rabbit4

Wow! I just saw Wing Commander -- what a piece of crap! lol Scenes that had no relevance to plot, characters who had a lot of screen time and no purpose, plot holes you could drive an APC through, alien bad guys that looked almost as frightening as bald hamsters, which is what they resembled (were the goatees supposed to make them look evil?).

Chris Roberts should stick to video games, where presenting a coherent plot isn't quite as important as in movies. His writing and directing styles are much better suited to the world on 2 minute cut-scenes than the world of $50 million, 2 hour feature films. At times you couldn't even tell what was going on he moved the camera around so damn fast.

The CG effects were very nice, very well-done (with a few exceptions -- you can tell which were last-minute effects). The space battles looked great, but as I said before, the alien bad guys -- the Kilrathi -- were horrible, and had all the menace of a carrot.

The acting was terribly uneven, with two exceptions -- Matthew Lillard was great as "Maniac" Marshall, and Saffron Burrows did a good job with a thin character as "Angel" Devereaux. Jurgen Prochnow and David Warner were a total waste, and the only thing I can figure is that both saw the amount of screen-time they'd get, saw the corresponding pay offer and figured they'd get while the getting was good. Unfortunately, Freddie Prinze Jr., in his first top-billing role as our hero Christopher Blair, was rather forgettable. I found myself wanting to see less of him and more of Maniac and Angel.

Overall, I give this flick one star for content (mainly thanks to Digital Anvil's CG work) and one star for effort. So, two stars total. Oh, and that's out of ten.

I admit it -- I went to see MEET JOE BLACK simply because it happened to be running the STAR WARS: EPISODE I trailer. Not being even remotely in the general category of "Brad Pitt fan" I was not exactly gung-ho about seeing this flick, but the fact that one of my favourites -- Tony Hopkins -- played one of the leads softened me up a bit. I'm glad it did. While this will not be everyone's cup of tea (it's more for the hopeless romantics), it's a very good film, which is wonderfully acted by all involved -- especially Jeffery Tambor -- and nicely directed by Martin Brest.

As the title says, Power Play has succeeded where many others have tried and failed -- they have made a movie/tv show centering on hockey that isn't crap. The only other production to ever achieve this was a 1994 CBC movie called Net Worth. With strong performances by all the leads, especially by the under-used Dean McDermott as the captain of the Hamilton Steelehads who is very convincing in his role as the soft-spoken jock. Gordon Pinsent is a pure delight to watch, and if you're able to follow all of his fast-spoken, half-muttered dialogue I'm sure you'll laugh as hard as I did. Overall, I'd have to say this power play lived up to it's name, because Alliance-Atlantis seem to have scored their first winner since merging.