mike-ryan455

If I told you all the ways this billion dollar piece of crap wasn't really part of the Lord of the Rings, I would have to flag it all as spoilers because it would cover most of the plot. This thing was a SHAM! Galadriel is one of the greatest characters of fantasy literature, and this abomination has committed the greatest sin of all, to make her BORING!

Instead of the wonderful, subtle growth of a character, we get the Mulan Live Action instant ultimate woman fantasy of Galadriel being the instant kick ass warrior. That is a cheat to the viewers and to girls everywhere who don't learn how to struggle and overcome.

For that much money, I would have thought they could get some better actors. The cast was definitely disappointing. I've seen worse, but not for that kind of money.

In addition, the production just looks wrong. I looked at a number of scenes and it finally hit me. They botched integrating the lighting directions of the CGI backgrounds and the live action people. Shadows run in the wrong directions. It's really obvious once you notice it. That makes everything look ludicrously amateurish, like amateur Star Trek fan video amateurish.

I really wonder where the heck that billion dollars went. It's not on screen, that's for sure.

Don't waste your time and money on this trash. Watch Peter Jackson's version instead. That had magic. The Amazon version just stinks like a turd.

I saw it, and I can't believe how horrible it is. Doomcock on YouTube channel called it right all along. I watched some other YouTube reviews after, and the fairest and most honest was by Shadiversity in "The Rise of Skywalker is TRASH of the highest order, STAR WARS full in-depth review."

This incoherent mess ruins Star Wars. I grew up with Star Wars. I remember exactly where I was when I first saw a trailer for it, and I was blown away and excited beyond belief. Luke, Han, Leah and Chewy were almost like family. This senseless, rambling mess butchered my friends and heroes. I just want to puke.

This mess will be in the bargain bin at Walmart soon enough. Don't spend the expensive ticket price. If you REALLY want to see it, wait until then.

I was watching the part on the Triassic when they showed an Aetosaur being chased by a pack of Coelophysis and they started talking about Eudimorphodon and how it took to the air as they showed a huge pterosaur overhead and I looked at the show and turned and said "That's not a Eudimorphodon! It's a Quetzalcoatlus." This isn't a subtle distinction and really told what was wrong with the whole show. Even an armchair paleontologist like me knows that Quetzalcoatlus dates to the very end of the Cretaceous while Eudimorphodon dates to the Triassic, 220 million years ago. That's about 150 million years in between. Quetalcoatlus was long necked, toothless, nearly tailless and had a really long, pointed beak. Eudimorphodon means "true dimorphic tooth" because they had a huge mouth of very distinctive teeth. They also have short necks and long tails.

It's not just a matter of making one mistake. The whole show was obviously made by someone who didn't know dinosaurs. They just downloaded some 3d models, loaded them in Blender and called it good without getting any scientists to check it. Of course the results are really lame. I could go on and on but what's the point? They made it too cheaply and didn't fix their mistakes.

I am so horrified that they slung this drivel at us in the guise of a reboot. How could they have done this to us? It was boring, it was not funny, it was ... just plain bad!

We loved the original. I could have seen a changing of the guard movie where they hand off to a new cast. But this was just SUCH a bad re- imagination. The whole ...

You can't do a movie on special effects. I don't care how good their goo monsters are. I don't blame the cast. Most of them were good in other movies. Melissa McCarthy was good in Spy Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones were Saturday Night Live Vets. How can you go wrong with Charles Dance? But NO, they managed to do it - somehow. It was an epic failure.

I am not an epidemiologist. But my job required me to go through the CDC's Ebola isolation preparation training this week in preparation for any emergencies with Zika virus. I'd had it before but when I watched this show the training happened to be very fresh in my mind. I couldn't help compare it with the ridiculously ill prepared and amateurish the doctors seemed in Containment as they struggled.

It wasn't just the medical staff that struggled. Any easy excuse for drama was used, right down to cops throwing temper tantrums. We have overused dramatic stereotype after stereotype when simple logic would have worked completely differently. Oh, we have thousands of people contained within a few city blocks. There would be dozens of escape attempts. They showed one - ridiculously simple. That one escape attempt would have been stopped instantly if the Governor would have done the first logical thing which would be to call in the National Guard and position them all around the perimeter with rifles and to have sharp shooters behind them covering every inch of the line. Why didn't they? I think so they could have another cop temper tantrum.

Drama, drama, drama everywhere. Am I in the mood for more of their drama? I don't know. Maybe. Depends on my mood. I up voted it one point for being Sci Fi themed, rounding it up to a seven out of ten.

The Man in the High Castle had a lot going for it. The visuals were stunning, quiet and yet fascinating. It made a very believable post- defeat scene. It started with a very interesting Phillip K. Dick story - like what could be weirder than Phillip K. Dick, right?

The first episode resembled the book, enough to get my interest. Unfortunately they took a huge departure from there, to the point of being almost unrecognizable by the end. I found their version of the identity of the man in the high castle to be utterly disappointing - and of course completely different in intention from the book.

I know Hollywood always takes a good story and ruins it, but this one seemed to try to take a good premise and spread it thin enough to go through ten episodes when it really only had enough meat for perhaps three. As a result, they not only ruined it but abandoned it.

Too updated for my tastes. I really liked the version with Albert Finney from 1974. Who can argue with Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins and Richard Widmark? I also think their dropping four of the participants in this modernized version really reduced it and their use of the Internet rather cheapens it. Searching by Google tells rather than slowly reveals. It made detective work far too easy.

Don't think me a purist. I thoroughly enjoyed the David Suchet version. Actually I thought it was one of the better "Poirot" scripts. I look forward to the Branagh version in 2017.

I will give this version five stars. It wasn't bad but the script took far too many liberties with Poirot's character and with the story. I've seen decent modern age Poirot before, like the Thirteen For Dinner from 1985. They knew what to update and what to leave alone.

The scenario is simple. Four would be astronauts go on a simulated mission for 400 days. Things start out normal but get weirder and weirder as they go on. They have ship failures and "lose communications with Earth." From there, it takes a turn into the creepy. Was it all a hallucination? Was it reality? Were they being tricked? Was one of them cracking? We aren't quite sure what is going on.

The Russians did a similar simulated Mars mission recently, only it was on Earth and everyone walked out. The initial premise wasn't bad. The sets were adequate but not great. I could find lots of problems with them scientifically but I guess that's not the point. Net rating: Plus one point for it being SciFi so five points. Better than typical SyFy channel fare but not good.

I saw "suspense" flipping through something else. It was listed on IMDb as a TV show so I looked up the referenced FaceBook page and found out that it is actually a YouTube series. I checked it out and found out that it was not a TV (video) production but a radio production.

I listened on YouTube to the episode "Testament." Someone who knows enough about old time radio to appreciate it fully would be able to give a better review. I knew the Captain of the ship of the episode, Vic Mignogna, from Star Trek fan fictions. The story was decent and the production seemed adequate.

If you like old time radio, give it a try. It may be your thing. The YouTube URL is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCab7Qx12PeOV3MQbgyegirA

Starship Apocalypse attempts to be a part of a low budget rip-off of the Star Wars trilogy. It is the sequel of Starship: Rising, which currently has an IMDb rating of 2.1. This is not a good sign.

The plot is a mish-mosh of pieces taken from other movies. The evil emperor in a black robe wants to turn everyone into mindless zombies by infecting them with an evil virus and of course the noble rebel alliance tries to stop him.

The production values remind me of nothing so much as a Star Trek fan video made using little but green screen and CGI. The props and costumes are adequate. The acting was hardly stellar.

Their failing is the confusing, chaotic script. If the authors had a clear and imaginative vision. Unfortunately the whole movie rather resembled the confused, hemming and hawing reflection by the star at the beginning. It mumbled without ever really saying anything.

I rated this movie as a three and I will always rate any movie that is science fiction as a good point higher than if it were another genre just because I like Science Fiction.

I am really disappointed by this show. The word "painfully bad" comes to mind. I wanted so desperately to find something to like. It just wasn't there. Lost in another part of the universe, a cable network show, encountering weird aliens. I hoped for a low budget version of Farscape. I have seen some incredibly sophisticated shows made as fanfiction using green screen so I know the production values could have been adequate. Do you remember Sanctuary? It was all green screen and CGI. Look at productions like Starship Farragut, Star Trek Continues and especially Star Trek: Phase II (formerly known as Star Trek: New Voyages). So what went wrong? Crappy writing first and foremost. When the story is a tortured joke there's nothing you can do to salvage it. Was it trying to be a "So bad it's good" comedy? Probably, but it wasn't even funny. It was predictable and unimaginative. They didn't have the writing talent to pull off a parody of a Sci Fi show.

Spike tried to follow a tried and true recipe that HBO has used very successfully. Pick a mysterious and fantastic time and place. Put some young, attractive people and have them unfold a great story as they have a lot of sex and violent fighting. We've all seen how incredibly successful their "Game of Thrones" is. They also struck gold with "Rome" and other epic sagas like "The Sopranos" and "True Blood." Unfortunately, Spike didn't follow all the little details of HBO's recipe that has yielded such a delicious array of guilty pleasures.

They didn't have a strong cast. Oh, they had one classic blockbuster star, Ben Kingsley, who said his words bravely but looked like he was depressed to be there. The title actor and his queen would have been quite at home in a soap opera set in a Hollywood poolside but they were utterly out of their league. In no way could they compete with James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano or Ray Stevenson as Titus Pullo or Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse.

They didn't have enough sex. Oh they hinted at it but no really good nipple bearing with flashes of fur that all the geeks crave.

Worst of all, they didn't have the writing. There was never a mystery. At every step Tut had pretty much one choice and he followed that choice, without humor and with little joy or imagination. I'm not criticizing it for utter historical inaccuracy. That is expected and is forgivable. I'm criticizing it for being so predictable and boring. Here, King Tut was not a part of ancient Egypt but was such a painfully 21st century Generation X'er.

It wasn't a bad miniseries. It was just such an ordinary one.

I saw The Imitation Game with high hopes. Unfortunately those hopes were dashed. I can't say that it was a bad movie. It just wasn't nearly as good a movie as has been hyped.

First, it is a Hollyweird pro-homosexual club you over the head with their political notions movie. I guess I should have predicted that but it doesn't make it any the less true.

Second, they couldn't get their history right. The way they wrote it, Turing single handed saved Britain during the war. Ah, that's not true. The Poles gave Britain the entire base for cracking Enigma and had cracked the predecessors of it repeatedly. Turing wasn't the only contributor. Turing's group didn't make the only computer during the war for code cracking, etc.

Third, Turing wouldn't have just blabbed to some nobody cop about his war time record. He knew he could have been shot for it.

Rating: 5. It could have been a solid seven but I have to knock off one point for the painful pro-homosexual message and one point for the historical inaccuracy.

You already know the subject, animal husbandry. You all know the thesis - that animal husbandry is simply ecologically unsustainable with our current population numbers.

What Cowspiracy does is take one person through a very personal journey to show just how there is only one course of action that will allow this species to have a reasonable chance of surviving at the current population levels. We can change and adapt and go to a more healthy diet or we can wait for a massive ecological change and have our population levels and civilization crash like so many others have before.

Is it perfect? No, but it is still that good. I wish broadcast TV had the guts to run it. I wish it were played in schools. Unfortunately they never will.

How do I phrase it with originality? No, why bother being original when the movie so wasn't. It was dull and predictable, an attempt at a haunted house movie at 35,000 feet flying over the Pacific in a big Boeing. Of course, this is a quickie rip-off of the disappearance of MH-370, you say. No, actually it isn't. It was made a couple of years before but it wasn't released. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7500_(film) to confirm that it was originally scheduled to be released on August 12, 2012, but was delayed to April 19, 2013, and then to an unspecified date in October, 2013, based on a tweet from actress Scout Taylor-Compton, which was pushed back again another year to October 3, 2014 for the US release. Wikipedia even references an article about it that predates MH-370.

Anyway, it being rather similar to what I think actually happened to MH-370 is really its only claim to fame. Wait for this one to come out on cable, or better yet wait for a better movie.

The first season, I really liked this show. It was about a tattoo competition. Some of the ink was even good but even when it wasn't it was focused on the art.

Unfortunately, things began to go down hill in the second season. One of the judges, Chris Nunez, became snarkier and snarkier. He seemed to be trying to humiliate and put down the contestants who didn't measure up rather than pull them up to do even better.

Each season, there was a jerk added to the mix. They were someone who would try to "play the game strategically" to get ahead. It became very annoying to watch the petty politics and insults.

The show completely jumped the shark when they announced in the fourth season finale that everyone on the show would have a rival, someone brought in to fight with. Great, pre-made arguing. What a joke! That was the death moment of the show. As soon as they announced that contestants are going to be chosen not on the basis of their art work but on the quality of their enemies I knew the show was dead.

I watched the pilot of Extant tonight. I know these shows can get better or worse, but right now this one is not ready for prime time.

I don't rate shows first by the stars or the special effects. I rate them by the script. This one is pretty confused. It was as if they tried to toss in so many elements that something had to stick. Just repeating the stuff I had also seen in the trailers, we have a wife who was alone in space for a year who comes back pregnant, we have a rather creepy husband who made their robotic child and we have a dark and shadowy figure who passed cryptic notes. We got some details on these in the pilot but for every question we got a few details about we got three more balls tossed up in the air. Some feel randomly selected. Others are just too painfully obvious.

Second I'll talk about the cast. It was lackluster. Halle Berry was just out of her depth and she wasn't eye candy. In fact, she looks quite shopworn to me, almost beyond the age to be pregnant. I dislike the husband. He is even worse.

Oh, yes, ahm, the special effects. They were OK. I have seen better on shorts that people with love and imagination do at home but they did the job just fine.

I like Sci Fi and I gave them one extra star just for it being sort of Sci Fi. I really hope they can pull it together but somehow I think it will be another big budget flop.

I got a chance to watch "Chariot" last night and I enjoyed it and then went to bed. At the time I thought it was an imaginative low budget movie with generally decent performances.

Then I woke up and it hit me smack between the eyes just where they had gone utterly wrong.

In the movie, seven people wake up on an airplane. They have no idea how they got there. They learn from a mobile phone that they find that the country is under nuclear attack and that they are in the plane as part of a secret operation to preserve a remnant of humanity. They also learn that their destination (Andrews Air Force Base) was destroyed and that they have to get the pilot to divert the plane. Of course the crew is locked in the cockpit and won't answer.

One of the seven passengers (Genevieve) is a government employee in the program. She verifies everything about Operation Chariot.

Before long, we have one person dead. Genevieve takes the available gun and gets into the cockpit, killing the co-pilot and severely wounding the pilot - who quickly dies from the injuries. One of the passengers is killed by the co-pilot as well.

We later learn that the whole thing was an experiment and that Genevieve knew it. She was on the team trying to figure out how to get people to calmly sit through this flight during a nuclear attack and she shot two people to death. That's three counts of homicide, two people she shot and one count of felony murder for the guy who was shot by the co-pilot - all for a fake experiment she knew for a fact was a fake. If she survived, she'd be going away for life in any state of the union and that's a pretty big if because she just shot the pilot and copilot of the plane and nobody left alive can fly it.

I do applaud some parts of the movie. A thriller set in just an old airplane was a good idea. No other sets whatsoever. The cast was small but quite good, especially Anthony Montgomery. If you're a Trekkie you'll know the name as the black navigator on Star Trek: Enterprise but he acted so completely different he was almost unrecognizable. Unfortunately that logic hole is so big you could ... fly an airplane through it.

That's a really depressing summary for a TV show, but alas it seems to be true. I have seen the first three episodes by now and really don't know if I'd bother to see a fourth.

The sneak info that was published before the pilot was aired told you that there is some sort of disease outbreak in an isolated research base in the high Arctic. So they call in the CDC from Atlanta, Georgia.

There is the first mistake. They said it was in international territory. Ah, horse hockey. It would be in Nunavut territory in Canada. Why doesn't the Public Health Agency of Canada fly their people in? Maybe we'd be spared the story.

So, this guy flies in with his ex-wife who was sleeping with his brother and this girl he's hot about and this ugly chick to save ... his brother who was sleeping with his ex-wife. Oh Brother - in more ways than one.

The whole thing feels like a bid rip-off of A & E's version of "The Andromeda Strain" - which was such a rip-off of the original movie and book that it hurt. I don't like giving spoilers of any sort but I had every part of the plot pegged very early on and nothing has changed.

Will this one make it past thirteen weeks? Lord, I hope not.

OK, that's a strange title for a review. But it's true - there is a low resolution copy of The Neon Ceiling on youtube. Search for it! The video claims to be 480x360 resolution but it looks like a VHS rip. However, the tremendous quality of the movie trumps the poor quality of the video.

To think this was done as an ABC movie of the week. I guess the writer kept polishing the script until it sparkled. The cast is excellent, with Gig Young and Lee Grant in the lead but Denise Nickerson stealing the show.

It's a small movie with a very small cast and limited sets. It looks a lot like a G rated Indie art movie about relationships, marriage and growing up, if you can imagine that. It's so simple it doesn't even look very dated. I do not want to spoil it by giving any clues as to what happens but if that mix sounds interesting try it.

I don't want to flame South African cinema. I've enjoyed several releases from there. I also love a good World War II flying movie. This one lost credibility with me.

I can forgive the CGI flight scenes that look like they came out of a game. Original planes from that period are far too rare and valuable to use to make a movie and special effects don't make a movie. The story makes the movie. Unfortunately the story is what let me down.

There is a phenomena called "suspension of disbelief" in a movie. Unfortunately they literally shot suspension of disbelief quite early. The cliché evil SS officer just blew it away. His actions were utterly illogical. His men didn't point out how his actions directly worked against the Third Reich winning the war.

The evil SS officer was the worst but it wasn't the only logical failure. Over and over I kept thinking "Why would they do that" and "What a wasted opportunity." I sincerely wish them better luck next time.

I looked at this from two perspectives. The first was to compare it against a drama made with a normal multimillion dollar Hollywood budget. It did pretty good. I'd give it a fair six out of ten. It had a good story, passable acting, didn't do anything stupidly wrong or offensive and was generally quite interesting and enjoyable.

Then I considered that it was made for a hundredth of what even a SyFy Channel super cheapie TV movie is made for, a thousandth of what a cheap Hollywood movie like Footloose was made for and one ten thousandth of the budget of a true Hollywood blockbuster turkey like "The Lone Ranger." The New Republic had imagination. It had a good script about a slightly more totalitarian country than ours and it showed that country with very little. It kept you going as our character was sucked away by it.

Was it perfect? No. Was it great? No. It would be about a decent six stars out of ten. But that's not bad - especially when it took $150,000,000 for Mars Needs Moms just to eek out their five stars.

I saw it and to me this isn't a Judge Dee story. It is a Kung Fu movie and not a great one at that. I'm sorry - if I want to see Kung Fu characters flying through the air on wires and doing physically impossible feats in a world of myth and magic then I'll look for it. What I wanted was a good Judge Dee story - a logical and intelligent deductive reasoning detective story set in a rich and fascinating Tang Dynasty world.

I am a great fan of Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee books. I had just read "The Phantom of the Temple" a few days before seeing this movie. What I had expected was a movie with a story line set in the world of Judge Dee and keeping in harmony with that world. They are intelligent whodunnits without an overbearing supernatural element. The TV movie "Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders" that was taken from "The Haunted Monastery" was quite enjoyable.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame was a great disappointment. The story by Lin Qianyu was just not up to snuff. Unfortunately, so was the action. I've seen as good in TV shows like Andromeda.

It wasn't great but it wasn't bad either. I gave it a five. If it weren't Christian I might have gone as low as a four but because it was I gave it the benefit of the doubt and a bit extra.

I am a Christian but I don't believe in the Rapture doctrine. John Nelson Darby first proposed and popularized the pre-tribulation rapture in 1827. The Rapture always seemed like an easy out to me - the good escape Satan's rampage before the Son of God returns. I think there will be no such miracle. Instead believers will have to slog through Hell.

That all aside, I like a clean movie where religious ideas are expressed. The movie comes from Pure Flix Entertainment and even features a walk-on by Bruce Marchiano as Jesus. Even though it is far too clean for today's broadcast TV it still manages to pack in enough motorcycles and gratuitous violence to satisfy the urge.

It's OK for Church youth night but it wouldn't get a permanent place in my video collection.

The Phoenix Rises is definitely a product of the "School of Amazingly Bad Lost Rip-Offs," a.k.a. SABLRO.

My first clue that this was purely a SABLRO movie was the frantic cutting back and forth with the funky beam weapon zapping the universe. Then we cut back in time to the trademark "Mysterious Introduction with Death Defying Leaps." Unfortunately we then got subject to the "mysterious danger" - coming in the form of the zombie looking woman with a machine gun as that patented Cool Hero goes through the would be massacre without a scratch or even breaking a sweat. Then we get the Sayid Jamal rip-off crazed torturer and assassin.

You think I am making this up? I wish I were. This one hurt my eyes and my brain. It even hurt my ears with amazingly clanging, jangling noise they called music.

If you value the health of your brain, stay away.