I don’t know how, but I went 25 years without ever seeing a John Wayne movie. My grandparents were huge fans of the Duke, but I always ducked out of the room when he was on. It wasn’t until a few months ago when I first heard that the Coen brothers were remaking a classic John Wayne film that I became interested. I watched the original True Grit and fell into a months-long John Wayne kick. The original is a great film, filled with classic characters and a simple, but poignant, revenge plot.

The Coen brothers were the perfect choice to create another adaption of the novel by Charles Portis, and they’ve created their own classic. I think it’s their best film, and I can’t think of a better compliment considering their impressive filmography.

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Know any 70’s cartoon fans and need a last-minute gift idea? Check out this Mystery Machine Van Replica that Warner Bros. has released, containing 41 episodes from the original Scooby-Doo Where Are You! series. I’m a sucker for collectible DVD packages, and this one is pretty awesome. It’s the first DVD set I’ve seen that actually holds it’s own on a shelf next to your other collectibles as far as coolness-factor goes.

You know what to expect from the cartoon itself: pure 70s Hanna-Barbera camp. That’s not a bad thing by any means. Scooby-Doo Where Are You! became a template of sorts for HB cartoons in the 70s and 80s, but none of the other shows really captured the goofiness and fun of watching Shaggy, Scooby, and the gang solve mysteries every week.

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Last night it was between The Tourist and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and we chose Narnia. I enjoyed the first two movies, thought they were well done for what they were (children’s fantasy stories), and hoped the latest installment would be similar. Needless to say, I was not transported to a dreamworld of magic.

It’s one thing to get let down with a film when you had high expectations for it, but it’s worse when you only expected the movie to be decent and it turns out to be awful. I knew I liked Narnia enough to enjoy two movies full of it’s thinly veiled Christian allegories, stiff child acting, and bad writing, and I was just hoping that Dawn Treader would be interesting enough that my wife and I wouldn’t feel like we wasted our money or our evening. That’s all I wanted.

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Tron was one of those movies I would occasionally rent from the local Library as a kid of about 7 or 8 years old. At the time I viewed it (the early 90s) the 1982 movie already seemed dated, but it had a special charm and an interesting cast of characters including Kevin Flynn played by the “Dude” himself actor Jeff Bridges. It also presented some interesting concepts centering around artificial intelligence and how computers (and humans) connect to each other. Now, almost 30 years later we have the sequel Tron Legacy. How does the sequel compare with the original? Does it improve on what made the original still loved as a cult classic to this day?

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A few days ago I reviewed The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Disney’s attempt at making an action-adventure film out of the classic Mickey Mouse sequence in Fantasia. Seeing that so-so movie really made me want to watch the original, and luckily Disney released Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 on Blu-ray last week.

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