Mr. Burke Reviews

Reviews #43-46: The Sword in the Stone / The Sword and the Rose / The Moon-Spinners / The Reluctant Dragon 43: The Sword in the Stone (1963) The next stop on my Disney deep dive was going to be a disappointment. It was as I remembered it. The Sword in the Stone premeired in 1963, before I was born, and returned to theaters a couple of times. I never saw it in one. And as luck would have it, it didn't surface on video when my niece or nephews were little. I was interested because it was King Arthur. And for decades, I've had an unread copy of The Once and Future King, of which, The Sword in the Stone is the first chapter. I was really looking forward to this movie the first time we rented it. And it was just boring. Arthur's lessons are dragged out but not very entertaining. There isn't a song worth singing, and most of the songs are just nonsense words, which I guess work for magic, but not from repeatability. You won't hear any of these son...

Reviews #40-42: The Parent Trap / The Sign of Zorro / Jungle Cat Every now and again, I think about the blogs I've started and let fall dormant. This is one of them. There's a good reason for this one: it's not like anyone is going to find this blog and ask me to review anything for them! And, yes, I did have that in mind when I first started this blog. I've given some thought to restarting this ever since I took a bunch of DVDs from my brother's apartment when I was cleaning it out. Most of the DVDs I donated to a local church for its community center. Another thing that happened was that I recently got a cheap deal for Hulu with Disney (with commercials) last Christmas (or was it Thanksgiving?). The last time I had Disney Plus, I started doing a deep dive into the catalogue going all the way back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , using a list I found on Wikipedia. A couple of discoveries: There were more movies than I remembered and...

Reviews #28-39: 12 Abbott & Costello movies It's been a little over a year since I posted my last review on this blog. That's not to say that I haven't expressed my opinions anywhere in social media. Just not here. For one thing, keeping a weekly schedule isn't easy. For another, I wasn't watching enough to warrant posting weekly. (Posting "weakly" would be more like it, amirite?) And, to be honest with myself, no one is reading these reviews, except me. Maybe at a future date, someone came back to find out what else I've done, for good or for ill, but that's not happening now. Several times I thought about it. And, at times, I kept track of some of the things I binged, in case I wanted to include them here. And maybe I will, if I recall the details. Anyway, a couple months ago, while cleaning in the basement, I found a stack of DVDs that needed to be watched and passed along. "Found" might not be the correct word. They wer...

Review #24: The Ape, The Bat, Doomed to Die, The Corpse Vanishes Toward the end of the era of video rental and the rise of online streaming, there was a time when discount and dollar stores would sell dollar DVDs of old movies, likely in public domain. I collected a few of these before coming to the realization that if I wouldn't pay a dollar to rent one of these, why am I paying money to own them? The answer is that some of these are classics that would never show up at regular video stores, and with the rise of chain stores pushing the "mom & pop" places out of business, the price to rent was considerably more than a buck anyway. Anyway, I recently had occasion to pull a few videos out of the basement on a mission to view them and then pass them along. Passing along likely means the donation pile, because I'm not sure who might be interested and also owns a DVD player. As it is, I watched these on my desktop PC. I do have a portable player, but the screen i...