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jjoseph202
Reviews
Space Warriors (2013)
Confusing Formulaic disappointment (spoilers!)
Sorry guys, but this film was a horrible disappointment. It's proof that trying to do recipe-based films for children is best only done by Disney.
When the main character "runs away" to Space Camp, it's apparently under the presumption that if he wins the competition (a phony competition, a la the Top Gun trophy in that movie) he'll outfox his mother into letting him go on a real spaceflight to the International Space Station. The parent astonishingly DON'T CALL THE COPS to get the darn kid back when his ruse to fool each parent into thinking he's with the other one. Shades of the Parent Trap.
This is obviously supposed to be a film for kids, but the film DOESN'T SHOW US THE CONSEQUENCES OF CHEATING OR RULE-BREAKING OR JUST PLAIN EVIL. Some consequences are inferred, but not boldly enough to teach lessons to the kids who are engaged in this reckless behavior.
Idiotically, the ISS has a fire on-board and only 3 astronauts can use the ferry Soyuz as a lifeboat. In the middle of that crisis, the MOCR in Houston loses communication with the ISS and Soyuz so communications have to be transferred to...wait for it...Huntsville! Which enables the Space Warriors to save the day from the duplicate MOCR in Huntsville.
I've been watching the U.S. Space Program since 1958, and there were so many times that the jargon was inaccurate or the engineering was inaccurate or the history was inaccurate that I was constantly yelling at my TV screen "What Idiots Wrote This?" Not to mention that the most promising character, the girl pilot, pulls the all-too-familiar female neurotic self-doubt angst at the most critical part of the film. A cliché at best. Horribly unnecessary in an age of women's liberation at worst.
DON'T WATCH THIS FILM IF YOU THINK YOU OR YOUR KIDS WILL LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT THE SPACE PROGRAM.
It was easier for me to suspend my disbelief when I watched Space Chimps. Even with the talking chimps.
My suggestion: studio execs should have a person (or team) familiar with the space program, space flight, and space history review this kind of script before allocating money for this sort of useless rubbish.
Even though it was totally fictional, Space Cowboys is a much more accurate, plausible, and realistic depiction of the U.S. Space Program.
So have your kids watch Space Cowboys instead.
A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)
An impossible watch on DVD
I'm not reviewing the movie per se.
I can't because I didn't watch the movie.
I didn't watch what the producers/director INTENDED as the movie because I tried to watch it on a 19" television.
The translated Russian-to-English subtitles were TOTALLY UNREADABLE.
Even turning on the Closed Captioning and English subtitles didn't help, because all the Russian-to-English phrases were in .00001 size type, even when the English-on-the-disc text was in 12-point type.
I made this same complaint about Inglourious Basterds (2009) on DVD. I really wanted to see that movie but couldn't because I couldn't read the subtitles that were the translated German-to-English.
It was a horrible error that I would have thought Quentin Tarantino wouldn't have made.
So my advice to film producers is: if you've got subtitles in the original film, double-check the DVD version to make sure that the translations are readable on a 19" television from eight feet away.
Otherwise, put all the dialog in English in the English subtitles on the DVD.
My advice: don't try to watch this film on DVD unless you want to find your TV screen punctured with a soda bottle from your frustration.
The Host (2013)
Plodding, neurotic mess.
I thought for sure this movie had been made in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, because my experience with those countries' movies and sci-fi TV series are slow, plodding, and tedious. Like 2009's MOON, for example. Or 2009's DISTRICT 19. On TV, I point to Farscape, Dr Who, Red Dwarf.
Extremely frustrating and tedious for me is the inner-conflict neurotic crosstalk. The two women's voices are similar enough in the beginning of the film to confuse the heck out of me.
But add to that the fashionable teen-angst inner-conflict neurosis, and it gets just plain boring.
Especially frustrating for me was the conditions under which Mel could control the body and when she couldn't control the body. Somehow, she was able to control the body when it was necessary to do something extremely stupid, like wrecking the car.
I've said this about Jumper (2008) and I'll say it about The Host: Interesting idea, poorly executed. And most of the poor execution had to do with the neuroses of the characters in both cases.
I really had the feeling that this film was like Lynch's Dune (1984) in that I constantly felt I was missing out on some "inside track" that the film never got around to explaining. The similarity in both cases is that so much takes place inside people's heads that by necessity of the medium has to be illustrated visually somehow. But in both films, we never get out of the characters' heads long enough to understand the back-story.
Yes, I know 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) suffered from the Kubrick's cryptic filmmaking style. But during 2001 I had Clarke's book in my head so it didn't lose me as rapidly as it could have. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) left me information-deprived, too.
I understand that The Host is based on a book, which I didn't read, and I'm not planning on reading it after watching the film.
I watched the film on DVD and fast-forwarded through it to shorten it by 40 minutes (it's 2:05). You're right: all that fast-forwarding may have made me miss the key data I needed to enjoy the film; the film was too plodding and boring for me to be subjected to "all the significance" of it (how the characters made everything so significant) as opposed to deigning to impart information that answered the questions an alert mind was bound to be asking.
For example, inquiring minds want to know: where did the aliens come from, why are they here, why were the aliens too stupid to stage a multi-billion-human-body takeover of the Earth without doing a little beta-testing first and figuring out that humans are too damn stubborn to easily conquer, why does a being from a non-corporeal alien race who's lived for over a thousand years not know how all the body-hopping works well enough to suggest the movie's "surprise ending" before it needed to be a "surprise ending"? I'm going to pull my copy of The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) down off the shelf and give it another watch. It may be more comprehensible and less boring than The Host. But I doubt it.
Alien Origin (2012)
There's ninety minutes I'll never get back
This film was a waste. I shouldn't have rented it from Redbox, and I shouldn't have stuffed it in my DVD player.
The promises made in the film previews and ads never materialize. I thought for sure I'd learn something about the alien origins of mankind.
Nope.
In a style reminiscent of CLOVERFIELD or BLAIR WITCH or APOLLO 18, this film tries to assemble itself out of bits of supposedly recovered video from two or three or four sources, all mangled or shredded in the goings-on in this film.
So it's confusing as blazes. Just when you think you're going to see the alien, the digital video goes all haywire (which a digital video wouldn't do) and makes the alien impossible to see. At least CLOVERFIELD didn't do that.
The closest analogue I can find to what this movie thought it was doing was PREDATOR. You know, a heavily armed group of professional soldiers caught in the jungle getting hunted by an annoyed alien which is better armed than they are.
Complicating the story is the injection of a cute blonde news bimbo who is trying to make a 60-minutes kind of segment.
I still can't figure out what was supposed to be going on.
FORTUNATELY, the movie tells us all the people disappeared.
So odds are we won't be subjected to a sequel.
The last 60 seconds of the film are supposed to explain it, BUT, since the film was supposedly assembled out of bits and scraps of video, WHY THE BLEEP WASN'T THE LAST 60 SECONDS OF THE FILM SPLICED INTO THE FILM IN SEQUENCE WHERE IT BELONGED? It wouldn't have made the story make more sense, frankly.
But watching the film, the last 60 seconds looks like someones afterthought. Like they got in the editing room and said, "Oh yeah, we got to the end of the film and didn't explain the alien origin! Let's splice in this bit of nonsense at the end!" And yet it doesn't explain anything to me.
All it looked like to me was someone's opportunity to shoot off a couple thousand rounds of blank ammo in automatic weapons.
Yawn.
The Pyramid Code (2009)
A five part "documentary" that documents nothing
The Pyramid Code is a prima facie example of the misuse of the documentary film to suck the susceptible into irrational viewpoints.
There are some carnival sideshow tricks used to hypnotize the viewer. First, the narrator speaks very slowly and in a foreign accent. The foreign accent trick is used to make infomercial hawkers seem more intellectual or more trustworthy. An Egyptian "expert" who can't speak English very well is used to make some points that are totally incomprehensible, because *he* is incomprehensible. One of the English-speaking intellectuals speaks with the volume turned down, so you have to crank up the volume to hear him. This happens so often that you just decide to leave the volume turned up, and when the episode is over you find your dog hiding under the couch covering his ears. This is a long-time trick of TV commercials, of course. There's snake-charmer music playing in the background which is also a hypnotic tool.
The reason I call this a "documentary" is because it documents *NOTHING*. The basic style employed is that the narrator asks several provocative questions that make you think you're going to be shown some kind of evidence, so you start to pay attention. You sit up and watch attentively for the next 10 minutes, and NO answers to the provocative questions appear!
Example:
Narrator: Were the pyramids part of a planetary power-generation system? Did they tap the earth's electromagnetic field to create a pollution-free power?
High-brow intellectual: I know that the pyramids were part of a power generation grid due to their construction. They're still generating power today. Of course, it's a kind of power we can't measure, but I know it's happening.
Huh? I was waiting to see your instruments register the power field, or power grid, or for the pyramid to shoot a lightning bolt out and turn on the electric light bulb in Uncle Fester's mouth, or SOMETHING. But all you get is this hocus-pocus can't prove it worth a dorcus statement.
THE WHOLE FIVE HOURS IS FILLED WITH THIS HOKUM.
And to add insult to injury, the last 10 minutes of the final episode has the narrator reviewing what she is now calling "the proof" and "the evidence".
I never saw any proof. I never saw any evidence.
I only heard assertions that were unproven.
If you're a Coast-to-Coast AM listener, you'll love it. Just don't tell your friends it's "proof".
Journey to the Edge of the Universe (2008)
Factually deficient space "docudrama"
It's so hard to find the words to express my extreme disappointment in this "docudrama". I call it that because the scriptwriter found it necessary to add "drama" to facts in order make it seem more interesting.
If you're going to take me through the universe, give me the DATA, not how I'm supposed to "feel" about it.
I often got the impression when watching this film that someone said, "Hey, Carl Sagan died in 1996 without an update to 'Cosmos', so let's make a Cosmos 'wow-alike' without a narrator that knows something about the subject matter." They even stole Sagan's "we are star-stuff" line.
Oh yeah, spoiler.
When you get to the edge of the universe, you'll witness the Big Bang.
Scientifically ludicrous.
The writer(s) obviously had space and time confused.
Don't watch this with the idea that you'll learn anything.
Instead, imagine that the 2001: Space Odyssey stargate sequence was (over)done with modern CGI and some Hubble-type imagery.
In the 70's people used to go to 2001 just to be stoned and watch the sequence. That's about what this film is good for.
The script even has the kind of vacuous insights that stoners get and think they're being profound.
Pompous.
I guess that's why they picked Alec Baldwin to narrate.
Der Rote Baron (2008)
Don't waste your time
I rented this film thinking I would get a docudrama about the Red Baron.
Instead, I got some chick-flick drivel that pretends to be a biopic about the Red Baron without delivering on the biopic-ness.
So much research has been done about Manfred von Richthofen that you'd think that *something* accurate about him would have shown up in the film.
Instead, this is a mewling, pandering attempt to cross Top Gun with Alan Alda's M*A*S*H...a meandering "love story" devoid of love or passion whose real intent is to make you see the waste of war.
DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME. NOT EVEN IF YOU'RE AN AIR COMBAT FAN.
The air-to-air combat is glossed over, and simply is there to give the von Richthofen character an opening for some emo-angst.
After watching this film, you'd think that von Richthofen met Roy Brown twice before Brown "shot down" von Richthofen. Didn't happen. Just more chances to tug on heart strings.
This could have been a good film. If there was too much for a 2-hour film, you could have done it like Patton: only showing the part of Patton's life from Battle of the Kasserine Pass (1942) through the war's end (1945).
The WRONG thing to do was to put the names of von Richthofen's associates on slips of paper in a box and pull them out one at a time and then write 15-seconds in the script for the ones that tumbled out. But, whatever you do, don't put Hermann Göring's name in the hat. (You would be able to provide total revisionist history if it were shown that Göring was part of the flying circus.)
Then add a love affair and a fictional Jewish character, with everybody "caring" about everything, and WHOOPS there's a movie! Then, at the end of the movie, when the characters are all being wrapped up, you can't read 50% of the on-screen print. I was cheated.
So this was a total WASTE OF CELLULOID. And a DVD blank.
Don't waste your time.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
DIsappointing DVD fare
As many others have commented on the film, and I don't want to rehash what they've submitted. The problem I have with this film was that I saw it on DVDm and the English subtitles for the Germans-speaking-German were so minuscule I couldn't read them. The English subtitles for Englanders-speaking-English were standard DVD fare and easy to read. But since the film depends so much on Subtitled German-to-English translations, having them be unreadable was insufferable. I had to scan back three and four times to read what the Germans were saying. and this eventually got frustrating. So I didn't enjoy the DVD version of the film at all...
Public Enemies (2009)
The Titanic of gangster films
This film was like Titanic in that if you were half-awake in the first 20 years of your life, you know how it ends. The performances were predictable and there wasn't anything to learn. Yawn. As far as being a period piece goes, the costuming and sets and locations and automobiles worked fine. But sometimes it was too dark to see what was going on, and the sound was over-modulated, meaning the dialogue was unintelligible. Huge overlong gun-battles that were too loud are of course Michael Mann's trademark, so I shouldn't have been disappointed there were so many of them. I guess if you're going to do a docudrama, your only recourse is to put your trademark on it, whether you're Oliver Stone, or Michael Mann. Yawn. Zzzzzzz..... It wasn't even worth renting. I want my money back.
When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions (2008)
Bigoted presentation of Space Exploration
Let me start out with the good stuff.
This miniseries was good in that it captures, 30 to 50 years later, the thoughts and experiences of those who were there. The modern footage -- the interviews with the astronauts and flight controllers especially -- does what historical documentaries do best: captures the words and experience of those who were actually there. I especially liked the interviews with Gene Kranz, Jim Lovell, and -- of all people -- the nearly hermit-like Neil Armstrong.
That said, the "HD" sequences are, by and large, limited by the resolution of the original (what a surprise), and calling them "HD" is a hyperbole at best, disingenuous at worst. So the Discovery channel's hype about digging stuff out of the vault and getting an HD-worthy presentation of this vintage footage is just that: hype. There are some priceless shots, like the slow-motion ground test footage of the explosively-jettisoned Mercury hatch. But, by and large, the "unearthed" footage is stuff we've seen before.
What I detested most, though, was the U.S.-centric view of the writing. The script for the Skylab sequences would lead you to believe that the U.S. orbited the first space station. The Apollo 8 mission planning and execution was triggered by the placement of a Russian moon rocket on their launch pad, but this is overlooked.
So, obviously, the "we" in "when we left earth", is Americans.
A historical distortion, at best.
Jumper (2008)
Disappointing execution of fascinating premise
*** SPOILERS *** The basic premise of this film is that there are naturally-occurring mutants (ala X-Men) that can jump -- teleport themselves -- via thought-impulse alone to other locations on Earth. These people are called Jumpers. Because they have seemingly supernatural powers, a gang of Christian assassins organized since the Middle Ages pursue and execute Jumpers because "only God should have such powers". These assassins are called Paladins, apparently after the collective name of the knights in Charlemagne's court.
So now we have X-men, being pursued and assassinated by Opus Dei. Get it? The movie concerns itself with a Paladin (Samuel Jackson) who gets on the trail of a Jumper because a large amount of cash has disappeared from a number of bank vaults where there was no forced entry, and the thief apparently left notes apologizing for the theft.
This Jumper is apparently an emo-angst dysfunction case because his mother left him when he was five and his father is a drunken dullard. But around the age of 15 he gets in a tussle with the high school bully and learns he can, by mental-impulse, cause himself to teleport to other locations.
The emo-angst bleeds through into everything this jumper does. This, complicated with his low I.Q. ("you did flunk algebra"), leads him into stupidity after stupidity.
This is the disappointment in the film for me. We have a Jumper who's been stealing money from bank vaults for 8 years but somehow (in an emotionally immature way) thinks that no one will come looking for him or try to recover their money.
This is similar to the emo-angst dysfunction in the film version of Lost in Space. Also very similar to the emo-angst dysfunction at the end of the first Superman film. And let's not forget the emo-angst portrayed in the Spider-Man films.
These films all could have (should have) been made without the emo-angst dysfunction.
When I see films like this, I want to ask myself "what would I do if I had power 'X'?" The reason this film leaves people cold, empty and dry inside is because they (like me) want to think that they would use the power more wisely than the emo-angst lead in this film. Or at least with a little insight and forethought. Not hesitantly and neurotically.
I think that the parts of the film about getting the girl, fighting the Paladins, and figuring out what mommy was all about could have been explored without all the mellerdrammer.
And, frankly, the premise could have left room for a Jumper-II (or, in Alien parlance, "Jumpers"). But the poor execution and over-emo application of the premise leaves room only for a sequel if someone has the stomach to suggest it for a Sci-Fi channel Memorial Day special premiere. And maybe not even then.
I want to take my Jumper DVD back to the store, demand my $16 be returned, and demand another $16 for the time I wasted watching this.
The Andromeda Strain (2008)
Absolute drivel
If you've seen the "updated remakes" of Rollerball, The Time Machine, Planet of the Apes, The Invaders, War of the Worlds, The Haunting, Lost in Space, and Battlestar Galactica and liked them, if you like the contrived derivative science-fictiony mini-series "Taken", then you'll like this.
The novel "Andromeda Strain" by Michael Chrichton could have been updated to 2008 U.S.A. without doing the overboard nonsense as clearly demonstrated in the above-mentioned awful remakes.
I'm sorry Michael Crichton is still alive to see this hack job of his masterpiece.
For example, in the remake of "The Haunting", there had to be lesbians. For what reason, who knows? But, in this remake, guess what? Unnecessary homosexuals! Even though it was obvious in the original film that the female scientist could have been a lesbian IT WAS IMMATERIAL TO THE PLOT, so wasn't explored! There was child abuse in the new "The Haunting", too. Why? I dunno. Someone wanted to make a point, I suppose, but failed utterly in doing so.
In the "Lost in Space" remake, the relationship between Will Smith and his father is dysfunctional as all get out. And UNNECESSARILY SO. Well, in this remake, the various characters (and there's too many of them) all have some sort of dysfunctional relationship with each other, with baggage left over from previous run-ins, affairs, and incidents.
The "Planet of the Apes" remake and "Time Machine" remake both did something stupid and unnecessary with time-space travel. So does this.
Wanna not trust the government? Well, "The Taken" used that so much it wore a hole in it. And it's done to death in this remake, even though, in the original Andromeda Strain, it was done just right. Why? Because in the original the government was running a con on the bio-scientists who didn't figure it out until five minutes from the end. That was enough government conspiracy stuff for me. I don't need anti-government paranoia thrown in my face, overdosing me, from the first minute of the film! And don't get me started on the moronic, pandering introduction of a sensation-seeking "journalist" (who wasn't in the original novel or film) that just mucks up the whole works. The producers apparently wanted to base him on an Anderson Cooper-Geraldo Rivera hybrid. Like that's a good model for a fabricated journalist.
If you wanted to update the Andromeda Strain, why not do it by updating the computer tech, the genetics, the medical diagnosis tech, the biochemistry knowledge/tech and the biowarfare tech? Those were all in the original film, but could use updating to 2008 tech or even envisioning a bit beyond 2008 tech. It could have been done just like the original Andromeda Strain, which put tech there that was recognizable and believable and understandable for a 1970 audience, but, where necessary, took it a step or two into the future.
And why do we have to have a mix-and-match one-from-column-A-and-one-from-column-B gender/race/sexual preference scientific team? Because it's politically correct? Guess what? I just watched the Phoenix Mars Lander team get interviewed and there was no such politically-motivated race/gender/sexual preference nonsense on that team. That's because the Phoenix team was chosen on the basis of knowledge, expertise, and ability, just like the the original Andromeda Strain scientific team.
Sorry, Benjamin Bratt, Christa Miller, Eric McCormack, and Rick Shroder, I loved you in other stuff, but you sure got suckered into this.
I really hate "remakes" that are over-emo, angst-filled, self-involved, personality conflict bore-fests. Can you tell? Anyway, after watching this wretched thing, I put in my DVD of Andromeda Strain and actually enjoyed "The Andromeda Strain".
The Big Bang Theory (2007)
Long Overdue!
After Max Headroom was unceremoniously canceled in 1988, I figured that the unwashed mass called "prime time TV audience" would never "get" anything more intellectually stimulating than 90210. Imagine my surprise when this show came to the air...and lasted a whole season! I recorded and watched the whole season with a friend of mine yesterday, and we agreed, the nerds are an amalgam of nerdness: one show, they're into Lord of the Rings, another show, they're into programming computers, another show, they're into Halo, another show, they're into Star Trek, another show, they're into Klingon Boggle, another show, they're into comics, another show, they're into robots. I don't think you could really have a show where the nerds were really nerds: real nerds are into the few specific nerdnesses that appeal to each individual nerd. Having a show with realistic nerds would be too boring for workability. This is, in fact, one of the minor problems with the scripts. The nerds are into a wide and interesting variety of things, yet Penny often comments that they "don't have a life". I love the asynchronous conversations about various physics and nerd-dom topics, though. They're exactly like the conversations I had with my nerd-friends when I was that age. And still do. So I love it. And I'm glad they made it a full season! That means DVDs! (With commentary!) Definitely recommended. For nerds, fer sure.