Printable View
I saw "Accidental Love" last night: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/accidental_love/
This is a mockery of romantic comedies. And politicians. And the medical profession. And police on motorcycles. And Indiana small town eateries. And girl scouts. And health insurance. And lobbyists.
I loved it. Score: 10/10
I saw "Chappie" a couple of nights ago: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chappie/
This is a story about reincarnation through artificial intelligence. AI supposedly solves the problem of death by "saving" individual consciousnesses onto some digital medium and then loading it back into a body. The problem with all this is if AI can move an individual's consciousness from one body to another, consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of a person's body. This undermines a materialistic notion of consciousness which AI seems to also promote.
One of the things I didn't like about the movie was that the bad guys were portrayed as "spiritual". Two of them crossed themselves before going into battle for selfish reasons. This attempt to create a stereotype of a bad, religious opponent of AI spoiled the entertainment value this movie might have had.
There was also another idea of taking the next "evolutionary step". I suspect this implies letting AI machines become the next species replacing us. I like the idea that evolution has a cultural component. It is not selfish genes replicating. However, I suspect we are the new species, the next evolutionary step, not some machines. We have only begun modifying the environment by our cultural activity.
The movie seemed to be visually well-done, but the dialogue left me questioning. The movie should have made me forget my questioning and enjoy the film as any well-done fantasy would, but I couldn't forget that the underlying message was nonsense.
Score 3/10
I finished "Interstellar" about an hour ago: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/interstellar_2014/
It is the near future and the Earth is done for. Space missions are being sent through a wormhole to find another planet to inhabit. Who put the wormhole there? Who is the ghost bothering Murph?
I found it amusing that right at the beginning there was mention that the Apollo missions were faked for political reasons.
There is a lot in this movie that doesn't make sense, such as going through the black hole and going back in time, but unlike Chappie, I didn't mind for some reason. I think because the going back into time stuff was just there to hold the story together until it finished. It was not critical to believe in it to be entertained. Ultimately this movie was a rom-com at heart.
Score: 8/10
This is the first full-length film that I have watched for some time . It falls under the category of 'ripping yarns' insofar as it's about a group of disaffected ex-submariners who following WWII attempt to find a hidden cache of diamonds on board a ship that was wrecked on the African coast during the war. Starring Richard Johnson, Jeremy Kemp and Peter Vaughan as a very unlikely German, the female interest is provided by Honor Blackman who is totally superfluous to requirements and an embarrassment to boot. Ninety-nine per cent of adventure films require the suspension of belief and this is no exception.
5/10
We went to see "Spy" last night: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/spy_2015/
I don't think my scores count for much since before the previews were finished, that is, before I actually saw the movie, I knew this one was going to be a 10.
This is a movie about how one overweight female and another rather tall one team up to kick butt, retrieve the missing nuclear weapon and save something or other.
Score: 10/10
Ping Pong: The Animation
Eleven episode anime series which tracks the progress of four major characters over a two year period of competition in the Japanese high school ping pong national championship. This series has been recommended to me quite a few times and since it's freely available on youtube I decided to check it out, and it's definitely worth a watch. The series features animation which is heavily stylized to a degree that some people, like myself, may find slightly jarring or unsettling. Ultimately I didn't end up overly disliking or appreciating the animation style, but I can see how it might possibly pose a challenge to some viewers. The show starts out strong from the first episode and only gets better; by the end I was very committed to the overall story line, and by the time every plot point converged into the very satisfactory, but open ended, conclusion I was quite moved.
Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcSuAhbtIFg
9/10
Just Before I Go: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/just_before_i_go/
This is romantic comedy where the main character decides to commit suicide but first he wants to confront the people in his past whom he thought caused all his problems. He discovers after contacting them again that they have problems of their own. Some of their problems are a bit odd such as his sister-in-law pretending to be sleep-walking. The people he was going to beat up, he turns out befriending. A female whom he viewed as a friend, he turns out damaging.
Predictably he meets a cute girl and that is one of the two problems with this movie: too much is predictable. The other problem is when you get to a part that is not predictable, such as his sister-in-law pretending to sleep-walk into his room at night, it is weird and you wonder just why is someone doing that?
Score: 5/10
Real Genius 1985
This was a futuristic comedy but very outdated. Was expecting a classic but it's a 5/10
Its about students getting into Pacific Technical University to figure out things about a laser. It couldn't be done any worse because the whole movie is a party until the very ending.
"The Voices": http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_voices/
Jerry is a young man with issues from his childhood. He lands a job where he falls in love with one of the accountants. She doesn't like him, but her co-worker likes him and another coworker wouldn't mind being his girlfriend either. He also has a female psychologist who sort of likes him, but not in a romantic way.
He has a dog, who is his good angel, and a cat, who is his not-so-good angel. They talk to him when he is not taking his meds giving him advice, some good, some not-so-good.
The three accountants each end up in his--well, I don't want to spoil the story, but they start giving him advice as well as if he were married to all three of them. Finally he captures his psychologist and insists she explain to him why God made him like this. She gives a pretty good answer which I forget at the moment.
Things don't go well for Jerry since the police have him trapped, but everything works out in the end.
The whole movie is weird, but entertaining.
Score: 8/10
Just saw Jurassic World, like the rest of the world apparently. Liked it for what it is, a few weird moments in it but ok. I like raptors and they have a kinda of a wolf-like relationship with Owen. Very predictable and pretty easy to see beforehand who wouldn't make it through to the end, but that is often the thing with action of this kind.
Entertaining and my son loved it.
I can only rate it against the other 3 and I would say it's second or third best... 1,4,2,3, I think or 1,2,4,3, three is crap
Really? Weren't there at least dinosaurs running around?Quote:
Originally Posted by Helga
Being a connoisseur of the 1950's, the last decade before TOTAL conformity finally triumphed under the guise of phony non-conformity, I watched the British film Venetian Bird that's set in post-war Venice and starring a range of stock English actors as Italians. In the capable hands of director Guy Green, this adventure yarn about a plot to assassinate a leading politician is well worth its You Tube presentation. 7/10
Robert Mitchum plays the part of an assistant to a very rich man the origin of whose wealth is a closely guarded secret. When the man dies of a heart attack, Mitchum sets off on a search for the truth about the money. This takes him to various European countries where he discovers that his employer's fortune has been derived from blackmailing important people. Unutterably dull, if not entirely pointless, the film turns out to be one of Mitchum's rare duds.
Written, directed and produced by the same man, Sheldon Reynolds, this quest to uncover a secret bears a very slight resemblance to Citizen Kane but Reynolds is no Orson Welles and there all similarity ends.
2/10
I saw 'to kill a Mocking bird' with Gregory Peck. I'd give it a 6. Some of the acting was over the top (stage acting on a movie) and focuses on the message rather than the plot.
This is a fine example of the post-war films that Britain excelled in before the great dumbing down.
John Mills, one of Britain's finest actors, plays an engineer who suffers a brain injury in a bus crash and who spends a long time in hospital before being signed-off as fully recovered.
He returns to work for a company in a town where he is living in a residential hotel and where shortly afterwards a young woman resident is murdered in a nearby park.
Circumstantial evidence and his former mental condition point to his being the killer but even when he finds out the real murderer the police refuse to believe him and he goes on the run to get proof of the man's guilt.
Reminiscent of Hitchcock's better work, this is a first class film with top notch direction, acting and atmospheric photography.
They really don't make 'em like this any more.
10/10