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The Justice League is back, and ready to hit the bad guys like a ton of bricks. LEGO bricks, that is.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: ATTACK OF THE LEGION OF DOOM is the latest installment in the animated LEGO adventures of DC Comics' Justice League characters: Superman (Nolan North), Batman (Troy Baker), Wonder Woman (Grey Griffin), Flash (James Arnold Taylor), Green Lantern (Josh Keaton) and Cyborg (Khary Payton). Together, they've been successful in stopping the bad guys in their tracks.

The root story behind MATCH is a simple one, but therein lies its mystery as well.

Patrick Stewart stars as Tobi Powell, an aging, single, Manhattan ballet instructor and former dancer who is forced to confront his past -- willingly at first, and forcibly later on -- when a young couple, Lisa and Mike Davis (Carla Gugino and Matthew Lillard), from Seattle interrupt his life under the guise of wanting to interview him about his colorful life as a dancer back in the 1960’s.

I tend to love movies that feature a limited main cast in a confined set area (mostly Tobi’s apartment), where the story and acting are so strong that you not only lose track of the time but you're unaware of the limited surroundings. MATCH is a textbook example of this for me. While, yes, there are times when we are not in Tobi’s apartment, and there are some limited interactions with other people, those times are more to set up the story that plays out in the apartment between the three of them.

Marrying up the fairy tales of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, THE SEVENTH DWARF comes up short in story and in film quality, coming nowhere near the levels set by HOODWINKED or the SHREK franchise.

The scene is the 18th birthday party for Princess Rose (Peyton List). It's more than your average big deal, because it marks the day the princess can take off all her armor, which she's been forced to wear since she was born, having been cursed to sleep for 100 years if she were to prick her finger. But the evil witch, Dellamorta, is determined to bring her curse to fruition, and put Rose in a slumber that only the kiss of true love can dispel.

Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara forge an unlikely partnership in this cop film / buddy film / road trip film that goes off the rails almost immediately after the credits.

Witherspoon plays Officer Rose Cooper, whom we see grow up in the back seat of her father's patrol car. This upbringing has made her a rather intense person with a complete knowledge of the codes and regulations, but not much in the way of social interaction. In summation, she's a female Barney Fife, working a desk. For reasons that defy even the plot, she's selected to accompany a detective to bring in a Federal witness to testify, so that she can accompany the witness's wife, Daniella Riva (Vergara).

Bomb shelters, doomsday preparedness, and those on the apocalypse watch have a part in our society today just like they did at least as far back as the Cold War. The struggle to survive is deeply ingrained in the human psyche but some people clearly will go to drastic means to survive an Earth-changing conflagration. I can see the sentiment, more so now that I have a family, yet building an underground bunker has never been high on my things-to-do list. Perhaps it's because, no matter how close to the edge society rides, I'm more of a "half full" kind of guy, that believes the world won't drop over the precipice.

What if it hadn't been the son of Jor-El, but the son of General Zod who had made the trek from a doomed Krypton to Earth as a baby? What if Bruce Wayne's parents hadn't been killed? What if Diana had never come from Paradise Island?

JUSTICE LEAGUE: GODS AND MONSTERS is the brainchild of Bruce Timm (BATMAN ANIMATED ADVENTURES, JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED), and it's a Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman like you have never seen before.

The complete second season of the Syfy drama, BITTEN, is now out on DVD, allowing for some wonderful binge-watching of werewolves -- and, this season, of witches as well.

This sexy action-drama picks up with the murder of Elena's friend, who had discovered her lycanthropic secret. However, while that's touched on a little bit in this second season, it takes a back seat to the new plot, which introduces a coven of witches, led by Ruth Winterbourne (Tammy Isbell) and her daughter Paige (Tommie-Amber Pirie). One of their own, young Savannah (Kiara Glasco) has gone missing, and is being used to bring about the prophesied "Undoing" of all witches.

Being born in 1973 means icons like Bruce Lee, Jackie Robinson, Steve McQueen, Muhammad Ali, and Evel Knievel permeated my life basically from the womb until today. These men had all accomplished many of their greatest feats before I was born, or, if nothing else, at a time when I was still sucking my thumb. Yet through reruns, playground antics, highlights, and toys they became some of my greatest celebrity influences. On Spike! I have seen "I Am..." films for McQueen and Lee, but I somehow missed their recent special devoted to the daredevil some dubbed The Last Gladiator.

Rounding out our coverage of JUSTICE LEAGUE: GODS AND MONSTERS CHRONICLES is the third episode. This one is called "Big" and is all about Wonder Woman.    

Commentary:

You know, the HR-V ads before these videos are WAAAAYYYYY off theme.  The narrator is so bright and cheery, it takes a second to adjust back into the dark tone GODS AND MONSTERS has going for it.  

This one starts with President Waller sending Agent Steve Trevor to infilitrate Kobra to find a powerful new weapon they are building.  Kobra is about to execute him when suddenly Wonder Woman appears through a Boom Tube to rescue him.  They quickly defeat Kobra, but Kobra is able to activate their secret weapon, Gigantra!  Actually, a giant robot.

Here is the second of three episodes of JUSTICE LEAGUE: GODS AND MONSTERS CHRONICLES.  This one features Harley Quinn and Batman, and is called “Twisted.”

Commentary:  While I have thought both of these shorts were terrific, I can’t help but think that it has to be confusing for a lot of casual viewers to do stories like this.  One of the comments on Youtube said “This ain't your grandma's Justice League!” and I’m just not sure how I feel about that.  YES, I love to see the status quo get rocked at every opportunity, but when you get this far away from the source material, part of me wonders why you don’t just create something new entirely.  Batman’s costume in particular is such a departure, he looks more like an homage to Batman than any version of Batman I’ve ever seen before.

DC has been putting a lot of marketing muscle behind the upcoming JUSTICE LEAGUE: GODS AND MONSTERS.  In the upcoming weeks, there will be a digital comic series, and they have also been posting some shorts on Machinima's Youtube channel.   There are three of them, and we'll be posting them over the next few days.

Here is the first one, called "Bomb" and featuring Superman and Brainiac:

On July 14, BBC Video will be releasing Doctor Who: The Daleks. This collection features a Doctor Who story from each of the modern Doctors facing off against the Daleks, a classic Doctor Who story, and a new Documentary called Dalek Origins. 

Dalek (season 1, episode 6)

KILLING JESUS is the film based on the book by Bill O'Reilly with Martin Dugard. I have not read this book, but if Christopher Menaul's vision of the movie is anything close to it, it's a very unique vision of Jesus, and one that I couldn't see sitting comfortably with most Christians.

The story covers the range of Jesus's life, but skips over some important aspects. It begins with King Herod (Kelsey Grammer) who has a vision of Isaiah telling him the true King of the Jews has been born. This precedes a visit from the magi who are following an astronomical sign, which prompts Herod to order all the male babies to be killed. But Jesus escapes, because Joseph feels that the adulation poured out on their child will arouse Herod's jealousy.

In case you're even an amateur Bible scholar, you may have noticed that we're skipping over that whole bit about a visitation from an angel and going with a gut feeling.

When high school football coach Jim White is fired, again, he and his family end up in the poorest town in California -- McFarland. The population is almost entirely Mexican immigrants who work as pickers, Their football team is a pushover -- and it isn't long before he loses his position as an assistant coach for them as well!

What he does notice, however, is that these kids can run -- fast, and for long distances. As Jim (Kevin Costner) relates his plan to Principal Camillo (a much-slimmed Valente Rodriguez, THE GEORGE LOPEZ SHOW), the kids carbo-load on rice and beans, and then run miles to their jobs in hot dry weather. They're natural fits for cross-country running.

Putting together a team of seven is a challenge, and White has many obstacles keeping them together. Ultimately, however, his work has a lasting impact on the runners, their families, White's family, and indeed the entire town.

I love a good con movie. From THE STING through LEVERAGE, if it's done well, I'm pulled in.

FOCUS starts off with great promise, and the fact that the filmmaker's brought in the master, Apollo Robbins, as a consultant, shows they at least had their hearts in the right place going into this. The film stars Will Smith and Margot Robbie (who will pair up again in the already overexposed SUICIDE SQUAD next year) as Nicky, a master con man, and Jess, a would-be pickpocket who crosses his path. He takes her in, mentors her in the finer points of the grift, and lets her take part in some of his current cons. And then, without notice, he cuts her loose. All that buildup, all those wonderfully filmed scenes just go poof as we realize this was just backstory to the film that's only just now getting started well into the movie.

There's a certain mathematical elegance to the Wachowski's JUPITER ASCENDING. Given infinite space and infinite time, someone will be born somewhere with the exact same genetic sequence as someone who already existed. Multiply those infinite chances out, and that previous person might have been the Queen of the universe, who owned the Earth and willed it back to herself should she ever be genetically reassembled.

Of course, if the Queen of the Universe had children who covet the Earth because they're getting ready to harvest the people there to make their special water of life (the daughter is over 14 millennia old), then you might want to watch your royal back.

Ripper Street: Season Three is set to hit the streets on DVD and BluRay on June 23^rd, and if you’re a fan of the Leman Street good guys you’ll mark this date down on the calendar! I was hooked on Ripper Street half-way through the first episode of season one and I haven’t stopped loving every episode since.

Season Three is 8 episodes in length, and starts out four years after Season 2 ended. It takes the events that ended in season two and progresses them outward to what we see they’ve become four years hence. Things have not been so cozy in the time that has elapsed.

Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn) left Whitechapel and moved to Manchester to start over again and become the police officer/man he always wanted to be, foregoing violence to become a man of peace. Having risen quickly through the ranks, we see him here now as Inspector Drake.

There’s a good portion of America these days that probably hasn’t heard of Ed Sullivan or his variety show and thus don't know just how popular and important it was to the people of the US and to the careers of the performers who now occupy the status of legend in the entertainment industry.

Then there’s a good portion of us who were too young to remember THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW when it was on because we were too young by the time it wound down in 1971.

But there is still a sizable number of Americans who remember the show because they tuned in every week to see it. Those, dear reader, are the luckiest of all… because they got to see Elvis, the Beatles and so many more before all the rest of us.

Now, thanks to StarVista Entertainment, the rest of us can count ourselves lucky too. This 6-DVD set spans the entire run of THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW, showcasing many of the talents that performed on it through the years.

Sometimes you're lucky to review an item that simply put, you know going in you already love. I mean, what can I tell you about the film Goodfellas that hasn't already been said? It's up there with the first two Godfather films as one of the greatest achievements in gangster cinema. So glorious is this film that it transcends the genre and isn't JUST a gangster film. It's simply a masterful piece of storytelling. Beautifully written, masterfully directed, and featuring some of the best performances of the past quarter century. It's fingerprint is upon so many films that have come since. Goodfellas has created stereotypes and tropes of the genre, yet when it was released it was original and vibrant. The only question to be pondered: does it hold up twenty-five years later.

FROM THE DARK, available on Blu-ray, tells the haunting tale of a young couple who are on a road trip around the Irish country side. When they develop car trouble, they seek help at a nearby farm house and it isn’t long before they discover a terrible evil is lurking in the dark.  A creature has been awakened from a thousand year slumber by the owner of the house who unearthed it while digging in the bog, and the couple soon learn the only safety they have from it lies in the light. But night is falling quickly, and the darker it gets the more powerful the creature becomes.

The movie has a very limited cast and stars Niamh Algar and Stephen Cromwell as the young couple Sarah and Mark.