The Couch Potato Report
May 31st, 2014
Green is the colour to fans of the CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders, and those fans don’t only reside in the province the team calls home, they can be found from coast to coast.
There’s Tom and Vanessa (Fleming) in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, Regan (Alford) in Halifax, Genevieve (Tardif) in Montreal, Laura (Monette) in Ottawa, almost all of Saskatchewan itself, another Regan (Tate) in Medicine Hat, and Robbie (Ireland Longpre) in Victoria, British Columbia.
It is those fans whom the new release ALL IN comes highly recommended as a must have!
Subtitled A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT THE TEAM AND EVENT THAT MADE HISTORY, ALL IN is a 70 minute look at the Riders victory last November on home soil in Regina in the 101st Grey Cup Game.
ALL IN takes us from training camp to the last seconds of the game and features interviews with team management, local media personalities, and several of the players, including Grey Cup 101 MVP Kory Sheets.
For die-hard fans of the team ALL IN is a must own. Casual fans may just want to borrow it from a friend because the release is far from perfect.
For starters, 70 minutes is nowhere near enough time to cover an entire season and Grey Cup Week and the game, the victory, the parties afterward, AND feature new interviews with management and players looking back and sharing their memories.
Plus, ALL IN doesn’t feature enough of the television version of the game, which was the fourth most-watched Grey Cup ever aired.
And where is Number 4? Where is Darian Durant throughout most of ALL IN? The team’s quarterback literally put the entire team on his shoulders at times last season, especially in the playoffs, and yet he is only featured through old interview footage from media scrums and from public events held after the victory.
His omission is a glaring mistake. Luckily Geroy Simon is there to cover for his QB, and the filmmakers.
Those criticisms aside, ALL IN – A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT THE TEAM AND EVENT THAT MADE HISTORY is still a very good production, and I can easily recommend it to fans of the Green & White across Saskatchewan, and from Newfoundland to British Columbia.
There was a remake of the 1966 film GAMBIT released late last year that featured a screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen, written back in 2010 not long after they were given an Academy Award nomination for their remake of TRUE GRIT.
The GAMBIT remake co-starred Academy Award winner Colin Firth, the always fun Cameron Diaz, Alan Rickman of DIE HARD and Stanley Tucci from THE HUNGER GAMES films.
Sadly, with all of that talent involved, the film is almost unwatchable.
Firth plays an art curator who decides to try and con his abusive billionaire boss into buying a fake Monet, but he can’t do it without the help of a complete stranger, an eccentric and unpredictable Texas rodeo queen played by Cameron Diaz. Yes, he’s willing to trust a complete stranger with a multi million dollar art heist. That is totally believable!!
GAMBIT isn’t funny, charming or really all that interesting. I like heist films, and I love this cast and the screenwriters, but this movie just isn’t worthy of your time.
Back in 1981, legendary Italian director Franco Zeffirelli gave us a movie called ENDLESS LOVE.
It starred Martin Hewitt as a high school student who’s love for a 15-year-old girl was thwarted by parental disapproval, circumstance and the fact that he set her family’s house on fire.
Brooke Shields played the young girl and while the film was a moderate box-office success, the only thing about it that has stood the test of time is the movie’s theme song.
Also called “Endless Love”, it was performed by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie and it spent nine weeks at Number One on the charts.
And now, because Hollywood loves to remake old movies, we have an updated version of ENDLESS LOVE but it actually plays more like a remake of SAY ANYTHING than anything else.
This ENDLESS LOVE stars Alex Pettyfer from MAGIC MIKE as a smart and charismatic recent High School graduate who doesn’t want to go to College, he’s happy to just work with his Dad in the family garage.
Gabriella Wilde from last year’s remake of CARRIE, yes Hollywood loves to remake old movies, plays the object of his affection, but she is such an uninteresting human being and movie character, it’s hard to believe that he’s fallen that hard for her.
Yes, as in the original, their love affair is made reckless by parents trying to keep them apart, and there is also a fire in this one, and it’s all a little bit different. Not much, but enough to be different
This version of ENDLESS LOVE is never awful, and it has a very strong supporting cast lead by Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood, it is always only okay. I didn’t like it, I didn’t dislike it, it is just okay.
That being the case, I’ll neither recommend it or suggest you skip it either…and I hope that is just okay too.
Alright, let me split the difference…should you think you’ll enjoy it, you just might. Otherwise, skip it.
Finally this week:
In 1984 a very funny comedy about social life on a university campus was released called REVENGE OF THE NERDS.
Lewis, Gilbert, Poindexter, Wormser, Lamar, Takashi and the boys are smart, personable, learned young men, many with pocket protectors…okay, they’re nerds, and they struggle to stop being picked on and harassed by the campus jocks.
These nerds seek revenge!!
The new Blu-ray for REVENGE OF THE NERDS has a great print of the film, and some very entertaining retrospective Bonus Features, and the original theatrical trailer, voiced by Orson Welles!!
I love this film, always have and always will. The sequels were a mixed bag, but this original one is still entertaining and laugh out loud funny.
Nerds forever!!
The still great eighties comedy REVENGE OF THE NERDS; the okay remake of the eighties drama ENDLESS LOVE; and the not great remake of the sixties film GAMBIT are all available now, either on disc or on demand.
ALL IN – A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT THE TEAM AND EVENT THAT MADE HISTORY is available on the Saskatchewan Roughriders online store at theriderstore.com.
And that’s this week’s COUCH POTATO REPORT.
Enjoy the movies and I’ll see you back here again next time on The Couch!