Reviews

This movie showed up on Amazon Prime this morning. As soon as I saw "Directed by Luc Besson" I was in. Remember how the original Star Wars starred a bunch of actors you never really heard of? Remember the original Star Wars was fun? Well Valerian recaptures that. Yeah, it's a bit bubble-gummy in places - at times it feels more like a kid's movie. But it is derived from a comic, so I guess that comes with the territory.

The two main characters are a male-female special ops team. And they're in love but don't really know it yet. But they're fun to watch. This isn't the usual heavy Hollywood style crap. Their relationship is more witnessed than spoken about. They don't spend half the movie drenched in self-analysis. She kicks as much butt as he does, so forget the whole "there are no strong female characters" whining. They're a couple - they compliment each other - it works. It's not Nick and Nora Charles, but it has the same kind of spark.

Very little SJW sub-text. Rihanna's character has a few lines about being an "illegal alien", but that was about the only really noticeable inflection of Soy-Think.

As usual, Besson's visuals are top notch. There's something about his direction that has a more "organic" feel than a lot of Hollywood directors. Scenes and sets seem more "alive" - less perfectly chiseled. His attention to detail is amazing. Everyone stays in character, there aren't any serious flat spots - maybe a little in the beginning before things get rolling. Lots of pew-pew and things getting blowed up, but no foul language.

If you can get past the few goofy comic-book-ish scenes, the rest of the movie is pretty damn awesome. Visually, it really is stunning. Just kind of ride out the first fifteen minutes. It apparently tanked at the box office, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

Wow. After all the great ratings for this movie I actually expected this to be, you know, a good movie. How anyone who's seen "2001: A Space Odyssey" can give this four stars or more is absolutely beyond me. But the critics for some reason raved about this thing.

The plot is that the Earth is running out of food and crops keep failing due to some kind of Nitrogen-loving blight. There are dust storms and things are looking bad. And then … somehow … a worm-hole in space opens up near Saturn by "them." Who ever "them" are. And, golly gee, there's habitable worlds on the other side of the wormhole. How convenient. So Michael Caine (who plays the chief NASA scientist) sends some spaceships through to check it out and the next step is to try to set up base to get the rest of the people through.

Enter our hero, Matthew McConaughey. A former NASA pilot who now works on a farm. The first sign of trouble with this movie is the amount of attention spent on The Children. Children and Sci-Fi or action movies equals death. Sure enough, McConaughey spends what feels like a quarter of the movie whining about missing his kids and so on and so forth. It's Acting!

And so they go through the wormhole and a bunch of stuff happens. I don't want to give the plot away, but see if some of this sounds familiar. The robots who help man the ship have warm, mellifluous voices. An astronaut travels through a tunnel of flashing lights. Said astronaut arrives in a strange room where he can see past and future. Oh … and the robots who help run the ship … they look like monoliths … articulated, walking monoliths.

Then some of the technical stuff that goes on is just impossible to believe. The most bizarre is the thrilling docking scene when the mother ship is in an uncontrolled spin, and so the shuttle not only matches the spin, but then manages to dock with the hatch which runs down the central axis of the mother ship. But that's not the stupid part. The shuttle then uses it's engines to stop the spin of the much, much bigger mother ship to which it is connected by a long, slim docking boom. And none of the metal buckles or shears away.

Some of the physics about how gravity can pass through worm holes and the time relativity shifts that occur simply by landing on a planet are a bit tough to swallow. The crap the film goes into about time travel is even harder to swallow. Note that "2001" also had similar elements, but Kubrick's genius was that he didn't try to explain what was going on. He let the viewer interpret it in whatever way it struck them. This movie insists on explaining everything – and it does so quite stupidly.

Visually, this is a striking film. The scenes on the other planets are really well done. The dust- storm effects are also nicely done – it does really look like the documentary footage from The Dust Bowl. And the actual story is pretty decent … if only they did a good job telling it.

And it's not like they didn't have time to tell the story. This film is almost three hours long. But they spend a lot of time on McConaughey emoting about not seeing his damn kids again – or giving soliloquies about the destiny of mankind (which sound an awful lot like those car commercials he just did). His accent and delivery work great when he's playing a lawyer … but it doesn't work for a dashing, daring space pilot.

If your standards aren't too high, you don't want to actually think, and you want to see a good-looking sci-fi movie – and you have three stinking hours to kill – then you may as well see this movie. Otherwise don't waste your money. Wait for it to come to Netflix, and then wait for a night when you're having trouble getting to sleep to watch "Interstellar."

According to Wikipedia, they spent $65 million making this atrocity. The end result is 112 minutes of mindless, puerile drivel which will leave any sentient being groggy from the barrage of idiocy. It's a parade of stereotypes, rehashed shtick, and poorly written and executed jokes. Except in this parade they put the horses up front and everyone has to tromp through manure the whole way.

Yes. It really is that bad. I like good slap-stick humor. And buddy comedies. And back-to-school comedies. And gross-out physical comedy. This movie tried to combine all of those elements, and managed to execute each one with equal levels of ineptitude. I guess in that respect this is an accomplishment.

The only positive I could find was that the production values were high. But after half an hour I needed to bail and do something more pleasing - like slam my head forcefully into a concrete highway barrier.

I wasn't expecting much. Another show about lawyers. In New York. Yay.

And for the first episode things went more or less predictably. The snarky super lawyer, the bright but naive understudy, the power female executive, and the thoroughly evil office Darth Vader (Louis!).

The lead characters - Harvey and Mike - kind of carry the show for the first half season but then the ensemble cast takes over. I watched this marathon fashion since I'd never seen it before and by the time I got to the middle of the second season I felt like fast-forwarding past the Harvey-and-Mike scenes. Their roles are kind of predictable after a while - you pretty much know they'll hit some roadblock and at the last minute they'll have this amazing idea and win the case. Feels kind of like House in that regard.

Donna (Harvey's legal secretary) is incredible. Smart, funny, complex. Every scene with her is interesting. Rachel is gorgeous and has an infectious smile and laugh - a bit of a drama queen, but so what - she's fun to watch and carries her role very well. Louis is a tour de force - you at once can't stand him and a second later feel bad for him - a thoroughly damaged human being that combines an Arthurian sense of justice with the people skills of Josef Stalin.

It helps that the head writer comes from a comedy background. This show would not work as a straight-up drama. What makes it immensely watchable is the humor that every character brings to their roles. No matter how heavy the plot-line is, there's always a scene or two - usually with Donna or Louis - that are comedy gold.

I gave it an 8 because it's fun to watch, but the show needs to be careful of becoming too formulaic and predictable. When the tertiary characters start stealing the show on a weekly basis, that says something is wrong. Harvey, Mike, and Jessica are almost caricatures by the end of the second season. There are no surprises from them. The constant focus on internal office politics and attempts to take control of the firm likewise gets tedious after a while. They should focus more on cases.

But overall this is a pretty good show and worth watching.

I had high hopes for Revolution. Zombies are fun and all, but a good ole "let's rebuild the world" story looked to be a nice change of pace.

My hopes were dashed within the first 30 seconds. Yes. Thirty seconds. The death knell for good sci-fi appeared on screen that quickly. And by that I mean: Little Children. Those precious little darlings which slow down plots, tone down action, and generally provide little or no value to an action-oriented program or movie.

Five minutes later, after 15 freakin' years of this black-out somehow passed and we're on some ad-hoc farm now, things got worse. The required teenage male and female characters were out foraging. And his breasts were bigger than hers. And more shapely. Now I know that sounds sexist, but I couldn't get past it. Ten minutes later I gave up entirely.

Thrown into this mess is that one of the characters seems to know why all this happened whereas no one else does. He put all the info on a Flash drive (which I guess somehow still will work even though every other electronic device is permanently fried ... but OK). So you can already see they're setting up for some "big mystery" down the road like "Lost".

Oh, and by the way, even though they've all been without power or running water for 15 years, everyone's clothes are not only in perfect shape, they're also perfectly clean. And no one's face is dirty, and no one has acne, and no one is sick. No one's griping about there being no toilet paper either - which I would assume would become a concern after so long.

Just awful. This show jumped the shark a minute into it's first episode.

This is one of those shows you watch and have to ask: "Why was this thing canceled?"

Great writing, directing, acting and casting. It was a pretty flawless show. Even the secondary characters, like Crews' old partner "Stark", are well rounded and interesting, Everyone has a back-story, and the bad guys are seriously bad.

The weekly crimes were well done. Not quite up to "Columbo" standards, but interesting enough to carry. The ongoing conspiracy investigation of who set Crews up threads its way into the show - sometimes just a few minutes, sometimes a third of the episode. An ongoing theme is that "everything is connected" - and this shows up in the conspiracy. People aren't always what they appear and sometimes people run into during the investigation of the weekly crime turn out to be factors in the bigger story.

My hunch is that this show was canceled because it was too smart for it's own good. Or maybe not violent enough. There is violence, but it's not the focus of the scripts. When it ended the conspiracy was only half solved. It could have easily gone on for another couple seasons.

"Life" is on Netflix now and it's worth spending a weekend watching it as a marathon.

Basically the same premise as the classic Escape from NY - bad dude tasked with saving the President (or his daughter, in this case) from a maximum security prison (a space-station prison in as opposed to Manhattan).

Luc Besson did the screenplay so right away you know this will be a well-executed film with lots of interesting characters and awesome set design. And in those regards, this film doesn't disappoint. Guy Pearce as "Snow" is a perfect bad-ass ... better than Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken. His dialog and attitude are awesome with lots of good action and some really funny lines (like when the Pres' daughter he's sent to rescue goes to town with an assault rifle: "I thought you were a Democrat").

The bad guys are really bad, though, for some reason they're also Scottish. At least the leaders are. It does give things a bit more flavor. The guys in the government aren't much higher on the evolutionary ladder - true scum bags.

This film won't win awards but it's a good watch. There aren't any surprises, and the ending is kind of "say what?" but it's one of the better pure action movies to come out in a while.

I have to assume that the people who rated this one below a 5 were expecting the standard slapstick fare. This isn't going to go down as a classic film, but it kind of picks up from "Holy Man" from 1998 in that the movie is about an unexpected encounter causing someone to re- evaluate and embrace their life.

Murphy does a pretty good job straddling comedic and dramatic acting. It's more like one or the other rather than both in the same scene, but it's not bad. The supporting cast is pretty good as well. The writing is decent enough.

What made me give this a 7 instead of a 6 is the ending. You pretty much know what's coming - that Murphy's character will resolve the issues which keep him from being happy. But the last 8 minutes or so are just really well done. Murphy's warmth really shines and you can't help but smile. And for that ending, I gave it an extra star.

Put this in the "feel-good comedy" category.

OK, first of all, yes, this movie has more holes than the surface of the moon. Some of the plot points, tactics, technical gaffes, etc. etc. etc. are so bad and stupid as the be insulting. Seriously, if you are up on your military technology at all it's best to go to this movie seriously drunk so that you won't care about the dumbness.

That said, it's actually a pretty fun movie. And, yes, I think it's better than Battle Los Angeles or even the latest Transformers. Why? Because this movie didn't make the same critical mistakes of trying to have Acting in the damn film. Nothing slows down a good action flick like a damn love story in the background, or the hero dealing with his feelings or, worse still, putting brats in the line of fire. Battleship had none of that - just a bunch of thick-headed do- gooders doing what they do best and not really learning a whole lot about anything, including themselves, in the process.

Another thing I like is that there is an appreciation for the warships and the people who serve on them. The timing of the ACDC music for the going-into-battle scene is perfectly done. You can't help but smile.

The alien technology is actually pretty imaginative and the animation is good. It's not as over- the-top as Battle LA - where there was so much going on you get overwhelmed. But when the aliens want something blowed up, they do so with conviction. Mind you, some of the technical deficiencies of the alien technology will leave you wondering how these creatures managed to cross a galaxy. But try not to worry about that - the writers sure didn't.

The cast is OK. Neeson is decent as the admiral or whatever, and even Rihanna does an acceptable job. We're not talking about "Apocalypse Now" kinds of performances, but it wasn't horrible either. It was at least semi-believable.

Look, this ain't no "Bedford Incident". But it's a pretty decent way to kill a couple hours and snarf down some popcorn. All the folks griping about the technical problems - well, it's all true - but who cares? This movie doesn't pretend to be realistic. Hell, in the credits it's "Based on the game by Hasbro," so go in prepared and enjoy.