Set in the small British town of Sheffield, six old friends, Gary "Gaz" (Robert Carlyle), Dave (Mark Addy), Lomper (Steve Huison), Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) and Guy (Hugo Speer), find themselves out of job and out of money when their steel mill shuts down. The former steel workers are desperate and depressed over their unemployment and Lomper is so despondent that he attempts to commit suicide. Meanwhile, the Chippendales, a troupe of male strippers, arrive in town and their act is a tremendous success with the local women. Inspired by the exotic dancers, Gaz comes up with the brilliant idea of putting on a similar show of his own, with one difference – they are daring to end the performance "fully nude". But there is only one snag: their bodies are far from perfect and they can't dance at all.
As the proverb goes, one lie makes many. When 17-year-old Sam Leonard (Ryan Pinkston) arrives at a new school, the first thing he does is tells tall tales to strike his peers, who have not yet got his measure, and infiltrate the most popular clique. He would have got entangled in his lies if they hadn't turned to truths. To his great astonishment, Sam becomes the focus of attention in the school. Little does he know that his overnight popularity will bring him a new set of problems.
Dick and Jane are a quite happy couple and living the American dream until the one awful day. When the company Dick works for becomes involved in a scandal he gets fired, Dick and Jane begin to sink into poverty. He looks for work, even trying day labor along with the relatives of their Mexican nanny. They are to turn into a sort of Bonny and Clyde in order to exact the hilarious revenge on Dick's boss.
Fashion photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire), in search for an intellectual backdrop for an air-headed model, expropriates a Greenwich Village bookstore. When the photo session is over the store is left in a shambles, much to salesgirl Jo Stockton's (Audrey Hepburn) dismay. Avery stays behind to help her clean up. Later, he examines the photos taken there and sees Jo in the background of one shot. He is intrigued by her unique appearance, as is Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson), the editor of a leading fashion magazine. They offer Jo a modeling contract, which she reluctantly accepts only because it includes a trip to Paris. Eventually, her snobbish attitude toward the job softens, and Jo begins to enjoy the work and the company of her handsome photographer.
In this exploration of our violent society and how depictions of violence reflect and shape our culture, a middle-class housewife Anna tells the story of how she and her husband George and their 10-year-old son Georgie submitted both physically and mentally to the torture, violence, and death foisted upon them by two young, unexpected, white-gloved visitors at their weekend vacation retreat near a lake.
What would you do if you found a bag of money? Would you pick it up and run? Or would you try to find its owner? The screwball comedy tells the story of an ordinary factory worker, Henry Perkins (Chevy Chase), who falls into an extraordinary situation when he accidentally switches briefcases with another man on his subway ride home. When he discovers five million dollars inside the briefcase, Henry swoons with joy, daydreaming that he can now retire from his wax fruit factory years earlier and live with his wife Carol (Penelope Ann Miller) happily and peacefully. However, windfall money turns out to be a plague for Perkins
Passing through a small town, Joe is arrested for kidnapping. A lynch mob burns down the jail and Joe is believed killed. The incident has been captured on newsreel film and, for revenge, Joe urges his brothers to use the film to prove the mob guilty of his murder.
Proving that you just can't keep a good animated series down, Bender's Big Score revives the Futurama crew in a full-length feature (reportedly, the first of four which will later be broken down into individual episodes for television broadcast) chock full of the satiric touches that made the Matt Groening series a cult favorite among sci-fi and animation fans. In true Futurama form, the plot of Big Score is proudly ridiculous: At its core, it's about alien telemarketers with a plan to steal Earth's most valuable historical objects, who use e-mail viruses to cripple Planet Express and take control of belligerent robot Bender; the latter carries out their scheme via a time-travel code tattooed on Fry's backside. This allows for all manner of subplots involving Fry's return to the 20 th century, romantic confusion between Fry and Leela (Katey Sagal), and a host of cameos ranging from Kwaanza-bot (Coolio) and Zapp Brannigan to Al Gore (voiced by the real former vice-president, who once again displays an offbeat sense of humor).
Bender's Big Score also features a staggering amount of extras that reflect the show's sense of playful anarchy. Most valuable to longtime fans is the feature-length commentary by Groening, writers Ken Keeler and David X. Cohen, director Dwayne Carey-Hill, and cast members Billy West (Fry), DiMaggio, and Phil LaMarr, which provides a wealth of information on the film's production as well as plenty of laughs from the voice actors. "Futurama Returns!" is a live comic book reading by the cast in front of an enthusiastic convention audience, while "A Terrifying Message from Al Gore" is a short animated promo featuring the ex-veep in an animated promo for his Inconvenient Truth documentary (Gore's commentary for this short is worth the DVD's sale price alone), and "Bite My Shiny Metal X" is an amusing, tongue-in-cheek lesson on the mathematics used to deliver the show's futuristic touches. Perhaps the oddest extra is a full-length episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad, a sitcom based around the bizarre title creature that will provoke equal amounts of laughter and exasperation. A small battery of deleted scenes, new character design sketches, and a five-minute promo shot for Comic-Con round out the extras.
At once a merciless skewering of all things fanboy and an extremely satisfying addition to the Futurama franchise, Bender's Game is among the best of the animated series' feature length adventures. The game in question is Dungeons and Dragons, and Bender wants in—only robots aren't programmed with the necessary imagination. Naturally, Bender's plans to develop one go completely awry and land him in an android asylum. The role-playing plotline later re-emerges—in typically convoluted Futurama fashion—via a subplot involving Professor Farnsworth's conversion of dark matter into spaceship fuel, which created a key to a very D&D-influenced universe where our hapless heroes eventually find themselves. The alternate world storyline allows for much lampooning of fantasy tropes, with Lord of the Rings receiving the lion's share of the tweaks. Seeing as how the writers have already devoted much of the movie's running time to parodying Star Wars and Star Trek (and their Lego offshoots), one might think that Bender's Game might suffer from pop-culture overload, but surprisingly, it all feels fresh and frequently funny, and the writers are wise to ground the story in their eccentric characters rather than pinballing them through an endless string of gags. The result is probably the strongest of the direct-to-DVD Futurama releases to date, and one that newcomers to the show's cracked universe can appreciate as much as longtime fans.As with previous Futurama DVD releases, the extras come fast and furious on Bender's Game: commentary by members of the cast and production team (including Matt Groening) is both informative and funny, while interviews with the writers and producers discuss, among other topics, the influence of Dungeons and Dragons on the series and the 3D models used in the feature. Aspiring animators might appreciate "How To Draw Futurama in 83 Easy Steps and the storyboard animatic for the first part of the story, while the "Genetics Lab" feature allows for some amusing Dr. Moreau-style cross-breeding of the characters. Recording session bloopers and a deleted scene offer their own laughs, but the most enjoyable extra must be the preview for the next Futurama feature, Into the Wild Green Yonder, which suggests a shocking development for one of the show's regulars.
In this feature-length Futurama adventure, dark forces older than time itself conspire to prevent the dawn of a glorious new green age as Bender falls for a married fembot, Leela attempts to escape Zapp Brannigan, and Fry is recruited for a top-secret mission to try and save the entire universe.
The Planet Express crew must work to fix rips between their universe and another inhabited by a planet-sized, tentacle alien which soon takes over the Earth and uses it's ability to control Fry to command an entire religion which takes over and convinces the inhabitants of Earth to abandon the Earth to live in a pseudo-heaven, leaving the robots of the world to inherit the planet.
