Reviews

"Acts of Sacrifice" is the episode in which both Londo and G'Kar really begin to emerge as great, tragic figures. This one is also deeply tied into the larger plot arc of the Shadow War.

I would rate this ep a '10' if it wasn't marred by a vulgar sub-plot involving Susan Ivanova and a horny alien ambassador. Granted, it was an amusing piece of low comedy but far below the level of the rest of the episode. This material would have been far better included in one of the throwaway, filler eps. As it is, I still rate "Acts of Sacrifice" a nine on the IMDb scale.

The only discernible thought in this farce is the suggestion that TPTB will gracefully submit to a successful rebel as the rulers of the Village are shown doing to Number Six. It's utter nonsense of course as anyone who actually studies history or political science could tell you. Just for one, if old corrupt establishments did things like that, events in the US since November, 2016, would have been rather different, you think?

So much for the only idea in this crapfest coherent enough to be critiqued. The rest of this is obscurationist bullshid. The creators of the show subjected their audience to this cloud of bs because they didn't know how to end the story they'd started. It's a histrionic, psychedelic version of the "It was all a dream" cop-out used on shows like "Dallas" and "Lost".

Too bad. "The Prisoner" had a promising start and there were a few good eps along the way.

"I Care A Lot" pretends to be about satirizing greed and exposing abuse of the elderly but you'd have to be really obtuse not to see through that. The sociopathic main character, Marla Grayson, isn't the villain of the movie; she's the hero. Throughout the film, the audience is manipulated to sympathize with Marla and her girlfriends.

The feminist angle becomes visible when you perceive that every single male in the movie is either a weakling, or a fool, or both. The film's radical feminism becomes further visible when you realize most of it's female characters (including our hero, Marla) are lesbians. Do I need to reference the tenets of radfem ideology that advocate lesbianism as a superior lifestyle for liberated women?

"I Care A Lot" is propaganda for Evil.

I recently saw the two main LOTR fan-films: both vids have good production values & very good costuming, but there the resemblance ends...

Of the two*, "The Hunt For Gollum" is by far the stronger. It covers some of the events described in Chapter 2, "The Shadow of the Past". The actor playing Gandalf, Patrick O'Connor, is truly excellent. The one playing Aragorn comes off as too boyish and/or beta in closeups but he looks great in the long shots. The stunt work in THFG is superb; the big fight scene is equal in quality to anything in Jackson's movies. If it were legally possible, the movie is good enough to be bundled in a package with the Hollywood trilogy. I give THFG an '8' on the IMDb scale. I will definitely watch it again.

* The other being "Born of Hope"

The writer of "Squadron" has a good grasp of the Dominion War story arc. As far as I can tell, through the veil of the Czech language dialogue, the acting is pretty good. I thought Jana Peclova as the Vorta, Inrina, was overacting a bit and Jakub Holý as Captain Viktor de Santis was, possibly, underacting. Michal Husak as Adm. Jens Nansen though got it just right and has real presence. If the world were fair, Husak would have a great future in the international cinema. The world being what it is though, who knows whether he'll ever be a star of anything except Czech soap opera.

The initial battle between the Norway-class destroyer and the four Jem Haddar fighters struck me as unrealistic but people with less of a geeky interest in the Star Trek universe will probably not be bothered by it. The second battle was genuinely interesting and well thought out.

Among the Starfleet characters, there were far too many females in command positions to be realistic as the Federation is not a gynecocracy. Otoh, making three of these women non-humans was realistic as the Federation is supposed to be a close alliance of multiple species, not a human empire. The big network shows have chronically spaced out this aspect of the Star Trek universe.

Bottom line, if you're into Star Trek, "Squadron" is worth a half-hour of your time. On the IMDB scale, I rate this as a '7'.

I'm rating this episode as a '5' only because of it's significance to the larger arc of the show. In and of itself, I found it literally annoying for the following three reasons...

1. Marina Sirtis couldn't even be bothered to get back in character as Deanna Troi. For most of the ep, she lapses back into her native, UK English accent which is fine but that's NOT Deanna Troi's accent.

2. More seriously, all holodeck episodes on any of the Trek series or movies are ridiculous because the holodeck technology is impossible. It violates the Laws of Physics in so many ways, I could be here all night listing them. If the Federation actually had a technology like this, they'd be almost as godlike as the beings of the Q Continuum.

3. Finally the Reginald Barclay character is really irritating to watch or listen to. Dwight Schultz is a good actor but the character he created in Barclay has a nails on the blackboard effect on me. I simply cant stand him.

As all Trek fans know, "Q Who" is the episode that introduced the Borg, arguably the greatest antagonist the Federation ever faced. Besides it's significance in the development of the Trek franchise, the ep boasts some pretty memorable lines, mostly delivered by Q (played by John de Lancie).

Unfortunately the episode is also flawed by several scenes (totaling about five minutes) devoted to introducing Ensign Sonya Gomez, a meaningless throwaway character. Perhaps the producers were auditioning the character for a larger role but if so nothing ever came of it.

The episode is also flawed by the showrunner's bizarre decision to have Picard stop in the middle of the battle with the Borg to leave the bridge and have a conference. The whole thing comes off as a joke on corporate culture in the Eighties.

Interestingly, "Q Who" was first shown on May 6, 1989 which is about six weeks after the beginning of the long-running Dilbert cartoon series. Ridiculing Eighties corporate culture was the original driving force of the Dilbert series. Given that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert is a science fiction fan, it is highly likely he saw this ep and found it as ridiculous as many other Trek fans did.

"Q Who" is one of the ten most important episodes in the "Next Generations" series, and one of the top twenty in the development of the franchise, but for itself, as a dramatic production, I cannot rate this ep any higher than '7' on the IMDb scale.

I've seen full length Hollywood movies with superstar casts and $50-million budgets that were not as good as this.

The heroes of "Outcasts" are the president, police chief, and armed enforcers of humanity's first interstellar colony, 'Forthaven', on the planet, 'Carpathia'. Although the writers of the series present these characters as admirable people involved in a great and noble project, the colony is a soft police state. This is not done ironically; the writers show no sign of understanding the disturbing nature of the society they've imagined into existence.

The Forthaven colony has not one but two paramilitary organizations, the PAS (Protection And Security) force who police the city and the 'XPs' (slang for Expeditionary Force) which has responsibility for manning the gate and patrolling outside the walls. The PAS is not only an armed police force, it has a sophisticated surveillance department and high-tech equipment for probing the minds of people against their will.

Even the name of the colony, Forthaven (pronounced Fort-haven), reflects paranoia. Why is this place surrounded by high walls? To keep out what? Since there was nothing living outside (not even animals) when they originally built the walls, the only purpose these barriers served was to keep people in.

The absurdity of the series' premise destroys most of the show's potential. Beyond that, there's a lot of soap opera among the characters which only works if you care about them which I didn't. I rate "Outcasts" a '1' on the IMDb scale and I'm throwing the dvd set into the recycling bin.

I just finished re-watching "Total Recall 2070" after seeing it for the first time in re-runs around 2000. As everyone knows, the show is basically a low-budget riff on Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner". So right off the bat that knocks off points for creativity but it also gave the show some great concepts to work with. So how did the series develop these Big Ideas? Not that well...

Frankly most of it is filler. If you just watch the pilot, "Machine Dreams" (which was broken up into two eps for tv) and the last ep, "Meet My Maker", you won't miss anything important. A few of the other 19 eps have interesting ideas but the writers invariably bury them under the same old television tropes you've seen a thousand times already. The two main characters, David Hume and Ian Farve, have Abrams tank-level plot armor.

The character of Ian Farve, the sentient android, is central to the show but because he's just a robot, it's hard to make him interesting. Karl Pruner is an okay actor, and he has strong presence, but he isn't given much to work with.

The character of David Hume is a bunch of dumb "cop on the edge" cliches and the actor who plays him, Michael Easton, is mediocre at best. I could not get interested in this guy.

The character of his hot blonde wife, Olivia Hume, goes from between being too sweet and good to be true in the early eps to being a mentally unstable pain-in-the ass in the later eps. Cynthia Preston, the actress who plays Olivia, is quite skilled but she couldn't save this character from being unbelievable in the beginning and then annoying as the series went on.

The character of Olan Chang is ridiculous. She's a forensic pathologist, a practicing MD, a CSI field technician, a coding expert, an android expert, plus she's never too tired to do another shift, or too busy to drop everything and spend hours babysitting her flaky bff, Olivia Hume. Is Olan Chang an android? Did anyone check? If she is human, what is the CPB paying this chick? Whatever it is, it isn't enough.

Seriously, every time the writers of the show needed an expert as a plot device, they added another skill to Olan's resume. Although the character is credibly played by Judith Krant, the overall effect is unintentionally funny.

I notice the reviews of "Total Recall 2070" are divided between people dumping on the show and fans bemoaning it's cancellation. Twenty years ago, I'd have been in the latter group. I remember thinking at the time how much it sucked that this fascinating show had been cancelled. After re-watching it now, with twenty years of experience under my belt, TR 2070 is just not as good as I remembered.

I give TR 2070 a '5' on the IMDb scale. If you're really into the Cyberpunk and/or Future Noir genres, it's okay. Otherwise you can safely skip it.

I thought I was going to like this movie and admire it's protagonist, King Haakon VII, but I rapidly became exasperated with both. The problem is that Haakon was basically a weak, impotent old man who was totally out of his depth dealing with the crisis of the German invasion of 1940. He apparently spent the previous 35 years of his life content to go through the motions of being a constitutional monarch with no actual power. When everything in his life was up-ended by the German onslaught, he didn't have the slightest idea what to do. That the movie seems to think his doddering was heroic is bizarre.

Most of the other Norwegian characters are similarly ineffectual as is the main German character, the envoy Curt Bräuer. Like the king, Brauer cannot grasp that Hitler's blitzkrieg against Norway means the middle-class rituals that have defined his life are now meaningless. The movie seems to see him as a tragic figure but I found it hard to take him that seriously. The other German characters (including his wife) treat Bauer with increasing contempt as the film goes on and regardless of your politics, it's hard to blame them.

I had trouble deciding how to rate this movie. In the end, I gave it a three on the basis of one point each for the scenes depicting the Battle of Drøbak Sound and the Battle of Midtskogen. Of course as we all know, on IMDb, you can't rate anything lower than one so for all intents and purposes one equals zero and three equals two. Since both of the above mentioned scenes can be watched for free on YouTube, I recommend doing that and not wasting your time and money on this silly exercise in virtue signalling.

Getting back to the heroization of the hapless king, the fact that so many people (including at least half the posters on this page) see Haakon VII as an inspiring figure implies that they themselves are weaker than he is. THINK about that...

This docu is barely nineteen minutes long and more than half of it is devoted to some artist type named Douwe Blumberg. This guy created a statue of a Green Beret on horseback that was set up near the 9/11 memorial in NYC. I suppose statues are interesting to some people but, personally, I'm not one of them.

If the above is not enough, there are several snippets (totaling more than a minute) of a cheesy speech by Joe Biden. Obviously Alex Quade (the director of the vid) has some connection to the Biden machine. Although these segments were mercifully brief, listening to that guy talk about courage was vomit-inducing.

To me, the only thing worthwhile in this production were a few images I hadn't seen before of the Green Berets in northern Afghanistan in 2001.

I bought "Force of Nature" on Amazon to support Mel Gibson and I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, the flick is a turkey on almost every level. The only time it really works is when Mel is on screen and he's only up there for maybe thirty minutes. For whatever reason, he delivers his lines in some kind of New York-New Jersey accent which, to my ears, didn't quite work.

Emile Hirsch and Stephanie Cayo were badly miscast as street cops in Puerto Rico. Neither of these snowflakes was even remotely believable. Fortunately for their reputations as actors, their characters were so poorly conceived that audiences may cut them some slack on their acting. Seriously, a white male cop in San Juan who can't speak Spanish? That's about as believable as a model-thin, white latina larping as a street cop in San Juan.

Regarding the 23-million dollar budget, a friend of mine is convinced the movie couldn't possibly have cost that much to make. He thinks it proves the whole thing was made as a tax write-off.

Summing up, FoN is only worth seeing if you're a big fan of Mel. On the IMDb scale, I give it a '5' but if not for Gibson it would be a '3'.

In the intro to 'Oro', the writer says of the protagonists:

"they were harsh, arrogant, cruel, often divided by quarrels... They killed without scruples and died without protest, in search of gold..."

The rest of the movie is a long, plodding death march illustrating the above points in one brutal incident after another. I was attracted to 'Oro' because of the involvement of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, author of the 'Alatriste' novels, and Agustín Díaz Yanes, the director and screenwriter of the movie version with Viggo Mortensen. As it turn outs though, the cast of 'Oro' is basically a bunch of minor characters from the Alatriste novels while the only thing it has in common with the Mortensen movie is the stabby, throat-slitting viciousness of the fight scenes. The artistry and athleticism of the swordsmen in 'Captain Alatriste' is nowhere to be seen.

I gave 'Oro' a five on the IMDb scale. It's worth seeing if you're really into the period or the creative people involved; if not, you probably want to give it a pass.

It's hard to know how to rate this odd little movie. On one hand, it's dreadful trash that affects to explore the Dracula Mythos while in fact exploiting it at every turn.

On the other hand, this is one of the very few, English-language productions* that addresses the fact that for three centuries, Europe was under attack by an aggressive, expansionist muslim empire. While Western Europe was enjoying the Renaissance, the (mostly) Eastern Orthodox peoples of the Balkans were fighting for their lives against the massive armies of the Ottoman Sultanate. It was their blood and pain that made the Renaissance possible.

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox. As for the "Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula", I'll go with the majority and rate it a '6'.

* The only other one I can think of offhand is the much higher-budget "Dracula Untold" (2014).

Less than two minutes in and I'm already annoyed...

The Varangian Guard were not "special forces"; they were a combo of palace guards and shock troops. In other words, they had two functions: executive security and assault infantry. Since the Byzantine Army had no unit specifically assigned to the role of special forces, the VG may have occasionally improvised as SF but so would any other unit whose commanding officer had sufficient testicular fortitude.

Later: I'm five minutes in and I've already heard more stupid mistakes than I can count.

I'm stopping here because my brain is starting to bleed. The heroic regiment that inspired the Greek proverb, "Loyal as a Varangian" deserves a lot better than this.

"The Arroyo" is set on the US-Mexican border in the very recent past (ie just before the 2016 election). It depicts the struggle of Jim Weatherford, a small-time American rancher, to protect his family and property from the relentless aggression of the Mexican cartels. In a larger sense, it's about the struggle of the American people to maintain control over the future of our country.

For an indy feature, the movie was surprisingly well made. Plot, script, pacing, cinematography were all up to professional standards. Acting was the weakest point, as you'd expect with a cast of amateurs and unknowns, but, even there, most of the performances were competent. Kenny Maines, the actor who played Jim Weatherford, was quite good at points. If he were younger and not openly conservative, I would say he had a real future in the movie business.

I rated the movie '10' out of respect for it's aspirations and sympathy for it's ideology. If "The Arroyo" were a typical Hollywood actioner with the usual contrived plot, I would have rated it a '7. It is watchable (although not outstanding) as purely escapist entertainment. The people who will most appreciate it though are those with Patriot values and/or an interest in the Southwestern border. Anyone who really got into "No Country For Old Men", or "Sicario", or Ridley Scott's "The Counselor" will find "The Arroyo" well worth their time.

"The Alamo" (2004) is not perfect but it's far better than it was given credit for. It is also aesthetically and historically superior to the 1960, John Wayne version of the legend so beloved by hardcore conservatives. In particular, the sequence when the Mexican Army storms the Alamo is the most historically accurate depiction of this confrontation ever put on film.

The film's great flaw is the 12-minute Battle of San Jacinto sequence tacked on at the end. It's just too much and it breaks up the dramatic flow of the movie. It's as if "Braveheart", instead of ending with the martyrdom of William Wallace, had fifteen minutes added on telling the story of Robert Bruce's victory at Bannockburn. The makers of "Braveheart" correctly gave the real-life sequel to Wallace's death about a minute's worth of narration at the very end. John Lee Hancock should have taken the hint.

A minor flaw was the scene where Travis addresses his troops when it becomes obvious that they're not going to be rescued or reinforced before Santa Anna's assault. His self-deprecating and deeply personal speech does not ring true for the character or the period. Nobody talked that way back then, least of all a wannabe hero like William Barrett Travis.

Nitpicking aside, the real problem "The Alamo" (2004) had was that it collided headfirst with the masses' addiction to mythology. Hardcore conservatives rejected it because it humanized the legendary heroes of the Alamo (especially Davy Crockett) while leftists rejected it because it didn't demonize this set of dead white males. And in between these warring political tribes, the great mass of sheeple rejected the movie because it didn't give them enough bang for their buck. If those idiots were going to put down $12 for a flick, they expected to get a lot more sex, violence, special effects and celebrity than "The Alamo" had to offer.

Billy Bob Thornton should have received an Academy Award nomination for his brilliant portrayal of Davy Crockett. Thornton's Crockett is a political and pop culture superstar who feels paralyzed by his own legend and suffocated by his fans to the point he barely knows who he is anymore.

Emilio Echevarría was miscast as Santa Anna (a much younger man in 1836 than Echevarria) but the lines written for his character are quite good and he delivers them with verve. His Santa Anna is an egomaniac whose fascistic and tyrannical tendencies are (partly) compensated for by his genuine love for his country.

The other main characters were basically good but there wasn't enough time to develop them deeply. I've seen most of the movies and miniseries about the Texan Revolution and they all do this, ie choose one or two of the main charactors from the Alamo Mythos and show events from their perspective.

Overall, I rate "The Alamo" a nine on the IMDb scale. Anybody who's interested in Texas, or American folklore, or this period of history will find it well worth their time.

"The Rover" (2014) with Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson is a brutal and utterly superb movie set in the Australian Outback 5-20 years from now as the whole society teeters on the brink of collapse. It's never explained what went wrong but government services have evaporated and the Australian state is only maintaining a tenuous hold on the interior though military occupation. Violent crime is endemic, everybody is armed, and human life is virtually worthless.

If this sounds like the set-up to "Mad Max" (ie the legendary, low-budget prequel to "The Road Warrior"), I'm convinced that's no accident. The movie plays like the writer and directer were trying to create an origin story for the character of Max without the fantasy elements that reduced the original "Road Warrior" trilogy to the level of mass-entertainment shlock. The great Australian actor, Guy Pearce, plays 'Eric', the film's stand-in for Max. Eric is a tormented, damaged, and extremely dangerous man who may or may not have once been normal but is clearly nothing of the kind now. Your milage may vary but I found him and the movie unforgettable.

Final notes: The script makes references to adultery, rape, pedophilia and prostitution but nothing explicit is ever shown on screen nor is there propaganda advocating for any of these things. The film is light on blood and splatter but there is lots of violence and it isn't prettified.

I gave "The Rover" a rating of '10' on the IMDb scale and I virtually never rate anything that high.

This series of four shorts was better than seasons Seven and Eight of "The Walking Dead" and as good as Season Nine.

"Ravenous" (2017) is a slow, morose movie about a group of incredibly stupid, French people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse.

The movie is set in rural, northern Quebec a couple of weeks after a 'Rage' virus-type plague has decimated the population and destroyed organized society. There is no mention of any help coming from anywhere else so presumably the virus has caused a worldwide collapse. As in "28 Days Later", the archetypal film of the FZ (Fast Zombie) sub-genre, the zombies are not dead per se, they are living humans infected with a virus that wipes out their intelligence while radically amping up their aggression. The 'Infected' of "Ravenous" are a bit smarter than their counterparts in other movies, being capable of exercising stealth and simple ambush tactics while also preserving some kind of symbolic awareness.

The cinematography in the film is often beautiful and the characterization is pretty good. I know a lot of the other reviewers here didn't think there was much characterization but on that point, I have to disagree. I suspect the problem is they just didn't like the characters which is understandable since, with the possible exception of the little girl, they're all as dumb as rocks. However the fact is the movie is a pretty good character study IF you can get past their lack of tactical intelligence.

The great weakness of the movie is it's lack of respect for the genre. Writer-director, Robin Aubert, seems to have never thought about any of the practical issues that would arise in an apocalyptic, SHTF (S*** Hits The Fan) scenario. I wouldn't hold the idiocy of his characters against his movie if there was any sign that their stupidity was deliberate (ie a conscious artistic choice) but there isn't. They're dumb because he is... at least as far as survival issues anyway.

Summing up, the ultimate joke in all this is that the Infected in this flick are smarter than the characters are. I rate "Ravenous" as a '3' because in IMDb's weird rating system '1' equals zero and (as previously stated) there are only two good things about this movie, thus making it a three.