I had been putting off seeing The Bourne Ultimatum because I wanted to make time to refresh my memory of The Bourne Identity and the Bourne Supremacy.  I finally took some time last Sunday to have my own Bourne marathon.

The Bourne Identity took some time to build an audience when it was released in theaters.  A lot of people did not believe that Matt Damon could be a believable action hero — those parts belonged to his best budd, Ben Affleck.  After watching The Bourne Identity, you get a sense that Damon could play any type of part he sets his mind to.

The movie starts off with a rescue at sea, as amnesiac Damon tries to piece together who he is.   As he finds answers, it leads to more danger and more questions.  His female companion is apropos for the movie — she is not your typical Bond sexpot.  Together, they have a chemistry that grows — that helps the story remain rooted in reality.

For an action movie, there is not much willing suspension of disbelief required.  Except for a couple of stunts, an audience member could do the same things with training.  The story is kept simple and, despite the twists that appear, has a comfortable linear progression.

The DVD has the usual extras.

My advice:  see it.  If you miss this movie, you are doing yourself a disservice.

Anybody who loves movies is familiar with the term “B-movie.”  Usually it refers to those movies that are not very good, but are high on the “cheese” factor.  Back in the day, theaters would play the bad movies as part of a double feature — the B selection.  We see this mirrored in the days of vinyl with 45-records having the hit on the A-side and another song on the B-side.

Since the early 90’s, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell have teamed up to make some memorable B-movies (Evil Dead).  Even into the 2000’s, Bruce Campbell seemed to relish being able to camp it up a bit on screen and TV.  So it was a no-brainer for him to take on the role of Elvis for a movie about a mummy spirit invading a rest home.  Ossie Davis, in his final screen appearance, plays a black JFK and provides the right chemistry to be Bruce’s sidekick.

A lot of the movie deals with Elvis’s thoughts and backstory — this could have been eliminated to add more danger from the monster.  The monster only got 2 people and was never on-screen long enough to make me fear that he might destroy everything.  What saves this movie is the relationship and the action sequences at the end.

The DVD features the normal extras, with the following bonuses:

• Commentary by Elvis, in addition to the director
• Music videos
• a leather Elvis jumpsuit sleeve for the case

My advice: if you like Bruce Campbell, check it out; otherwise, be prepared for it to be slow in a lot of places…

Now that my theatrical release reviews are caught up, I can delve into a stack of DVD reviews…

As a kid, I could count on two things on Saturday morning TV: Super-Friends and Bugs Bunny. ABC had some incarnation of Super-Friends on from the early 70s until around 84 or 85. CBS offered up Bugs Bunny and pals from the early 70s until around 82 or 83. I would get up, get breakfast, watch my hour of Super-Friends, followed by an hour of Batman/Tarzan, and ended with 90 minutes of classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Often times, my dad would join me for this last 90 minutes — one of the few times he would actually rest from doing something. My parents never worried about me getting violent ideas from the cartoons, because they had done their job in teaching me that the cartoon world operated under different rules than the real world. People did not survive falling from cliffs or holding dynamite sticks. Once that was clear, they let me enjoy the cartoons.

As I grew up, networks started running cheap cartoons made by toy companies to sell products. Bugs Bunny was a casualty of this as CBS shortened the show to an hour, then a half-hour, and then finally pulled it from the schedule. This started the creation of generations that did not fully understand the genius of Warner Brothers in its heyday. The late 80s brought us Tiny Toons, and the early-mid-90s brought us Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain. Mel Blanc, the voice of all, passed in 1989; his son did a Broadway tribute 1991 to some of the greatest cartoons.

Fast-forward to 2003…

I was working at a place that shared a parking lot with an AMC theater, so I would often catch twilight shows after work. Looney Tunes: Back in Action was one of those shows. A few months later it came out on DVD and I immediately got it.

Fast-forward to last month…

I couldn’t sleep one night and usually putting in a DVD I have seen many times will induce sleep, particularly one with animation. This time the plan backfired — I ended up watching the whole movie.

Don’t get me wrong — this is no great piece of film history. But it is cheesy and can be fun if you allow yourself to become that child that loved Saturday morning cartoons. Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, LT is a mix of live-action and animation. All of the classic gags from the original WB cartoons are hit, and the live actors do a great job of not taking the movie too seriously. Everyone is in on the gag. Brendan Fraser has some good comic timing and should attempt these roles in the future. This was the first time that Jenna Elfman actually looked good to me and Steve Martin channeled his drug-induced SNL days.

The best comparison I have to this film is The Muppet Movie — not much plot, but lots of cameos and just plain fun.

The DVD has all of the usual features including:

• Gag Reel
• Deleted Scenes

My advice: grab this one if you have some time to kill and want to see some good cheese with homages to classic cinema genres. It is also a fun way to spend some time with the kids. You could certainly pick worse movies to watch….