DVD Quicky Reviews

13 GOING ON 30 (Rented from NetFlix)

Rating: PG-13

Jennifer Garner's newest film is essentially a remake of the classic Tom Hank's film BIG with the genders reversed, and a dask of It's A Wonderful Life thrown in for good measure. Garner plays Jenna Rink, a gawky 13 year old girl with a geeky boy friend named Matty. She is desperate to get in good with the in-crowd (a flock of harpies called "the Six Chicks") and invites them all to her birthday party. When they humiliate her in front of Matty, she locks herself in a closet and wishes that she were "30 and flirty," like the women in her favorite fashion magazine. After a sprinkling of "wishing dust," she wakes up in Manhattan at age 30, in present day, and proceeds to explore the world and find out what kind of person she has become. Ultimately, she recognizes the flaws in her adult character, sees where she went wrong, and desperately hopes for a way to right those wrongs. The film is fun, mostly because Garner embodies Jenna perfectly. However, the film does not have the cross-over appeal to the male audience that some recent female-lead films have, but is pretty much a complete chick-flick. That being said, it is a good one which tells a good story, and is reasonably clean and safe for family watching.



SLIDERS: Seasons 1 and 2 (Bought from Wal-Mart)

Rating: TV

Sliders was one of those rare Sci Fi shows on TV these days - one that is not clearly derivative from Star Trek or X-Files. It followed the stories of four people who accidentally fall into a jounrey where they are sliding between parallel worlds. For those who do not follow sci fi, the idea is that there are an infinite number of parrallel earth with slightly different histories - one in which the USSR won the Cold War, and another where the USA is a matriarchy, for example. These travellers are forced to travel from world to world via wormhole ("sliding" is what they call it, since the wormhole is pictured like an interdimensional waterslide), as they try to get back to their home world. The series is full of interesting ideas, good stories, and lots of humor. It eventually died when the major stars began to leave for other careers, most notably Johnathan Rhys-Davies, best known these days as Gimli from the LOTR films. This DVD set is one of those rare exceptions to the rule of DVD collections. Most are horrible collections with GREAT packaging. This is instead a GREAT collection with horrible packaging. The marketeers tried to create a package where the DVDs appear to be forming a wormhole, but instead just managed to create one that is too big for your DVD shelf and almost impossible to replace the DVDs correctly after viewing. Consider buying this DVD set, but if so also plan to buy some jewel cases to protect the DVDs better than their default packaging!