The Couch Potato Report – August 4th, 2012
Inside this week’s Couch Potato Report is a Northern Canadian love story, Marilyn Monroe, and we’re off to Mars.
We start this week on a road trip to North Bay, Ontario for the romantic road trip I’M YOURS.
The story here begins in a bar in New York City as a man celebrating his thirtieth birthday meets a beautiful woman, and they spend the night together.
When he wakes up the next morning, in his car, she explains that they are on the way to North Bay to meet her parents.
The reason he agrees is because she found a bag of money that he was planning to use to run away from his Wall Street life and he’ll only get it back if he helps her.
And there is your classic movie set-up…two people at odds forced to spend time together…who just might find out that they have a lot in common, and might even find love.
But the reason I’M YOURS worked for me is that the characters are likeable and the performances by the young Canadian actors never seem like performances. It seems as if they are the people they have created.
I’M YOURS slows down a bit toward the end, but it starts off strong enough that it doesn’t matter.
I liked it, and can easily recommend it.
It was fifty years ago this weekend that one of the brightest stars in Hollywood was extinguished.
Marilyn Monroe died on August 5th, 1962, at her home in Brentwood, California. She was 36 years old.
In commemoration of the anniversary of her death, a new blu-ray box set called FOREVER MARILYN has been released featuring seven of her best known movies: THE MISFITS, SOME LIKE IT HOT, THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS, GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES, HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE, THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH and the made-in-Alberta western RIVER OF NO RETURN.
Five of these films have never been available in High Definition before, and that is one of the main reasons as they now look and sound amazing. Marilyn has never looked better!!
Sadly, FOREVER MARILYN is not a definitive box set as it doesn’t include all of the screen icon’s films, and four of the movies don’t have very many special features, plus…the set’s packaging isn’t the size of blu-rays, it is the size of a DVD, so it won’t fit on your blu-ray shelf. But those facts don’t diminish what it does have…seven classic Marilyn Monroe performances.
Fifty years after her death, she remains legendary, and one of the most beautiful women of all time.
I highly recommend this collection of her films.
I recently had a long conversation with a long time friend of mine about television shows. Old shows we love, current shows we enjoy, new shows that we would recommend to each other, we discussed everything from SEINFELD to THE NEWSROOM.
One show I didn’t mention, because I hadn’t seen it yet, but I have since emailed and told my friend about is the British series THE INBETWEENERS.
This show – about four friends trying to navigate life in and out of high school – is amazing!!
THE INBETWEENERS is a situation comedy that aired for three series from 2008 to 2010and now the six episode COMPLETE FIRST SEASON is available for us in Canada to watch or own.
Since the show features and is all about adolescent boys it is very profane at times and does feature storylines about things you can imagine high school boys would be interested in and all of it done honestly, and is usually very funny.
I do and will always love shows about friends just hanging out and doing stuff, even doing nothing, and that combined with the quality and well written situations offered up in THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON of THE INBETWEENERS is why I can say that I really enjoyed it, and can highly recommend it.
I am really looking forward to seeing the other two seasons and the movie they’ve made!! This is great stuff!!
The Discovery Channel’s first ever Shark Week took place in 1988 and this week long television celebration of sharks now takes place in over seventy-two countries around the world and is going strong twenty-four years since it first began.
Yes, 2012 minus 1988 is 24, yet there is now a new DVD and Blu-ray available called SHARK WEEK – 25th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION, which I guess is okay since we are now heading in to the twenty-fifth one…right?!
Admittedly, this could have been called SHARKS, SHARKS AND MORE SHARKS and would have wanted to watch it…I love sharks and shark week!!
SHARK WEEK – 25th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION features four programs that have ran over the years about sharks – Great White Shark: Uncaged, Blood In The Water, Mythbusters: Shark Special and the incredible Ultimate Air Jaws which features flying sharks…sort of…and oh so much more!!
I don’t think that the shows featured on SHARK WEEK – 25th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION are the best ones that have ever aired – Blood In The Water is especially weak – but I still enjoyed watching it, and I will watch it again one day down the road…whether it is Shark Week or not!!
Shark lovers, don’t miss it!!
LOL. If you text me a message, post something on Facebook, or send me an email and include those letters – LOL – I, and just about everyone else in the world will assume you mean Laughing Out Loud.
Even Wikipedia defines it as “LOL, an abbreviation for laughing out loud, or laugh out loud, is a common element of Internet slang.”
LOL is also in the Oxford English Dictionary – which is often referred to as the premier dictionary of the English language. LOL was added in March of 2011.
The fact that they don’t know what most people who speak the English language use the letters LOL for is just one of the many, many, many problems the producers of a Miley Cyrus movie called LOL have.
To the people who made this mess, LOL stands for Lots Of Love, which is another accepted use of those letters… and so is Little Old Lady…but most people don’t use LOL for Lots Of Love…and most people do not need to waste their time on this movie about a teenager with a broken heart who is also rebelling against her mom…in all o fthe most clichéd ways imaginable.
LOL is J-U-N-K, B-O-R-I-N-G, A-W-F-U-L, and you won’t care about it – and most of the people in it – for a second.
If you see it, S-K-I-P it…because you will not be laughing out loud, and you certainly won’t have lots of love for it.
Finally this week…lets go to Mars!
There is a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi classic opening in theatres next week, and so the original has been re-released on Blu-ray as TOTAL RECALL: ULTIMATE REKALL EDITION with some new special features, including an interview with Director Paul Verhoeven.
TOTAL RECALL is a great film that features some unique twists and turns, along with some of Schwarzenegger’s most quotable movie lines.
I have always enjoyed TOTAL RECALL and the newly remastered blu-ray version of it called the ULTIMATE REKALL EDITION looks and sounds great and is something I can easily recommend.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s TOTAL RECALL, the awful Miley Cyrus film LOL, the great SHARK WEEK – 25th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION, THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON of the fantastic British series THE INBETWEENERS, the not perfect but still great seven movie Marilyn Monroe set FOREVER MARILYN, and the likeable made-in-Northern-Ontario film I’M YOURS are all available now, either on disc or on demand.
Coming up inside the next Couch Potato Report
The quirky Canadian comedy MOON POINT, the documentary MARLEY about Bob Marley, CLUE: THE MOVIE and DR. SUESS’ THE LORAX…he speaks for the trees.
I’m Dan Reynish. I’ll have more on those, and some other releases, in seven days.
For now, that’s this week’s COUCH POTATO REPORT.
Enjoy the movies and I’ll see you back here again next time on The Couch!