stadiums to watch high school football. H.G. Bissinger immortalized the experience in his book Friday Night Lights, which directors have been trying to adapt for years. The book tracks the progress of the 1998 Permian Panthers for Odessa, Texas, and was such a powerful story because Bissinger took a step back from football and wrote about the town and its inhabitants. There is not much to do in Odessa. Many people wanted to leave upon graduation, and for many of these boys, football was their only ticket out of town.
The football scenes start decently, but by the end of the film, Berg and crew do a great job of filming the pounding that these kids give and take. Billy Bob Thornton plays Coach Gary Gaines who must submit to armchair coaching from the entire town that worsens if he loses. Everybody is expecting him to win state. If not, he will almost certainly lose his job.
The star running back is Boobie Miles (Derek Luke) an arrogant but phenomenal athlete with bright hopes for the future. He fully acknowledges that he will go to college based on his football skills and not on his academics. Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlun) is living under the shadow of his alcoholic father (Tim McGraw) who also played for the Panthers. Quarterback Mike Winchell's (Lucas Black) mother is sick, but still drills him through all of his plays morning and night. Berg focuses on how the personal lives of these boys affects their play, and on the hopes and aspirations that each one is trying to achieve through football.
The ending is an acquired taste and while we won’t ruin it for you, we’ll just say it wasn’t what we were expecting. Sports fans will be entertained and non-sports fans might be entertained enough by the human emotion and Tim McGraw as an alcoholic father. Not bad.

All right sports fans, here is the box set for you. Everytime we think of Rocky we can't help but get "Eye of the Tiger" playing in our heads. This is the box set to eliminate all box sets. It features all five Rocky movies which, despite progressively getting worse and worse, stayed very entertaining. Each one except Rocky V has new High Definition Transfer to make sure you catch each and every piece of saliva that flies through the air when someone gets punched. And, believe it or not, the original Rocky did win Best Picture at the Oscars in 1976. So it is classy after all.

Classic Cartoon Favourites (5 out of 5 stars)
Disney/ January 11, 2005

Although many of Disney’s new films and cartoon series are very creative and amusing, there is something to be said for the classics that most of us grew up with. Our “back in the good old days” lamenting is over because Disney has just released four DVDs that have classic (and I don’t mean the super-old black and white ones) cartoons of all your favourite characters.
Starring Mickey features seven cartoons that are sure to send you back down memory lane. They include “Mickey’s Circus”, “Mickey’s Garden” and “On Ice” all of which are wonderful although perhaps a few should be a little more Mickey-centred.
Starring Donald has the hilarious “Chef Donald” short and “Don Donald” which also features Daisy Duck (who like a lot better than Minnie, shh).
Starring Goofy features “The Big Wash” where he comes to blows with Delores the Elephant and “Father’s Day Off” where his attempts to help with household chores end up, well, kind of messy.
Our favourite of these by far has got to be Starring Chip n’ Dale, which features our favourite chipmunks in animated shorts like “Dragon Around” and the farm fave “Chicken in the Rough.”
Any Disney fan will appreciate these unforgettable cartoons which are sure to entertain for many years to come.

The Village (3 out of 5 stars)
Touchstone/ January 11, 2005
Here’s a huge shocker: there is a twist in M.Night Shyamalan’s The Village. His movies are known for this and his best to this day, remains The Sixth Sense. He’s great at creating tension and suspense and he succeeds in this for the first half of The Village. Then it all goes downhill.
The Village takes place in a remote village, untouched by time, surrounded by a forbidding forest. The inhabitants of Covington have a truce with “the ones we do not speak of" in the forest where the people will stay in the village, and the monsters will stay in the forest.
This all changes when Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) deeply affected by the death of a child, asks permission to go through the forest to fetch 'medicines' from a nearby town. The village elders, led by Edward Walker (William Hurt) reject his request. They moved to the village to live away from the crime and evils that festered in the towns. Life begins to change for the village as the monsters begin encroaching upon the village, walking through at night and leaving skinned animal carcasses and red slashes across the doors. The sense of dread grows amongst the villagers and the audience. Still, there is time for Lucius to fall in love with Kitty (Bryce Dallas Howard) Walker's blind daughter.
The twist in this movie arrives very early and it seems like a huge mistake on Shyamalan’s part since as the movie keeps going, it becomes distracting and ruins the suspense. The final twist is also quite anti-climactic and you don’t sit there thinking how cool it is, you kind of wonder, “that’s it?”
The dialogue is archaic and forced and takes away from what the characters are saying which, to be fair, isn’t much.
The Village is one of Shyamalan’s poorest efforts and we hope he can create something comparable to The Sixth Sense next. Or maybe he should do a movie without a twist; that would be an actual surprise.