Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Deck the Halls

  • REGION 1 DVD - NSTC
Matthew Broderick and Danny DeVito are hilarious as two neighbors trying to put the "win" in "winter" in one of the year's funniest comedies! Determined to unseat Steve Finch's (Broderick) reign as the town's holiday season king, Buddy Hall (DeVito) plasters his house with so many decorative lights that it'll be visible from space! When their wives (Kristin Davis and Kristin Chenoweth) bond, and their kids follow suit, the two men only escalate their rivalry ­ and their decorating. It's anybody's guess whether the holidays will wind up jolly or jostled in this wild and woolly laugh-fest that the whole family will love!Good neighbors can be hard to come by and when the flighty Buddy Hall (Danny Devito) moves in across the street from the conservative Dr. Steve Finch (Matthew Broderick), it quickly becomes apparent that the two men are complete opposites. While Finch met! hodically plans out every minute of the coming Christmas season for his family, Buddy craves freshness and excitement and is seized by an impulsive desire to decorate his house so brightly that it can be seen from space. While the men's wives Kelly (Kristin Davis) and Tia (Kristin Chenoweth) and their children revel in one another's differences and form solid friendships, a rivalry of personalities and Christmas spirit ensues between the two men that will wind up testing the patience and love of every member of both families. This is fun, comical holiday entertainment for the entire family ages 9 and older. --Tami Horiuchi

Beyond Deck the Halls


The Holidays on DVD

Matthew Broderick Films

Danny DeVito Films



Stills from Deck the Halls







Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 10/04/2011 Run time: 93 minutes Rating: PgA slapstick comedy starring Matthew Broderick and Danny DeVito, Deck The Halls tackles the Christmas spirit with lights, music, and plenty o' pratfalls--none of which makes much sense in this floundering film. Steve Finch (Broderick) is a persnickety dentist who enjoys being the town's go-to guy when it comes to all things Christmas. Buddy Hall (DeVito) is his new neighbor--a car salesman who finds that decorating the exterior of his house in bright, garish decorations and lights makes him feel like the big man he never was. His goal is for his Lite-Brite house to be visible from space. Why? It's better not to ask, because there really is no logical explanation. As Buddy says, "Sometimes my stupidity astounds me." The same could be said for Steve and this movie. While the characters' wives (played by Kristin Davis and Kristin Chenoweth) are more relatable, their fast friendship is! unbelievable--especially when they side with each other rathe! r than t heir husbands. Though there are some funny moments (a dirty manger scene with a spitting camel comes to mind), Deck The Halls spends way too much time asking the audience to root for a pair of wannabe alpha males who have little redeeming value. Both DeVito (Get Shorty, Taxi) and Broderick (Election, WarGames) have formidable resumes and deserve better than this movie, which offers strong visuals but a barely-there plot. "How's it feel to be invisible?" Steve rhetorically asks. Sometimes, being invisible is better than just being bad. --Jae-Ha KimCHRISTMAS IN PARADISE
Two bereaved families take a holiday vacation to an exotic Caribbean island to escape the memories of Christmas past. Dan Cassidy s (Colin Ferguson, Eureka) wife has left him and his teen daughters for another man. Dana Shaw (Charlotte Ross, Glee) recently suffered the death of her husband, leaving her alone with their two teen sons. The parents and kids develop bond! s on a cruise ship and their stay at a beach resort. When Dan's ex-wife shows up to reclaim her family, what promised to be a happy Christmas turns emotionally complicated as each character has to sort out their feelings and choose their own path.

DECK THE HALLS
Holly (Gabrielle Carteris, Beverly Hills, 90210) returns to her hometown with her eight-year old son, Ben, to work for her father's toy business. Soon after, Ben watches a man (Steve Bacic, Big Love) move in next door with a sleigh, red suit, and lots of Christmas goodies. Ben begins to believe that their new neighbor is Santa Claus, and devises a plan to set up his mom with Santa Claus.Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 10/04/2011 Run time: 93 minutes Rating: PgA slapstick comedy starring Matthew Broderick and Danny DeVito, Deck The Halls tackles the Christmas spirit with lights, music, and plenty o' pratfalls--none of which makes much sense in this floundering film. Steve Finch (Broderick) is a persni! ckety dentist who enjoys being the town's go-to guy when it co! mes to a ll things Christmas. Buddy Hall (DeVito) is his new neighbor--a car salesman who finds that decorating the exterior of his house in bright, garish decorations and lights makes him feel like the big man he never was. His goal is for his Lite-Brite house to be visible from space. Why? It's better not to ask, because there really is no logical explanation. As Buddy says, "Sometimes my stupidity astounds me." The same could be said for Steve and this movie. While the characters' wives (played by Kristin Davis and Kristin Chenoweth) are more relatable, their fast friendship is unbelievable--especially when they side with each other rather than their husbands. Though there are some funny moments (a dirty manger scene with a spitting camel comes to mind), Deck The Halls spends way too much time asking the audience to root for a pair of wannabe alpha males who have little redeeming value. Both DeVito (Get Shorty, Taxi) and Broderick (Election, WarGames! ) have formidable resumes and deserve better than this movie, which offers strong visuals but a barely-there plot. "How's it feel to be invisible?" Steve rhetorically asks. Sometimes, being invisible is better than just being bad. --Jae-Ha KimIn the tradition of such classic films as "Miracle On 34th Street", a hip, eccentric marketing genius teaches a widow and her son the miracle of Christmas.

Friday the 13th (Extended Killer Cut)

  • A man in search of his missing sister stumbles across a deadly secret in the woods surrounding Crystal Lake as Texas Chainsaw Massacre redux duo Michael Bay and Marcus Nispel resurrect one of the silver screen's most feared slashers -- machete-wielding, hockey mask-wearing madman Jason Voorhees. The last time Clay heard from his sister, she was headed toward Crystal Lake. There, amidst the creaky
Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 10/04/2011 Run time: 736 minutesFriday the 13th
This splatter flick, along with John Carpenter's Halloween, helped spawn the great horror-movie movement of the '80s, not to mentioneight sequels, many of which had nothing to do with the films that preceded them. It also gave birth to Jason Voorhees, one of the three biggest horror-movie psychos of the modern era (the other two being Halloween's Michael Myer! s and A Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger). Forever duplicated, the original Friday the 13th popularized a number of themes and techniques that today are now clichés: the increasingly gory murders, the remote forest location, the anonymous and nubile cast, the murderer as cult hero, and, of course, the moral that if you have sex, you will die, very painfully. Still, if you have to see a Friday the 13th movie, this is the one to check out. A group of eager (and horny) teenagers decide to reopen Camp Crystal Lake, which 20 years earlier was closed after the shocking and mysterious murders of two amorous camp counselors. You can take it from there, as the teens get picked off one by one, during a dark and stormy night; of course, their car won't start and there's no phone. The ending stole shamelessly from Brian De Palma's Carrie, but it still provides a slight if campy shock. Look for a young Kevin Bacon as the requisite! stud--you can tell that's what he is because when the cast a! ppears i n swimsuits, he's wearing a Speedo--who's the beneficiary of the film's best murder sequence, an arrowhead to the throat. Right after having sex, of course. --Mark Englehart

Friday the 13th, Part 2
As bad as Friday the 13th, Part 2 is, it's a work of art in comparison to the rest of the Friday the 13th flicks that came afterward. This installment officially introduced us to Jason Voorhees as the killer (if you remember Drew Barrymore's fatal phone quiz in Scream, you know that the killer in the first Friday the 13th was actually Jason's mother), and made the slicing and dicing even more generic. Survivor Alice is dispatched within the first 10 minutes, and we're left with plucky Ginny (Amy Steel, doing a fairly decent Jamie Lee Curtis impression) to do battle with the monstrous Jason. Ginny's part of a another group of horny teenagers (less intelligent as well as less attractive than their! predecessors) who try to resurrect Camp Crystal Lake five years after the initial murders--a pretty mean feat, considering this movie was made only a year after the first one. Being a smarty-pants child-psychology major, Ginny tries to outwit the dim Jason, and at one point dons the bloody and moldy sweater of Jason's late mother (which is more disgusting than any of the killings beforehand) in an attempt to confuse the masked killer. Jason may not be the brightest bulb on the tree, but the only one who's going to pull the wool--or in this case, the burlap--over his eyes is Jason himself, who wears a sack with one eyehole throughout the movie to hide his deformed features (he finally found his way to a sporting-goods store and his trademark hockey mask appears in the third installment of the series). Directed by Steve Miner, who also helmed the next Friday the 13th film (in 3-D no less) as well as the more reputable House, Forever Young, and Halloween: H20. --Mark Englehart
Friday the 13th, Part 3
The tender, tragic saga of Jason Vorhees, the world's unhappiest camper, continues when yet another batch of hormonally advanced teens decide to ignore past history and spend some time at the woodsy, pine-scented slaughterhouse known as Camp Crystal Lake. It may be a bit of a stretch to describe any of the entries in this interminable series as "good," but this creatively grotesque installment manages to come surprisingly close with a welcome sense of humor and some quick glimmers of real menace (courtesy of director Steve Miner, who would later go on to helm the far more accomplished Halloween: H20). Originally presented in 3-D, which explains the never-ending slew of objects (knives, pitchforks, yo-yos, cats, eyeballs, etc.) that are repeatedly thrust in the viewer's general direction. --Andrew Wright

Friday the 13th, The Final Chapter
Amateur butcher and enthusiasti! c hockey fan Jason Vorhees is back in business, and business is good. Can a plucky young boy stop the madness before Camp Crystal Lake's population report takes yet another machete-aided dip? The stalk-and-slash formula was pretty narcoleptic by this point, but this otherwise humdrum entry is distinguished by some unusual casting choices (Crispin Glover as a stud in training? Corey Feldman as a genius?) and the splattery return of makeup master Tom Savini. The fact that this installment was titled The Final Chapter may seem to contradict the existence of the numerous sequels that followed, but it's not as if logic was ever this series' strong point to begin with. --Andrew Wright

Friday the 13th, Part VII
A philosophical quandary: when we truly get a glimpse behind the mask, do we like what we see? This eternal question is directly addressed in chapter 7 of the famed Friday the 13th gross-out series. Here! , indestructible killing machine Jason meets his match in the! form of a telekinetic teenage girl. Yes, it's "Carrie Goes Camping," although the young lady with special powers might have picked a better vacation spot than Crystal Lake, which has an awful track record for young blondes in tight jeans. This installment is exactly no better or worse than the previous Jason-o-ramas, with the added bonus of a climax in which the imperturbable Mr. Voorhees actually duels someone with supernatural gifts to rival his own. Yes, he does lose his hockey mask (the heroine mind-wills it to pop off), and the results ain't pretty--but then, neither is the Friday the 13th franchise. --Robert Horton

Friday the 13th, Part VIII
Start spreadin' the news... Jason Voorhees, the cleaver-hoisting man in the hockey mask, has finally left Crystal Lake behind and taken his vagabond shoes to the Big Apple. Actually, Jason spends most of his time on a cruise ship bound for Manhattan, carving up the unluckiest ! high school graduation party ever. You'd think the change of scenery might breathe new life, or death, into the series, but chapter 8 is standard stalk 'em and slash 'em fare, albeit with a nautical slant. The title hints at a comic tone, but except for the one-joke idea that Jason fits right into the menacing urban scene, forget it. (The comedy would wait until the surprisingly entertaining Jason X.) This one does have a pretty leading lady, Jensen Daggett, whose visions of the young drowned Jason are occasionally creepy. The grown-up Jason, like "these little-town blues," is melting away. --Robert Horton
Camp Crystal Lake has been shuttered for over 20 years due to several vicious and unsolved murders. The camp's new owner and seven young counselors are readying the property for re-opening despite warnings of a "death curse" by local residents. The curse proves true on Friday the 13th as one by one each of the counselors is stalked by a vio! lent killer.If you thought a bigger budget and an A-list produ! cer (Mic hael Bay) would go to Jason's head, well, forget it. The indestructible villain of so many bottom-of-the-barrel shockers isn't about to change his shtick, and the 2009 Friday the 13th proves it. This, the umpteenth sequel (nope, it's not a remake of the origin story) to the original 1980 movie, gives us a clever prologue that manages to fit an entire Jason Voorhees killing spree in a brisk and bloody 20 minutes. Jumping ahead six weeks, the film introduces a carload of clueless teens headed for a weekend at a lakeside cabin, plus a lone motorcyclist (Jared Padalecki) in search of his missing sister (Amanda Righetti). When the "lakeside" happens to refer to Crystal Lake, of course, there can be only one outcome. Cue the hockey mask, and pass the machete. Bay and director Marcus Nispel, who collaborated on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, are surprisingly indifferent to changing up the formula this time, although there's more care taken in building up a fe! w characters, and for once the comic relief (mostly supplied by Aaron Yoo and Arlen Escarpeta) is pretty funny. You might even regret the slaughter of a couple of these young folk, which is an unusual feeling in Friday-watching. The film's Jason is quite the athletic fellow, and he's assembled an elaborate underground corpse-hiding lair in the vicinity of Crystal Lake. How he's been able to live down there for 30 years (if the film's own timeline is to be believed) and had enough unwitting campers pass by to keep himself entertained is anybody's guess. But if they keep coming, he'll keep slashing. --Robert Horton

Also on the disc
The extended Killer Cut is 106 minutes compared to 97 for the theatrical cut, and it's hard to imagine choosing to watch the theatrical cut if you have a choice. In addition to some more of Amanda Righetti and of Jason, the extra nine minutes is mostly more gore in the gory scenes and more sex in the sexy scenes. If y! ou're squeamish you might not want those things, but if you're! that sq ueamish you probably don't want to watch Friday the 13th in the first place, right? The longer cut will give you more of the stuff that you probably watch this movie for. There's also an 11-minute featurette on the new movie and three deleted scenes (a different version of Jason getting his mask, the police response to the phone call, and a revised climax). --David Horiuchi

DYSFUNKTIONAL FAMILY ORIGINAL MOVIE POSTER

Schrade 33BRBSAT Old Timer Middleman Jack Pocket Knife with Boy Scouts of America 100th Anniversary Collector's Tin, Brown Pick Bone Handle

  • 2.4" blade, 3.3" handle
  • 400 Series Stainless steel
  • Brown Bone Handle
  • 1.7 ounces
  • 100th Anniversary Collector Tin Included
Look who's back to chill readers to the bone...

The first novel featuring Detective Lincoln Rhyme, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Stone Monkey.The hero of Jeffery Deaver's thriller The Bone Collector is Lincoln Rhyme, a forensic scientist known to his peers as "the world's foremost criminalist." Rhyme will need all his reason--and his considerable stock of high-tech tools--about him to solve this latest brain-twister: a serial killer with method to his madness. In tried and true thriller fashion, the killer's crimes are described in lurid detail, as is the astounding technological equipment with which Rhyme examines the evidence--everything from an energy-dispersive x-ray unit to a mass! spectrometer.

Every fictional detective has his or her gimmick, from Sherlock Holmes's violin to Nero Wolf's orchids, and Rhyme is no exception. He is a quadriplegic who can move nothing but a single finger. Gadget-philes will be in seventh heaven reading about Lincoln Rhyme's tools; other readers might feel the book could do with a few more plausible characters and a little less technology.Schrade Old Timer Middleman pocketknife Turkish clip blade is a drop point with 2.40 non-serrated edge Pen blade is a spear point with 1.63 non-serrated edge Bone handle Stainless steel blades Stainless steel bolsters 5.71 open 3.30 closed 1.7 oz. Includes Boy Scouts of America 100th Anniversary collector's tin

Calendar Girls

  • When 12 ordinary members of the Women's Institute, a prim and proper local ladies' club, decide they need to find a more compelling way to raise money for a new charity, they turn to their traditional annual calendar and give it a very untraditional twist. Behind the usual baked goods, the apple pressing, and the flower arrangements are the women -- completely nude! Starring 2003 Golden Gl
When 12 ordinary members of the Women's Institute, a prim and proper local ladies' club, decide they need to find a more compelling way to raise money for a new charity, they turn to their traditional annual calendar and give it a very untraditional twist. Behind the usual baked goods, the apple pressing, and the flower arrangements are the women -- completely nude! Starring 2003 Golden Globe nominee Helen Mirren (Best Actress, CALENDAR GIRLS) and Julie Walters (HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS), CAL! ENDAR GIRLS is a terrifically entertaining comedy. And that's the naked truth.In the sensible yet elegant hands of actresses Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, Calendar Girls walks a fine line between sappiness and snickering and ends up both wonderfully funny and gently touching. When her best friend Annie (Walters, Billy Elliot) loses her husband, Chris (Mirren, Prime Suspect, Gosford Park) cooks up a scheme to memorialize him: They and their friends--all fiftysomething women--will make a nude calendar to raise money for the hospital where he died. The calendar becomes hugely popular, but the success may drive a wedge between the two women's friendship. Based on an actual event, Calendar Girls carefully balances the stories of several women as it follows the calendar's media explosion, becoming a surprisingly moving fable of loss, determination, and the perils of fame. And let's face it--Helen Mirren is one of the wittiest and sexiest women! alive, clothes on or not. --Bret Fetzer

The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth

  • ISBN13: 9780399525179
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Â"Well-researched and engaging . . . Birth is a clever, almost irreverent look at an enduring everyday miracle. (A-)” —Entertainment Weekly
Â"Wonderful. Packed full of information, a brilliant mixture of ancient wisdom and modern science.” —Kate Mosse, author of the New York Times best seller, Labyrinth
Â"Birth is a power-packed book. . . . A lively, engaging, and often witty read, a quirky, eye-opening account of one of life’s most elemental experiences.” —The Boston Globe
Published to widespread acclaim, Tina Cassidy’s smart, engaging book is the first world history of childbirth in fifty years. From evolution to the epidural and beyond, Tina Cas! sidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how and why we’re born the way we are. Women have been giving birth for millennia but that’s about the only constant in the final stage of the great process that is human reproduction. Why is it that every culture and generation seems to have its own ideas about the best way to give birth? Cassidy explores the physical, anthropological, political, and religious factors that have and will continue to influence how women bring new life into the world.
The newest procedures. The latest information. The complete rundown on modern pregnancy and childbirth...for women who want the facts.

Every intelligent, informed woman is used to gathering the most complete information she can get before making a decision. But when it comes to one of the most important decisions in her life--how she will give birth--it can be tough to get the complete picture, even from an obstetrician. ! Surprisingly, much of the latest research goes against common! medical opinion. Certified Lamaze instructor and activist Henci Goer brings women the carefully researched facts they'll want to have. Based on the latest medical studies and literature, The Thinking Woman's Guide To A Better Birth offers clear, concise information on tests, procedures and treatments--and gives advice about:* cesareans * ultrasound * gestational diabetes * breech babies * inducing labor * IVs * electronic fetal monitoring * ruptured membranes * epidurals * episiotomies * vaginal birth after a cesarean * midwives and obstetricians * alternative birthing methods * choosing a birth location * drugs and delivery * elective induction * professional labor support * and much more

* Author is a certified Lamaze instructor and doula who counsels women on their childbirth experiences
* Author belongs to the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services
* Drawn upon the most up-to-date medical literature and studies
* Written in an accessible, underst! andable style, explaining technical medical terms
* Gives advice to women who were dissatisfied with their first birth experience
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