spotter-8

This is yet another movie where an alien with superhuman abilities comes to Earth and tells us all the things we're doing wrong. Think 'The Day The Earth Stood Still'. In the early version, we're all warned about the perils of nuclear war. In a later version, we're lectured about damaging the ecology. In a future version, no doubt we'll be warned about some other thing that we dim, stupid, primitive humans are getting wrong. The various aliens might as well be powerful demigods come to Earth to teach us how to live, and somehow the 'correct' way to live always adopts the liberal/progressive hot ideas of the day. But those people aren't big on gods or religions, so they use omniscient, almost all-powerful and more than a tad supercilious aliens.

This particular two-episode anime series is meant to be viewed just for fun. There are no hidden conflicts, or deadly threats to civilization. There are no powered battle suits, and hardly any magic. What you have is a cute teenage girl, Mink, who happens to be half-human and half-dragon, and her two girlfriends, one of whom has pointy ears and so may or may not be an elf. She has a teenage crush on a pop singer who also happens to be the king's dragon slayer. And after that it gets a little weird. And after THAT it gets even weirder, and more outlandish, and funnier. None of it is meant to be taken seriously, but all of it is great fun to watch. A lot of attention to small, and sometimes hilarious, details is a continuing feature of this anime.

I knew very early in the movie that the father character was going to go around the bend. While some of the early scenes of the film did look as if they'd been shot in the actual Pine Barrens, it soon became apparent that they'd actually been shot somewhere very else. I've been to the Pine Barrens several times, and they just don't look like the stand-in forest at all. You certainly won't see any 20-foot-high rock faces in Wharton State Forest. You'd be lucky just to find a rock.

And as for the Devil itself, let's just say that NO part of the Jersey Devil legend includes it eviscerating deer and throwing them on the road or killing people in economy-sized bunches.

To sum up, the scenery was generic, the characters were horror-movie generic, the monster's behavior was bad-horror-movie generic, and the whole film could have easily been about some other kind of monster. I think the only reason they went with the Jersey Devil for this movie was because it was one of the few folk legend creatures left that hadn't already had a bad movie made out of its story.

Before I saw her in this film I'd never paid much attention to Jennifer Love Hewitt, since I'd never been much of a fan of horror/dead teenager movies. In 'Heartbreakers', she showed a lot of cleavage, a LOT of leg, and a real talent for both light and physical comedy. I thought that she played very well opposite Sigourney Weaver and still hope that they might team up again some day.

There aren't a lot of movies that I'll watch over again, but this is one of them. Ray Liotta is good, if not on screen for most of the film, Gene Hackman is entertaining as a tobacco magnate with a persistent hacking cough, and I always like seeing Anne Bancroft. This is a caper/con game movie driven by the interactions of some very interesting characters.

This is essentially a Western buddy movie, only with two stunning Latina actresses instead of Paul Newman and Robert Redford. While there's a serious underlying story, there's also considerable humor, much of it physical and not a little of it having to do with the considerable physical charms of Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz. This movie was aimed at being entertaining, not at being Oscar bait, and it is very entertaining indeed. The two women start out seeking revenge for the deaths of their fathers, and though they come from very different social strata (Gee, doesn't that sound familiar?) they join forces to achieve their goals. This leads to a great deal of interplay between the two of them. You may have seen that before in any number of buddy movies, but having it occur between two women makes it all seem fresh. This is the sort of movie I'd watch more than once.

I saw this movie a long time ago at a drive-in theater in New Jersey, back when gas was thirty cents a gallon. The basic plot, as best as I can recall, was that some men kidnap an aspiring actress and train her to please their male clients. She's not a sex slave, exactly, because she's allowed to come and go and is told once she's achieved success she can tell them to sod off and they won't bother her any more. She does, she does, and they do, which all happens at the end of the movie. At several points in the movie the projectionist turned the light down so low that no one could see anything, although the sound was maintained so that everyone could tell that something interesting was going on. We just weren't allowed to see what it was. There were also a few places where some scenes have clearly been cut short or edited out.

The movie had something of the feel of the old 'Ginger' movies, since it featured mild bondage and nudity. It predates those movies, but it has some of the same people involved with it.

I've come not to expect much from any SyFy "original" movie. This particular one, though, plumbs new depths of bad writing, atrocious plotting, mediocre-to-bad acting and weak execution. It hijacked names from Greek mythology and applied them to the movie's two-dimensional characters in an attempt, I suppose, to give them some apparent depth, and then to compound the theft shamelessly grabbed some material from Christianity and Bram Stoker, and THEN, not content with making a complete mess of things, swiped an ending right out of any one of the "Halloween" movies. It was flat, predictable and never more than minimally interesting.

I came across this film while flipping through the satellite channels one rainy Saturday afternoon, and left it on for a while because with over 357 channels, there was really nothing on. Bruce Springsteen needs to update his song.

I don't know how many Americans are familiar with Bollywood movies, but I'm given to understand that most of them involve a man and a woman who fall in love and must overcome many obstacles in order to be together. Also as I understand it, there must always be a happy ending. We have our own clichés, like the monster in a horror movie must always show up for the sequel, no matter how dead it was before, or that cars must fly through the air during accidents. Me, I kinda prefer the happy endings. Indestructible monsters and cars bouncing around like ping-pong balls leave me cold.

The movie itself was simple, straightforward, and predictable, but there was one thing it had that made me watch it again. That was the secondary female character, played by Neha Dubey. Throughout the movie she seemed attractive enough, but not especially so...and then she was called upon to dance in a musical number for the movie that was going to be made. For me, at least, she went from slightly attractive to jaw-droppingly, rock-between-the-eyes, can't-look-away stunning, all flashing eyes and brilliant smile and fascinating choreography. If I see that this movie is going to be on satellite again, I'll watch it again, just for that dance routine.

There are any number of movies that are worth watching. There is a smaller number of movies that are worth watching again. And there are a very few movies that are worth watching over and over. "Angel's Dance" is one of those movies.This is due to imaginative writing and fine performances turned in by Jim Belushi, as the professional hit-man trying to train a mafia soldier to do wetwork, and Sheryl Lee, as the introverted, isolated woman who is supposed to be the apprentice's final exam. Nothing goes as planned for the assassins, as their intended victim reacts unpredictably and lethally to their efforts. As miserable and lonely as her life may be, she isn't at all ready to give it up yet.

The movie has plenty of little surprises in it, yet none of them feel contrived. This is a movie you can safely pop into the VCR or DVD player on a rainy day and be assured of an entertaining ride, even if the ending isn't exactly a happily-ever-after one.

Maybe all of the period details aren't correct. Maybe Henry's sisters got bundled into a composite character. Maybe the series isn't as historically accurate as it could be. They're on a budget. Even if they had a bigger budget, it's likely that they would have missed something. I think the producers of this mini-series were trying to provide interesting entertainment, not an historical documentary.

That said, I want to go on to say that I've found the series to be very entertaining. However, when I first saw it billed as "The Tudors", I was hoping for a bit more than "The First Two Wives of Henry VIII". Well, they're on a budget. If this series does well, maybe we'll run through the rest of the wives. The Tudor dynasty was a short one: Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. But, it packed a lot of drama, intrigue and entertainment value into those three reigns. The producers of this series picked just part of the bigger story to tell. Even so, they have intrigue, lust (for sex, for power and for wealth), treachery, deceit, all the things that go into soap operas. Historical and costume inaccuracies aside, it's still a pretty good story.

I have a little trouble with the casting, though. Natalie Dormer is devastating as Anne Boleynn. There's a lot going on behind those eyes. But Henry's first queen seems a little too old for the role. Sam Neill is suitably oleaginous as Cardinal Wolsey. The secondary characters seem well-cast for the most part. My one real complaint is in the casting of Henry VIII. Henry was a giant of a man for those days, tall, with red-gold hair. Casting an average-sized actor in the role is a little too cute. I'm not familiar with the actor's other work. He does seem to be trying to fill the role. But when I look at him, I can't help but think of a Calvin Klein underwear model. When he launches into a royal rage, I can't help thinking of a petulant Calvin Klein underwear model. I'm still going to watch the rest of the series. It's more entertaining than most of the stuff on cable and satellite these days.

First, I would like to say that Peter Jackson's "King Kong" is beyond doubt worth watching, and also worth re-watching. The movie works best when it concentrates on the interplay between Naomi Watts' character and Kong himself. King Kong is spectacularly realized in this film, and utterly believable. Naomi Watts turns in an equally believable performance, as viewers can see the relationship develop between the down-on-her-luck blonde actress and the big, hairy Alpha Male of Skull Island. Almost anyone would be familiar with the story line, and the tragic ending. Peter Jackson managed to tell the old story superbly well.

Having said that, I have to also say I wish they'd done a better job of editing, because there are a number of scenes not central to the plot that go on for too long.

In the original movie, Kong fights and kills a Tyrannosaurus, after first placing Ann safely in a tree. In this version, he fights not one, but three Tyrannosaurs at once while deftly flipping Anne from one hand or prehensile foot to the other. As a demonstration of the wizardry of the CGI artists, it is impressive. It also goes on for too long. The old Kong was more of a boxer-wrestler. The new one gets into a King Kong Kung Fu Fight with the dinosaurs that really belongs in a Jackie Chan movie, but even Jackie Chan would have edited the scene down by about half. Just because you CAN do something cool with CGIs in a movie is not sufficient reason to go ahead and do it...and do it...and do it.

The sauropod stampede similarly went on for too long. One minute of it would have been exciting. Two minutes would have been okay. But it goes on far longer than that, with the movie makers and ship's crew caught up in the stampede escaping certain death by a whisker about three times every second. You lose track with so much going on. And when it goes on and on and on, you lose interest as well and just want the scene to be over. It was another display of the consummate skill of the CGI people, but it got in the way of the story they were trying to tell.

There is a similar dragging out of a scene with Kong on a rampage in New York City, looking for his lost lady love. Here it was a display of more CGI wizardry interspersed with too many stunts.

The iconic ending atop the Empire State Building had some small things added to it that it didn't really need, but these are minor things. There is a scene when Kong seems to realize he has no way out, no chance of survival. Ann realizes this as well. The scene is dialogue-free, and very well done. It's a classic tragic ending, but Kong elects to go down fighting...with a bang rather than a whimper. You find yourself rooting for him, even when you know how it's going to turn out.

I was told that "Sky Captain" was made because someone loved the old movie serials from the 30s and 40s. If this is true, it only goes to prove the old saying that you always hurt the one you love.

There was a TV special showing how most of the scenery and sets were computer-generated, and how the actors had to act and react to a blue screen. No doubt this saved much money and time, but it seems that they had the same approach when it came to having a script...more blue screen. Anyway, I've seen too many movies these days that seem to take the approach that if you throw enough really cool CGIs at an audience, they won't care about plots, character or writing. This is another one of those movies. They also seem to have done something in the processing so that the whole film looks as if they took a slightly blurry old sepia print and colorized it. If this was intended as another homage to the days when movies were fun to watch, well...you always hurt...(In this case, it started to hurt my eyes after a while as well) Many of the CGI scenes were flatly unbelievable anyway.

What finally killed the movie for me...and by then it wasn't looking very chipper anyway...was when the P-40 did a screaming power dive into the ocean from 10,000 feet and then proceeded to fly along underwater. I'd already suspended my disbelief pretty high by then, and it just wouldn't go any higher. The line snapped.

The interplay between the rugged, one-expression Sky Captain and perky Polly Perkins might have been live-action, but it felt as strained as many of the CGIs. Polly's constant whining about how few shots she had left in her camera (It seemed to take up the last five hours of the movie) may have been meant to be cute. I found it annoying. I found it even more annoying when it turned out to be a rather labored setup for the final line in the movie.

If you want to see a real homage to old serial-adventure movies, get a tape or a CD of "Raiders Of The Lost Ark". It didn't have wall-to-wall CGIs, but it was a lot more fun to watch. And the third or fourth time Polly went on about her camera, Indiana Jones would have chucked the camera into the next bottomless pit they had to cross. He might have thought about chucking Polly in after her camera too.

I saw this movie on satellite. I originally started to watch it because I was curious to see what Buffy the Vampire Slayer was up to now.

Thirty minutes...or maybe less...into the movie, I was hooked. For sheer skin-crawling creepiness, this film is near the top of my list. Unfortunately, it was on so late that I had to go to bed right after it was over. I didn't sleep well that night. One of my sons had seen it before, in a theater, and now I could understand his reluctance to go up into the attic of our house. More is implied than is explicitly shown in this movie, which makes the few explicit moments all the more scary. But the implied stuff will work its way into the darker recesses of your imagination and last longer, so that for a while afterward you'll have an aversion to stairwells, elevators, small children, train rides...and dark attics. If you like a good horror film, I can heartily recommend this one. The only complaint I had about it was the ending, which seemed a little too Western for a remake of a Japanese film.

It has been said that war consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. This movie seems to want to recreate that by giving the viewer long periods of sheer boredom (unending internal monologues by the actors, long, artsy shots of landscapes, flying birds, a sprouting coconut on an empty beach, flashbacks and what appear to be flash-sidewayses of a Marine's wife being unfaithful back at home while he is mumbling on and on about how much he loves her) punctuated by moments of excitement and big explosions. I think there were more Japanese captured in this movie than there were in the first two years of the war in the Pacific, and long scenes of Japanese prisoners and battle-weary Marines all shivering and shaking together and trying not to cry after a fight was pretty damned unrealistic, given the historical record of that war.

If I watch a war movie, I want to see battles, fights, desperate struggles and acts of heroism. I don't want to see what looks like a very special episode of Oprah proceeding at a pace that makes a snail look speedy. There were a few good moments in the movie, but the accumulated weight of all the sleep-inducing scenes smothered them.

Okay, this wasn't as mind-numbing as "Alexander", and I did see it only on cable...but the whole time I was watching it I felt uncomfortable, as if I was looking at a really bad multiple-vehicle collision with lots of injuries. You know you shouldn't, but some morbid part of you won't let you turn away...

As for the plot...Global Warming can lead to another Ice Age. This is bad enough, like saying that setting fire to your house will help to keep your beer cold, but in this movie the Ice Age takes only fifteen or twenty minutes to get started. You no sooner set a match to the gasoline-soaked drapes than the entire house is encased in ice. Oh yes, and you are being hunted by wolves who escaped from the city zoo. These are the only animals that escaped from the zoo, and as the snow got deeper and the temperatures lower, they didn't have the sense to head South while they could.

I really doubt that there could be such a thing as the snow super-hurricanes as depicted in the movie, but these were the chosen special-effects-ex-machina to jump start the glaciers. A hurricane is a heat engine, driven by the accumulated warmth of the sun on tropical waters. What drives a super-snowcane? The answer to that one is easy: A bad writer's overheated imagination. We get not one, but three of these things, all appearing overnight and sweeping down from the North Pole simultaneously. The one that hits New York also generates a storm surge.

A real hurricane's storm surge is a dome of water under the eye of the storm. It's there because the air pressure in the eye is much lower than anywhere else. A storm surge might go eight to ten feet for a big hurricane. The super-snowcane generates a surge high enough to slap the face of the Statue of Liberty and submerge Manhattan. It comes in from the east (The supercane winds would be pushing all the water the other way) and arrives several minutes...sorry, hours...or maybe days...before the eye of the storm does. The pacing in this movie is astonishing whenever it isn't simply unbelievable. I think the passage of time was sped up in order to cram as many really cool, nay, chillin', special effects into two hours as possible.

The storm surge then does not leave. No, it stays in Manhattan, enjoying Times Square, the Guggenheim and all the other cultural attractions for a while. Gravity cannot pull it away, or perhaps the ecology is so unsettled that water can no longer flow downhill. A Russian supertanker joins in as another sightseer and then it all freezes solid. Sea water can apparently freeze in minutes.

The New York supercane is monitored from space. The other two, ravaging Europe and Siberia, are apparently less interesting. At one point, we are told that the temperatures at the eye of the supercane are dropping by ten degrees per second. Now, it doesn't matter if the degrees are Fahrenheit or Centigrade. In less than a minute, this storm will be freezing the air itself solid, but this doesn't happen. Apparently the CGI budget could only go so far.

This unprecedented disaster forces the evacuation of the entire US. No mention is made of what happened to the Canadians. In fact, I don't think any mention at all is made of the Canadians. Maybe to them it was just a chilly Spring, eh? Mexico, on the other hand, is mentioned a couple of times, since all 300 million Americans seem to be trying to get there. Just how they get there is as unmentioned as the Canadians, since early on we are told that neither planes nor trains can operate in the weather. Could SUVs?

At the end of the movie, we are treated to a sermon about how We Should Respect Nature More, and Not Exploit Our Precious Resources. There's also a humble obesiance to all the Third World countries who so charitably took us all in. Got that? The US has been destroyed by its own arrogance, and maybe now we'll appreciate subsistence farming and outdoor plumbing a lot more.

The special effects were impressive, but they followed each other so quickly and bewilderingly that it was a lot like being punched repeatedly in the head by Mike Tyson. Some of the special effects shots were views from a space station. At the end of the movie, we see that this was an Ice Age to top all Ice Ages. The snow and glaciers reach all the way down to the Rio Grande. They stop there, though. Apparently Mexico wouldn't let them in. But...During the last Ice Age, which only reached as far South as Chicago, the sea level was a couple of hundred feet lower than it is today. In spite of glaciers now occupying Phoenix, San Diego and Orlando, in THIS movie, the sea level hasn't changed at all and the coastlines are exactly the same as they were the day before yesterday.

I must first say that there is NO way I could spoil this movie no matter what I might write about it. Oliver Stone spoiled it long before I ever got to see it. This is the only movie I've ever seen where afterward I felt cheated enough to ask for my money back. I got it, too.

Where to begin? Alexander the Great was a conqueror, but we only get to see two of the many battles he fought. Gaugamela began promisingly, but then the overhead battle scenes were all filmed during a titanic dust storm so that it was impossible to tell who was fighting...or even if anyone was fighting. The closeup battle scenes appear to have been filmed by a shaky man with a camcorder bouncing on a pogo stick during an earthquake accompanied by a slightly less dense dust storm. The second battle scene had a jungle obscuring most of the activity and most of it was shot through a bad red filter anyway. We get a LOT more footage than that suggesting that Alexander was really, really, really gay.

Take away the conquering, and what do you have left? Nothing worth the price of admission. They gave the actor playing Alexander (who spent most of the time with a deer-in-the-headlights stare) a hair dye job that looked like a pile of old straw on his head. Having done that, couldn't they have done something about his thick, black woolly-bear caterpillar eyebrows? Every time he was on camera my gaze was drawn irresistibly towards them.

Early on in the film we are treated to a CGI image of the great harbor at Alexandria over the shoulder of Hannibal Lecter Ptolemy as he begins talking about Alexander to a scribe. In the harbor can be seen two ships under way, one under sail, the other under oars. After THREE PLUS HOURS of mixed no-action scenes and windy Ptolemaic narrative, we get to see the great harbor again. Both ships are still there. Neither has moved a cubit. This could be said to be symbolic of the whole movie. At what I thought was the end, Ptolemy advises the scribe who has been assiduously writing it all down to just throw all of the pages away. Would that the studio had done the same with the movie. The ONLY thing that could have made this turgid lump of celluloid enjoyable would have been to see it accompanied by Mike Nelson and the 'bots from MST3K. More than one person walked out before the film was over. I wonder if they wanted their money back also?

Since this film is supposed to tell the story of Stonewall Jackson, I think the filmmakers made a mistake here. We see Jackson at First Manassas, and then the movie skips on ahead to Fredericksburg. This completely ignores the campaigns which made Jackson's career: The Valley Campaign, The Seven Days Campaign, Second Manassas and Antietam. Perhaps the filmmakers figured that anyone who came to see this movie would already know all about Jackson, so they could skip all the dramatic stuff of most of 1862 and go straight to Fredericksburg so they could introduce Colonel Chamberlain right away. As much as I admire Mr. Daniels' portrayal of this soldier, he doesn't really get much to do at Fredericksburg. The battle of Chancellorsville is necessary, since it leads to Jackson's death, but aside from getting to show us Chamberlain, Fredericksburg doesn't seem to be truly necessary. It also wasn't much of a battle, except for the casualty lists: No maneuver, no imagination, and, for the Federals, no chance. If the aim of the film was to give us Jackson's story (And I thought that Stephen Lang was a better Jackson than he was a Pickett) I think they should have broken it into two movies. The first could have shown just HOW Jackson made his reputation. The Valley Campaign is still studied by military men today, and Antietam had a lot more drama to it than Fredericksburg. Which reminds me...was the actor playing A. P. Hill the same one who played "Larry" on the old "Newhart" show? Every time he spoke, I half expected him to introduce Darryl and Darryl to General Lee.

I saw this film in the theater when it first came out. Since I was with a group of friends, I felt obliged to sit through the whole thing. I came out of the theater wishing I hadn't. I read Orwell's book many years ago, so I can't say just now how faithful an adaptation the film was. However, I'd also seen an earlier version of "1984"...the one made in 1956, I think. I remembered the 1956 film as being quite chilling. However, the 1984 remake left me unimpressed. As we exited the theater, a friend of mine who seemed to believe that with Reagan in office we were all headed straight into Orwell's nightmare world, asked me what I thought of it. I told him that this movie was just about the elaborate squashing of a bug...and a corrupt bug, at that. I could not bring myself to care about Winston Smith at all. I had a little trouble with the notion that Richard Burton's character would handle so many messy details of Smith's...what? Interrogation? Re-education? Sensitivity training?...himself. The only character I found at all interesting was Suzanna Hamilton's. She was the only bright spot in all that unrelieved dreariness. I KNOW that Orwell's book isn't a happy one, but portraying Ms. Hamilton's character as this film did felt too much like a ham-handed effort at a little contrast, and left me wondering what on Earth she had ever seen in Winston Smith.

I rented this video many years ago, and enjoyed it enough to spend several years hunting down another copy I could buy for my own collection. The video is a great sendup of all the post-apocalyptic Road-Warrior-ripoff movies of the 70s and 80s. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but is written, directed, and acted well enough to be thoroughly enjoyable. Some of the scenes are hilarious. The interplay between Roddy Piper and Sandahl Bergman is worth watching as well. If you like B-movies, this one is a keeper.

I have three Nuku-Nuku videos now, all that seem to have been released over here. Like most anime, the storyline has a slightly goofy premise, but the characters are unique, a bit demented (each in their own way) and every episode is good for plenty of laughs. I strongly recommend getting the subtitled versions over the dubbed versions. Somehow, anime doesn't seem as funny when it's dubbed.

This is an odd movie. In places there doesn't seem to be much of a plot, and many of the characters are....well, odd. Essentially, the story is about Ellen Barkin's character, Claire, attempting to get to an airport in Spain in time to return to the US for a daredevil stunt she's supposed to perform. Why the hurry? Well, she came to Spain to look up an old boyfriend.... I don't want to give too much away. Claire's attempts to get to the airport run into obstacles...peculiar obstacles. In places the movie has the same frustrating feel to it as a dream in which one continually tries to do something, but somehow nothing quite works out. There's a supporting cast with some big names in it, but just keep your eyes on Ellen Barkin, as those other characters come and go. There's an interesting use of mythology in the movie, but I'm not entirely certain that it was deliberate. In places the pacing seems a bit slow, but overall I think it's very watchable

"Slayers" was the funniest anime series I'd ever watched...then I saw "Slayers Next". The series just kept getting better, especially with the introduction of Xellos, a character whose motives, means and intentions are always in doubt until the last minute. He makes an excellent addition to the funny, familiar team of Lina, Gourry, Amelia and Zelgadis.

Okay, so it's not the entire Python crew, but the movie has Python prints all over it. It's a very funny movie, especially with the lone Christian along on the longship among the pagans and berserks. If you don't laugh out loud somewhere in this movie, you must be sleeping.

I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. what starts out as a simple scam quickly collapses into robbery, murder, mayhem and enough plot twists to satisfy anybody. Lesley Ann Warren looks (and acts) very well, and Mario Van Peebles has put together a nice gem of a movie. I recommend it to anyone who likes to keep guessing right up to the end.

Do you like Babylon 5? Do you like South Park? If so, you'll like this comic blending of the two. In addition to these two shows, however, the producers threw in brief references to almost every other science fiction movie or tv series ever made, the Lovecraft Cthulu mythos, and some Japanese anime. Hence, while the video is not all that long, you can watch it over and over again to pick up what you missed the first time...or the second...or the fifth. I found out about the video entirely by lucky accident, and I heartily recommend it!