cherold

I liked the first Predator movie, mainly liked the second, and then just dropped the whole thing, occasionally hearing about a sequel that didn't sound worth watching.

But then I heard about Prey, set in America before Native American were decimated and staring Amber Midthunder, who I'd really liked in Legion. I watched the trailer and it looked great, and it was great.

While Predator was about a game hunter being hunted by a game hunter, Amber is a wannabe hunter (her friends don't have faith in her, but it's unclear if that's sexism or just something against her) who, like all of her tribe, hunt not for trophies but to live.

Then the predator shows up, and it turns out Amber finds herself both hunter and hunted as her friends get slaughtered.

This is all very exciting. Amber is very likable as the tough and determined protagonist, and the movie is fast-paced and has some remarkable sequences.

It also takes place mainly at night, and the director fails to manage that well. It's often unclear what's going on. I originally thought, well, this probably worked better in the theater, but this wasn't actually a theatrical release (although it should have been), so there's not really an excuse. After I watched the movie I had to read several articles to figure out all that had happened, especially in the final faceoff, where I was like, wait, what?

A lot of these scenes would have been better done in slowmo, which is a standard action technique to let people see what's going on, although there are certainly action movies that handle complex sequences without slow motion.

But if you don't want to shoot in slowmo, don't make half your movie in a dark forest at night.

If not for that one issue I would have given this movie 9 stars instead of 8. But in spite of that weakness, it's a really terrific film - easily the best of the 3 Predator movies I've seen. Highly recommended.

When GoT debuted, I thought, this isn't my thing. I watched the first episode, it seemed like another drafty-castle show, and that should have been it.

But later, a friend of my girlfriend convinced us to give it a shot. He said, give it a few episodes, it gets so good.

So we watched a few episodes. It was well done, moderately interesting, unpleasantly brutal, and something neither of us was that into. There were some good characters (until they died, anyway), and Peter Dinklage was freaking amazing, but we just weren't into it.

But my GF's friend said, it gets really really good later in the season. And when the first season was over, and we still didn't like it, he said, oh, but you've got to see the second season, because that's when it gets really amazing.

My girlfriend is easily persuaded by the sense that she's not watching the thing everyone is supposed to love, while I don't mind ignoring the pack, but halfway through season 2 we agreed that liking this series was a hopeless task and promises that it would get so much better if we just kept going were clearly BS.

The only way I would watch GoT is if someone made a supercut of all of Peter Dinklage's scenes and nothing else. I would watch that in a heartbeat. But I don't care ho many people rave about it, GoT is not that great.

This series is about a mushroom geek who finds a mushroom with ridiculously amazing medicinal and hallucinogenic powers, helped by a girl with sketchy motives and pursued by the feds, big pharma, and others.

While I had mixed feelings about the dumpy character design, the animation is good and the hallucinations are supercool. The story is well paced and has some nice twists and turns. The main characters are likable.

The thing that really bugged me, though, was the premise of big pharma wanting to destroy the magic mushroom. This is based on the idea that rich people would destroy something that could hurt their profits. But if you look at how the world actually works, rich people seek to *control* valuable things, not destroy them. It's just dumb. Like a lot of conspiracy theories, it's less that it's paranoid than that it's paranoid about the wrong things.

Anyway, rant over. Overall it's a really entertaining series (at least through the first season), and you should definitely check it out.