DVD Round Up

So, I'd been enjoying a Buñuel week on DVD (well, except for Tristana which I didn't enjoy so much, The Milky Way, though, I enjoyed immensely for a road movie about catholic heresy) and I need to watch something blow up so I visited my local DVD store and tried to catch up on some more mainstream fare. I don't really want to review these, there's plenty of places out there for that, and I'm not planning on making this a regular feature, it's just that a few things struck me and I wanted to share:

• Ghost Rider I actually quite enjoyed this. Nic Cage was likeably goofy and the action was reasonably well-staged. I don't quite get why the reviews for this were uniformly rotten. As a popcorn movie, it does the job just fine.


• Gridiron Gang The Rock teaches football to a bunch of young prisoners. It's obvious and emotionally manipulative. I cried all the way through and cheered at the end, just I was supposed to. And there's nothing wrong with that.


• The Prestige I got the "twist" fairly early on in this (and it's all but signposted with flashing neon) and it then annoyed me that the film thought it was being so clever about it. Probably a decent movie but I just wanted it to end.


• 300 Fun. There was some argle bargle about the politics of this when it first came out, as I remember. No questions are really asked about the Spartan lifestyle and their war-loving ways so I guess that is tacit approval of something. The film is such a Boys Own fantasy of men sticking things in each other (and occasionally women, too), however, that any political message it may have is confused at best. Armoured rhinos, though, cool or what?