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Arrival (2016)
Slow and thought-provoking scifi, not for action fans
The film is OK if you have patience (it's very slow moving) but it's not essential to see it at the cinema, it's not a big "spectacle" movie like Close Encounters for instance. I was a little disappointed but then it was one of those films that purposefully confounds expectations and is willfully vague and thought-provoking, I want to see it again as I'm a bit dense when it comes to first viewings of movies like that and may well appreciate it more after reading some views on it and understanding it better.
Thematically at least, I'd say it's got many similarities to Contact, The Abyss and Interstellar (to use sci-fi's as examples - it was also a bit like The Tree Of Life) so if you liked those (or Close Encounters and The Day The Earth Stood Still) and have patience to see something that's even slower than those then it's worth streaming if not paying out at the flicks
Interstellar (2014)
This is a great continuation of the Space Odyssey series (2001 & 2010)....
I have seen Interstellar twice now, with about a year's gap in between. My interpretation of what the Nolan's were trying to do is re-tell/expand on Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey stories and they did a pretty good job.
There are many obvious elements that are inspired by 2001 & 2010, if you have seen those and know them well then you'll have noticed them already no doubt; (some big ones being contact from supposedly higher beings, their help in finding new planets for human colonisation etc). I have also read the books (inc 2061) a long time ago and cannot remember them well, but I have seen the movies many times so they are what I refer to.
One more similarity that has struck me more on the second Interstellar viewing is the inter-dimensional "ghost" idea. At the beginning of 2010 Bowman's "ghost" contacts people on earth, via TVs and at one time even moving objects when he brushes his elderly mother's hair by moving a hair brush around. That particular scene is similar to both Cooper's manipulation of objects by gravity and the scene where he visits his now-elderly daughter. There's one other very obvious link between Interstellar and 2010 - they both have John Lithgow in! This must be more than just a coincidence as Lithgow's cameo is not in any way essential to Interstellar's plot, I think he's there because they just wanted him in the movie, which is great.
I always thought 2010 has been under-applauded. It was a sequel to one of the most famous movies of all time but it has received very little attention. Some people don't rate it very highly and might say "deservedly so" but I think it's great and all sci-fi enthusiasts that might have overlooked it should see it ASAP. I am glad that the Nolan's seem to appreciate it and have paid it, and 2001, the ultimate respect with a huge movie that is mostly successful in telling essentially the same story and taking the story a bit closer to a conclusion!
AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem (2007)
Offensively bad : 0 / 10 from me
This movie has absolutely no redeeming qualities at all. If I could give it 0/10 I would. This episode of Dawson's Creek with monsters actually manages to make AVP 1 look great. It is a cheap crappy excuse of a film and the things that happen are purely there to fill the running time so a product could be made and sold to make money.
This movie is so obviously terrible in every dept. the glaring faults speak for themselves! I can only imagine that people who think it's good are Twilight fans who are too young to have seen or appreciate the Alien-Predator classics like Alien / Aliens / Predator / Predator 2
Why give this pile of money-grabbing garbage more than a fleeting thought when you can watch the originals? Every aspect that some may consider 'good' in AVPR (for me there were none anyway) can be directly-attributed to good parts that were ripped-off from the afore- mentioned originals, or any number of other good sci-fi / horror movies.
Watch it (but for God's sake don't give anyone money to do so) just to re-confirm to yourself how great the originals are, and any other good sci fi.
Predator 2 (1990)
The lost art of blockbuster action movies
Damn this is good, haven't seen it for a long time and just seen it again. I liked it a lot back in the day but in this current age of PC all-inclusive action blockbusters, quality like Predator 2 shines even brighter than it did then! All the more amazing that it's a sequel, and as such, almost on a par with Aliens I think, maybe equal even. Predator 2 gets the balance right, the violence and tone of the original with a new, compelling story that complements and expands upon the lore of the original too. 6.2 is clearly too low a score for this one!
God I miss the days of good violent action movies! Dredd (2012) is one that comes to mind in recent years but they are thin on the ground, and that was a low budget independent production. Hollywood just ain't gonna green-light good stuff like Predator, Robocop again.
The Punisher (2004)
Great, more comic-like than most current Marvel movies
As entertaining as some of the newer Marvel movies are, this version of The Punisher actually feels more like a comic than any of them and all the more authentic because of it. There's not a hint of CGI in it for a start, which you might have expected by 2004.
It's more of a crime-based thriller than the "5h1t flying all over the screen" bonanzas that most of them are now, a suspenseful revenge movie (or should that be 'punishment' movie?) with a dark sense of humour too, the tone and music feels more like a good Batman flick or a great entertaining '80s actioner like Robocop.
Tom Jane and John Travolta put in fine, understated performances as our protagonist and antagonist. You should definitely check it out if you haven't done so yet, you won't regret it.
Dredd (2012)
Good in the classic '80s action way! Nice surprise...
Only just seen DREDD and was very pleasantly surprised...I guess it goes to show that reboots/re-imaginings can be great, at the end of the day a good movie is a good movie, it just depends on if you are actually capable of improving on a license by going about it in a different way to what came before. If it had been made as a stand-alone without the Dredd connection it would still have been good.
This is a compact, violent and entertaining actioner in the classic '80s traditions of Die Hard / Robocop, with both of which it has thematic similarities...It even managed to have a few stylistic chops of it's own with the slo-mo drug scenes. WAY better than you might expect from it's image / trailer etc, if you knew it existed in the first place! I think it went totally under my radar when it came out. Almost nothing in common with Stallone's circus show...
Jacob's Ladder (1990)
Excellent surreal / symbolic thriller with horror overtones
If you dig psychological/surreal horrors you'll dig this! Can't believe I have only just got around to seeing it, but glad I did. It's one of those movies which creates a very uncomfortable atmosphere, feeding off natural fears and anxieties, where you never know whats's coming next. Tim Robbins's performance is understated and sympathetic.
Apparently the three unused scenes that come with the DVD indicate that the it could have ended very differently so they seem to have done some major re- shoots for what was eventually released. Anyway, for fans of Eraserhead and Lynch/Cronenberg/Carpenter films like Videodrome or In The Mouth Of Madness, check it out!
Poltergeist (2015)
PLEASE don't give anyone money for making this rubbish
A few bullet points I came up with within an hour of seeing it:
1. There's no likable characters. Not effort to establish them or reasons to sympathise with them. We get a few minutes of exposition about the schlub fathers bad career luck, that's it. "Hey, why bother writing a good story, everyone knows what Poltergeist is about already right?". The establishing scenes (moving in/seeing ghosts for first time/getting paranormal investigators in) is all done so quickly and uncreatively.
2. The dialogue is terrible, like the screenplay was scribbled down in half an hour after a quick viewing of the original.
3. Did any of the writers actually bother to find out what G.P.S. even stands for? Or how it works? Let alone find out what cheap drones are really capable of. Apparently Bluetooth can travel between different dimensions, wonder what version they were on?
4. The parent's performances are perfunctory, the kids are all bad. The Irish ghost hunter is the only slightly-likable performance but that's barely enough and it's right at the end.
5. There's no attempt to put any interesting spins on the original story. Bolting on a (really bad) slightly alternative ending doesn't count. So damn lazy.
6. Absolutely none of the CG ghosts/effects are scary. The original succeeded in having effective scares when needed, but also effective humour too. This glaringly has neither. Hang on, i'm wrong....there were a couple of laughably-bad scenes, but not many of them either.
7. The whole thing has the cynical air of "Let's just get this over and done with as quickly and efficiently as possible so we can hopefully make a fair profit for minimal effort and expense".
8. Watch the excellent original and forget this rubbish ever existed.
Ghostbusters (2016)
To my surprise the movie is better than the trailer, but not much
It's not as bad as it could have been. The first two acts are lightly entertaining and the characters / actors do as well as they can with the material. BUT, the final act is rubbish.
By the inevitable action-lead final act the things that made the beginning watchable are totally abandoned and there's effectively no attempt to explain why the bad guy(s) are doing what they do, and zero pay-off. I don't think the writers could even be bothered to explain it. "You know, it's Ghostbusters, that's a good enough reason why there's ghosts flying around NY being creepy and a baddie set on making it happen. Maybe we'll say more in the sequel".
I hate to admit it as I am the most cynical guy in the world and people who know me personally will vouch for that, but the trailer makes it look worse than it actually is. I think it's fair to say that 80% of the controversy there has been was caused by the direction they took for the trailer, deciding to fill it mostly with one-liners only when the movie had other effective-enough scenes in it that they could have used as well.
On the subject of racism and sexism, there wasn't any more than any similar contemporary pop-corn movie, and again, the trailer may have given a false impression. I can honestly say that all parties involved have some responsibility for making a much bigger deal of those things than it really is; the critics (who probably have only seen the trailer) and its makers. Social media (and people who should know better than to use it) are an equally big culprit too.
A fair amount of the jokes in it are smirk-inducing but not gut- busting, so shown out of the context of the movie they fall flat, they could have made a trailer that showed more of the lower-key drama that would have made for a much more intriguing enticement and thereby avoided all the bile that's been going around. So I reckon the massively negative opinion can be attributed to how they go about making trailers and publicity methods these days in general, which is an issue I have had with other movies in recent times too.
Saying all that....the movie is not a classic by any measure, if you are a level-headed person you probably won't come out the theater feeling angry or ripped off, but also you are missing nothing important if you wait to see it by some cheaper method, or for free. It's average with a forgettable ending, like the majority of mass- consumption blockbusters these days. Over-all: 6/10
Angie Tribeca: Tribeca's Day Off (2016)
Wasted cameo in this episode
When this begins it seems as though it's going to be one of the better episodes of this patchy tribute to the spoof comedy of things like The Big Bus, Airplane, Police Squad and Sledge Hammer. In this one LA Police detective Angie Tribeca takes some time off work due to stress, and while shopping meets a character played by Bill Murray of Ghostbusters etc, with whom she has a very brief "affair". Bill has barely any lines and what he does has almost no jokes at all, so it seems like a big waste of his talent. While that plot line goes on, Angie's detective partner Jay Geils is on the case of a murder of a golf pro at a country club.
Although starting with promise, both plot lines end abruptly with very little actually happening, and along the way we are bombarded with the usual one-liner type jokes that mostly fall flat. By this point in the series it really feels that the show is dive-bombing, the repetitive, rapid-fire lame jokes are starting to loose all impact and it's hard to watch the episode all the way to the end without your mind wandering to more interesting things like what you are going to cook for dinner tomorrow night. It's hard to think of where this show can go from here and the very short run time of 20 mins per episode feels too short for any kind of interesting stories to develop, unfortunately the joke has worn thin.