Reviews

Dexter (at least the first few seasons) was edgy, exciting and gritty. It made you question morality, it made you an active participant, it raised interesting questions that we can all relate to.

New blood is slow-paced, filled with teen angst meldrama, preachy and betrays its own characters. They had the opportunity to redeem the season 8 finale but instead made a poorly written waste of potential.

Some characters disappear once their narrative purpose is done, others betray the established lore.

Harrison appears early on, which should have been interesting, but aside from stuttering virtually every line, and acting like a jerk he does very little. He's not interesting or endearing. If the attempt was to pass the torch they've failed. No one wants to see a mopey, bratty teen feeling sorry for himself.

I wish this didn't exist.

This is a great example of Hollywood doing what they do best these days... completely misrepresenting a political view they don't like and then churning it into a weak story that doesn't even fit into the series well. It felt more like an episode of the twilight zone. Basically mustache-twirling conservatives who don't like abortions (not because they think life should be protected, but because they want to control women's bodies) get a taste of their own medicine. Yes it's a filler episode, but it was a low point for a great series.

Here's the short... The film was definitely fun and entertaining. Although I didn't find it scary enough to be a horror movie nor funny enough to be a comedy, so it falls somewhere inbetween, making it a little bit of a confusing experience. But definitely fun.

Where this movie shines is in the nostalgia. The first one did a great job of transporting us back to our own childhoods, and it was clear that we were seeing the world through the eyes of a child, with adults and bullies all being characatures. This one was almost a nostalgia overload as the kids came back to see their home town, yet I really liked those bits. I was a bit dissapointed that the theme of seeing the world through their eyes didn't continue, this time with kids being characatures.

Perhaps my biggest problem with the film played itself out in the first couple of scenes...

It opens with a gay couple who are attacked by a bunch of thugs simply for being gay... Something I would've bought maybe of we were still back in the 90's but this is taking place in present day. Not only was this a forced little piece of woke, it had absolutely no relevance to the plot, making the filmmakers look desperate to appear intersectional.

The next issue was the following moments where we learn that Mike has been living above the library for years. Now in the original version this would make sense because Mike was the one obsessed with Derry, but for some reason in the first movie they made Ben the one that was into the history of the town, so they just abandoned that and instead decided to try to convince us that Ben was actually a prodigy architect, capable of building an underground structure most adults wouldn't be able to.

These changes are odd because they don't lend themselves to the story in ways that could've been done otherwise.

Steven king makes a cameo as a shop owner which had a lot more opportunities for jokes than they went for, which was a bit of a shame to be honest.

The entire movie is sort of pointing towards the characters getting artifacts from their past to perform a ritual that is supposed to kill the monster. It kind of trudges through these sequences intercutting new scenes with the kids being terrorized by the clown. The scenes from the past are great when they shed light on their present, but boring when they try to include new suspense sequences because we already know they point to nothing.

Another area that confused me was that in the first movie, the things that scared people were fake. But in this movie that seemed to change... To the extent that a zombie was chauffeuring the grown up Henry - so it makes for a confusion of the world we are in.

The other thing that was somewhat frustrating was that Pennywise didn't have any clear goal. In the first one he woke from his slumber to feed on fear and kills kids along the way. Here it's like all he's doing is waiting around for the grown up version of these kids. The only other person he kills is the gay guy from the beginning a d a random kid which also seemed to be to get at Bill.

It's a bit of a she because there was a lot of potential for this to be something special, but instead it took great casting and a great premise and didn't respect itself enough to give us a good ending - which is ironic seeing as one of the elements of the story is that Bill is a writer who is unable to write a good ending.

Bottom line, it's fun but didn't live up to its own potential.

Let's think back the The Force Awakens (we will be doing a lot of that) -- the entire movie centered around a single plot device: Luke's lightsaber.

So after waiting two years to learn the significance of this, Luke the old takes one look at the lightsaber hilt and nonchalantly chucks it away, essentially slapping us in the face for having been so stupid as to trust the filmmakers to pay this off.

But having insulting payoffs doesn't end there. How about the whole mystery of Rey's parents? Well it seems the filmmakers wanted so badly to disprove all the fan theories that they decided to hand us another lump of turd by saying that her parents were... drum roll... NOBODY! Not the way Anakin had no father, but as in "nobody" significant.

The obvious place to begin with this review is to state how it blatantly rips off scenes from both Empire and Jedi, or perhaps that it decided to one-up Force Awakens' lame lightsaber battle by giving us NONE AT ALL, but instead I'm going to look at this from within the context of the Star Wars universe, in which 3 films stand out as particularly memorable -- Episodes IV, V and III.

All of these films had interesting storylines, complex characters and took those characters to a place by the end where their entire world had changed.

The characters in Episode VIII do nothing remotely close to this. Rey's so-called training on Degoba-er-Luke's Island, consists of little more than Luke voyeuristically watching her dance around with a lightsaber. Sure she has a scene like Degoba's deep dark cave where she sees herself reflected, but in this case it did nothing more than point us towards the red herring of her parents. In the end her "new changed world" was simply her using the force to move some rocks to save her friends. Not much of an accomplishment for someone who already used the force in much more powerful ways in the previous film.

Much like Force Awakens did, this one took familiar characters from the original trilogy and put them into a blender. Reluctant mentor Yoda became Luke, ethnically diverse character who turns on the heroes to save his own hide in Lando becomes both Rose and DJ (Del Toro).

And yet none of this stupidity seems to be at the core of what annoyed the majority of Star Wars fans. There were two things that did...

1. Leia miraculously surviving an explosion and getting sucked into outer space by using the force to fly to safety... now personally I don't mind the force part of this, to me it was almost the same way they can draw a lightsaber to themselves, she just did the reverse. But how the hell did her head no explode in deep space? What was she breathing?

2. Luke's hologram at the end and demise. Yeah it was a bit of a cheap trick, but worse than that, it felt completely unnecessary. Not only that, it opens the door to a lot of potentially stupid things in the next movie, like maybe Rey has multiple holograms of herself for Kylo to fight (if they do this I think I'll die a little inside).

I know I'm coming off as harsh, but there were some good moments. The film started out promising. Although Poe taking on the entire fleet by himself was a stretch, they sold it pretty well. I likes the scene where Snioke first talks to Kylo Ren because he calls him out immediately for two of the things that annoyed me about The Force Awakens: the fact that he wears a helmet for no reason whatsoever, and the fact that he was bested by a noob.

There was also a scene towards the end where Finn was about to sacrifice himself to save the alliance... but just like the other previously mentioned scenes, they immediately went on to cock up something that had the potential to be really good. That's actually a good metaphor for the entire film. Even the comedic moments felt out of place - one in particular felt like it came right out of Spaceballs.

I didn't think it was possible to anticipate a Star Wars film less than I anticipated this one, but they've managed to get me to a new level of disinterest. If that was the goal... job well done.

Arrival was highly praised, making it one of the few movies to hit Netflix that I was actually looking forward to.

The opening scene was done really well, one of those "Up"-esc sad openings, with Amy Adams as Louise, watching her daughter grow up and then die of cancer.

Now in the present (or past) day, Louise is a language teacher, and we learn that the Earth has been invaded by aliens. We learn this by a series of news shows which were mixed to have very quiet, almost inaudible sound. Not for dramatic tension but so that the filmmaker could try to startle you by suddenly having a loud blaring horn go off.

The next half hour of the movie felt like it was being obnoxiously slow, as if to build atmosphere or something. They clearly did not learn from the failures of such films as the first Star Trek movie, that slow sci-fi is only superior in being more boring.

The aliens begin to come into view through a haze and they suddenly cut away from it as if taking pride in being its cinematic cockteasery.

The moment it cuts directly to is directly after the encounter - skipping over it, surely to beg the question "what happened"? and leading us to suspect that we will find out why everyone looks so shocked at a more dramatic time albeit in a less suspenseful way.

But instead the story just continues on. To me this took away some of the drama because all of the people acting traumatized by this experience were not behaving in a way I could relate to considering that the film is assuming that they experienced pretty much exactly what the audience did.

The next scene was a bit of a head-scratcher for me too... Having not been able to begin a verbal dialogue with the aliens, Louise decides that the next logical step is to have what she calls a "visual aid" by showing it the written word "Human". To me, she as a human being would be a better "visual aid" than the written word. But I guess I was wrong because this prompts the alien to start creating text of its own. How stupid must all these smart people have felt when all they had to do was show the aliens an English word they had no way of understanding.

Now that they have finally opened the lines of communication, this logically leads to the Colonel being angry at Louise for reasons that don't really make sense, but it allows her to go on a speech about kangaroos.

The scenes that follow are somewhat interesting as they try to learn to communicate, but it gets old pretty fast; it reminded me of the Legend of Graystoke and being bored to tears with watching Tarzan learn English. I wanted to see him swinging through trees, and in Arrival - a story about an alien invasion - I wanted to see something actually happen.

It becomes very clear that the author has a great interest in language and communication, and in the narration explaining the language the film is at its best. Unfortunately, the film slides into the all too predictable "race against time" cliché.

The aliens send a message that translates to "weapon" which apparently the Chinese have also learned to decipher - probably written in to add to the race against time, but instead it sort of renders all of the scenes where Louise was learning the language virtually pointless since apparently several others have done the exact same thing.

With about half an hour left in the movie I had figured out where the story was going. It's interesting but it probably wouldn't have been as predictable if it wasn't so DAMN SLOW PACED! Suffice it to say there is a kind of odd twist that was another interesting idea, but because of the way they did it, it feels like less of a twist than having the rug pulled out from under us, because there was clearly information that was being sneakily hid from us unnecessarily, leading to the necessary lack of character development.

But then comes the worst part yet... something that I'm afraid requires some spoilers...

She learns vital information by seeing into the future to a time when she already knew the information. This kind of circular story- telling is one of the laziest kinds!

Now I did like the fact that the theme of non-linear time was reinforced by the structure of the film. What I don't like is that the flashes of the future come at seemingly random times and is unclear about what brings them on - nor does it explain how she was suddenly able to phone a Chinese cell phone when we were told that all global communication systems were down.

I'm sorry of this is a "spoiler" but the way they hid the all too obvious revelation of who Hannah's father was was almost insulting.

Anyway, the film is an interesting attempt but is in many ways lost potential.

What made this film less than what it should've been are first of all the lucky coincidences/conveniences:

(eg. he is coincidentally situated perfectly to spot the Vulture's thugs who happen to be robbing the bank across the street from his favorite deli.

While on the roof at Liz's house party Spider-man happens to see a huge blue explosion goes off that apparently no one else sees.

Vulture drops Spidey from the air but luckily he falls into a lake, and luckily his suit even has a built-in air dryer, and luckily the Vulture happened to inadvertently drop one of his precious magic rocks and Spiderman coincidentally found it.

Peter learns that Vulture's gang is headed to Washington DC and wouldn't you know it, but his Math wiz club, is also going to DC at this exact same time.

Spiderman, trapped in a high security storage facility, hacks the security panel by randomly punching in numbers, and conveniently gets it right eventually without sounding any alarms.

While he is doing this his math club is conveniently winning their award despite the fact that Peter is supposed to be their star member, making his absence ultimately inconsequential.

Spidey gets to his friends in the nick of time, disposes of the bomb seconds before it explodes and saves the girl he happens to have a crush on.

Peter apologizes to Liz for bailing, and conveniently she not only completely forgives him, but agrees to be his date to homecoming because apparently no one else has asked the hottest girl in school.

Spiderman decides to interrogate a hardened criminal who apparently never learned that ratting is a bad idea in the underworld because he tips Spidey off as to where Vulture's next big hit is.

On the ferry he intercepts the thugs' planned weapon sale but coincidentally the FBI are aboard too for no explained reason, and they stupidly hold Spiderman at gunpoint. But conveniently, the Vulture, seeing this, stupidly makes a car-destroying scene that distracts the FBI and allows Spidey to escape.

In the chaos the boat is cut in half but when Spidey can't fix it Tony as Ironman comes to the rescue.

Peter goes to pick up Liz and who opens the door but the Vulture... who is coincidentally her father.

Peter, now with his homemade suit goes to chase after vulture, but one of his thugs – Shocker – is waiting for him for some reason and attacks him in the school parking lot. Spidey is almost done for when this time Ned rescues him.

Vulture topples a building on Peter and then flies away. Luckily for Peter, after collapsing the building, the Vulture doesn't bother to stick around to make sure he's dead. Luckier still, Vulture went to a nearby billboard to sit and watch for Stark's plane. Even luckier still, the Vulture doesn't notice Peter escaping from the rubble and subsequently webbing onto Vulture. Even luckier still, when Vulture says to his helper that he notices some drag the person on the other end brushed it off, because you know, aerodynamics is such an imperfect science.

Anyway you get the idea)

But there was one single scene that brought this movie down a star or two... When pursuing the Vulture, rather than giving us an awesome swinging scene, they had Spider-Man steal a kid's car, drive like a maniac endangering lives and destroy the car.

Grand theft auto is not the Spider-Man I wanted to see.

I really wanted to like this (despite waiting for it to arrive on Netflix). But this was groan after groan. Opening with a completely cliché sequence which feels like the obligatory scene where we learn that Reese and John are buddies, in which Reese complains about all the killing he has to do... Killing? Does gunning down machines count as killing now? That is followed by a battle sequence that takes place over-top of a voice-over war speech John gives his troops ala Braveheart/every other war movie out there.

I will admit that it is a cool concept to learn a little bit about the mechanics of how the time travel works, but it is a little lost when you are watching an entire battalion of soldiers staring awestruck at their naked companion.

Once we bounce back to 1984 there is a lot of "WTF"ery to get through as we see a crappy-looking CGI version of young Arnold re- enacting the original movie alongside actors who appear to have not seen the original - when suddenly, an aged Arnold arrives and picks a fight with himself.

Meanwhile Reese is going through the motions of the original which are now suddenly interrupted by an Asian version of the T-1000, only to be rescued by that aged terminator alongside Sarah Connor.

Breathe. Yes, by this point I was extremely confused as to what was happening. But Sarah tries to explain it, while addressing the aged Terminator as "pops" because clearly "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" taught the filmmakers nothing about pointing out how old our childhood heroes are getting. But before she can clear things up the T-1000 attacks and uses his liquid metal to revive the young Terminator - who for some reason attacks Reese instead of his actual target??

What continually took me out of the movie was the fact that it is kind of a reboot, kind of a remake, kind of a sequel, so most of the cast made me question what I was watching - Emilia Clarke being the one exception; I actually bought her as Sarah.

By a happy coincidence the heroes find themselves in a tunnel that has magical acid in the pipes... magical in that it melts the T1000's skeleton but not Arnold's.

The next nice convenience is that with this altered time-line, Reese and Sarah can hop into the future - which just so happens to be our time, and Arnold can now look even closer to his actual age. Not contrived at all.

With all of the confusion mounting up, the film seems to do it's best to either punch you in the face with action scenes or grind to a halt with boring scenes that explain nothing of the plot. Although we are constantly reminded that these two have to "mate", which on one hand was bold, but the fact that the actors have zero chemistry didn't help anything.

So to add to the confusion, John makes an appearance in 2017 - apparently having travelled back from the future even though he was attacked when Reese left, and despite history being completely altered he still has scars on his face, but actually turns out to be a terminator in disguise, but not a normal terminator, a new kind that is also John at the same time. This mess is what I was busy trying to figure out while the movie wanted me to think about this Genysis thing which is like an IOS-artificial intelligence hybrid.

So it turns out that the heroes have coincidentally landed exactly 24 hours before skynet becomes unstoppable, which of course makes one wonder why evil John helped them escape the police in the first place. But not to worry, rather than giving a sensible explanation we get treated to yet another fight scene.

So while it is seemingly a Terminatorish thing to do, having the good guy suddenly now the bad guy, that goes down the drain when things happen like the following scene where we learn that John is attempting to make a time machine... the same type of time machine that Old Arnold managed to make-shift back in 1994 on his own. It seemed like they were also working on T-1000ish robots, which is kind of stupid seeing as the original model (Arnold) has not even been developed yet.

At about this point in the film I was asking a zillion questions - like who turned John evil and why, and what their plan is? What is the good guys' agenda? and of course How much longer is this movie?

But those questions were not be answered as it was more important to bore us. And now that Reese learns he is John's father we have the worst premise ever which is that two unlikeable characters know that they have to get together. On top of this, we have the situation that John now wants skynet to rule the world despite the fact that he (albeit in an alternate reality) is the leader of the resistance that fights them - making his motivations very bizarre.

What follows is action scene after action scene, each one more boring than the last, until it crescendos in a monstrosity of ridiculousness, where somehow the time machine that the terminators were sent in now destroys them along with everything else in it's path - except Sarah and Reese of course.

And the denouement is no better, with an upgraded Arnold reappearing, Sarah approaching young Reese to introduce him to his older self to tell himself something that is no longer relevant in this time-line. This movie is just.so.stupid. It's an insult to James Cameron.

This film is essentially preaching to the choir. Which is fine, but not really entertaining. Nor does it seek intelligent debate. When you have a film that opens up with someone saying "Science is beautiful and right, and religion is not beautiful and not right" - you know what you are getting into here - people who are just as closed minded as those they are accusing of such.

What I don't understand is why these people who pride themselves on being smarter than everyone else have nothing better to do than to try to convince believers of any religion that having faith is wrong by means of trying to make them feel stupid. If it makes people happy why are you interfering?

What baffles me is how these so-called geniuses condemn "religion" so readily and yet can't accept the concept that a higher being is responsible for their scientific findings. Funny enough one of them even says "to assume the truth without asking the questions leads you nowhere" - yet he is assuming within his own beliefs - which is that natural selection etc occurred without the presence of a deity.

Anyway, people these days don't want to hear anything contradictory to their own world-view so this film that attempts to be smart is actually very dumbed down, knowing that it is essentially just telling a certain group of people what they already want to hear.

Because it refuses to understand the other side of the debate it is not brave, it is not exciting and it is not intelligent. But Ricky was in it so I'll give them a couple stars for that.

I saw this movie for a second time yesterday and I had to keep reminding myself it was meant for children so I wouldn't get too angry.

Since this will contain spoilers I should probably warn you up front about that but I won't.

Strangely the first thing that stood out to me was that the battle sequence near the beginning had more on-screen violence than in all of the "Hunger Games" movies combined. So that was a point in the movie's favour.

That being said, this war begins because a greedy King decides he wants to take over this magical land and wages war on them. Apparently this King has never heard of sending a scout in first to get intel; instead he comes out to a place for whose inhabitants he has no information about, with an army behind him.

There are two very good things about this movie before I get to the main problems.

1. Angelina Jolie. She was very believable in a preposterous film. She felt genuine from start to finish and also revitalized my interest in seeing her naked.

2. The music score. It was a tad over the top at times, but generally complimented the film.

So this lad named Stephan stumbles into the mystical realm and meets Maleficent where they fall in love. But he decides that living in a castle is more valuable to him than spending his life with Maleficent and leaves her. He's a dummy but there are lots of dummies in the world so that's perfectly plausible.

After the King is mortally wounded in the previously mentioned war, he tells his minions that whomever kills Maleficent will earn his crown. Stephan uses this as inspiration to betray the one he formerly loved. But he cannot bring himself to kill her, only chops off her wings to pretend he killed her. And that's where the real problems begin...

Shortly after his coronation, King Stephan announces to the kingdom that his child will be born, and who shows up to crash the celebration, but Maleficent... the one that he had claimed to have killed in order to win the crown, so shouldn't he be immediately stripped of his royalty?

Once his daughter is cursed the King decides that the best course of action is to send his baby into the care of three inept (and poorly rendered) fairies whom he just met and didn't seem to even like. This was a tough one for me to get past.

As Aurora grows up for some reason Maleficent decides to keep a close watch on her and makes up for the shortcomings of the fairies by making sure the child is safe, not really sure why she would do this to a child she just cursed.

A sort of mother-daughter relationship forms between the two of them, which is fairly nice but perhaps a little too rushed in an already short film. Then comes Prince Philip out of nowhere, a kid who looks like a member of One Direction, but my 11-year-old daughter thought he was ugly.

Supposedly Philip is en route to the castle when he happens upon Aurora, and after their cutesy meeting says that he will come back after he's been to the castle.

Aurora learns about her past, that she's cursed by Maleficent and returns to the castle where her father lovingly greets her by sticking her in room from which she easily escapes and pricks her finger on a spindle that exists for reasons unknown.

Maleficent decides she must try to break the sleeping spell with the help of the prince, who she intercepts while he's seeking out Aurora (presumably on his way home from his trip to the castle).

Maleficent and her man-bird sneak into the castle with ease toting along "sleeping handsome", then basically dump him into Aurora's lap. When Prince Philip comes to and realizes he's in the castle he says this is where he was meant to be -- but wait, wasn't the only reason he was in the forest when he was captured because he was coming back FROM the castle?

Once the Auror's sleeping spell is broken, she and Maleficent try to escape the castle we get into the mandatory final showdown, which is all well and good except for one major problem... during the battle Aurora hides in a random room in the castle, which conveniently, of every room in this massive castle, happens to be the very room where Maleficent's wings are kept. Apparently the writers missed the lesson where you are taught that lucky coincidences should NEVER save the heroes in the end.

The rest plays out as you would expect with the evil King being killed, Maleficent being redeemed and Aurora with her loving Prince becomes the queen of the two realms. We are then told by the narrator that now you know the "real" story. But hold on a minute... if this is the real story, who would have documented and passed down the inaccurate version that had been told up to this point?

•The evil King is dead so he and his followers wouldn't have.

•Aurora is the loved queen now so her loyal subjects wouldn't have.

•Maleficent would not have shined a bright light on her misdeeds.

The only solution to this I could come up with was this: After the events of the film, Philip has an affair with Maleficent and then he and Aurora go through an ugly divorce and custody battle, during which time Philip brainwashes his children into believing that Aurora is brainless and Maleficent is a heartless bitch and then they pass on that version of the story through time.

Either that is the plan or the writers just had no idea what they were doing.

I recently saw this movie on TV. I held off for a long time since I've always had low expectations. In the end I'm glad I didn't pay to see it.

My main gripe is this: The film attempts to take on the Noah story in modern day fashion, which is certainly an interesting concept. The trouble is that with Noah the theme was that mankind got obliterated not just because of their wickedness, but because of their lack of faith by not getting on the ark. In Even Almighty the townsfolk do not believe and yet are saved by quickly jumping aboard after seeing the floods coming. So in essence they are REWARDED for their lack of faith.

Furthermore, no one is destroyed by the flood anyway, making it largely pointless, as though God was doing this as a display of his power. Not only is this borderline sacrilegious, it flies right in the face of the theme of Bruce Almighty.

Some of this would be acceptable if the movie was hilarious in the process of being preposterous, but I don't think I laughed once. So the movie pretty much fails on every level.