lazur-2

The story is that a real woman's mediocre life has been not-quite-fictionalized, AI-digitized, and streamed by a Netflix-like company, with disastrous results for her. Those results also streamed, including fruitless attempts to cancel the iron-clad contract she unwittingly agreed-to when signing to buy the streaming service.. SPOILER: It turns out that *she herself* is the first-generation fiction, and all of her actions and emotions were originated by an actress. PROBLEMS: 1/The true original, who we never see, is an actress, playing a part. She knowingly agreed, and is getting paid. No problem, yet. No one else is real, including the main character. What is this telling us, the real audience?: "Sucker: We made you care about an AI fake." 2/(To me, the bigger problem): At the end the actress/original and the first-gen fake are buddies. ???? When the other AI copies disappeared, SO SHOULD SHE.

Considering that many of the actors are not actors, (and likely never will be actors),they did a great job. Considering that the production budget couldn't possibly have been even close to the amount of an equivalent Hollywood project, the only thing missing,(thank goodness were 21st-century edits. Considering that no one else had the guts to make this movie, any flaws are forgiven. The only things that bothered me were two or three lines that should've been re-done for clarity, and/or sync. DW was fully aware that this wasn't gonna make it to theaters; that's a wider audience's loss. Maybe TCM will play it eventually:^)

Anne Roberts, (Joan Blondell),'s husband, Joe Reynolds, (Ray Milland), conspires with Bert Harris, (James Cagney), to cover-up Joe's $30k embezzlement, by having Bert steal everything in the company's safe. Joe double-crosses Bert; and police catch & arrest Bert in the act. PROBLEM #1: A:The purpose of the theft is to account for the embezzled $30k, but **The $30k is NOT in Bert's possession**, so the embezzlement stands, (B: and how did Joe explain to the police about his fore-knowledge of the theft?). PROBLEM #2: If there was no embezzlement, and this was a set-up from the beginning, with some other motive, (jealousy?), this script has a lot of explaining to do.

This was ruined by the ending: The 'villain' is an elderly man, unarmed, & no indication of ever having been armed. He's exhausted from running. He's trapped against a gate, with a steep drop on the gate's other side. He could attempt suicide by crawling over the gate, but he doesn't. He's done. / The 'hero', a, young, athletic cop, armed with a revolver, has been chasing the old man, while firing his revolver for no good reason. Benefit of the doubt for the hero; maybe warning shots, but still stupid. The villain's trapped, arrest him. NOPE: Without a word, He shoots him dead! That is MURDER.

Ultra-violence from a big body that could believably commit t, with motivation that would turn any of us into monsters.

This story's intensity builds through the entire length of the film. All the characters ring true, & what would seem outrageous if not handed well is instead inevitable. There are some gruesome scenes that the young &/or squeamish should avoid.

It's all in the imagination of a kid who plays computer games all day, & he's almost never in the film. The only "real" event is at the end, when the kid stabs his stepfather to death, but even that isn't in the film, except as reported on the "news". So if you had any feelings for the characters, or interest in the plot, you've been tricked into to caring about nothing. Isn't it enough that we're expected to suspend our disbelief in characters & events that came from a scriptwriter's imagination? Do we have to be told, in the story itself, that none of it was real?

Sure, this movie is useless, senseless, & hopeless, but it din't have to be humorless , too . Why make one of our great funny-adventure actors into a bland suit? This could've been saved, sort-of, with some Willis clowning.

...the ending. Some movies don't make sense until the ending wraps it all up . Lesser movies might not really tie up all the loose ends, but merely relieve the tension, via payback /revenge... Then there are films that never quite made sense in the first place, and still don't make sense in the last place. The "why" is not only never answered, there's never even an attempt or intention to answer it. "Knock Knock" is a multi-level mystery: A mystery why Keanu Reeves agreed to be in it, & why anyone would write, produce, direct, or watch it, without , (as I needed to), fast-forwarding more than watching. But what the heck, you already paid your Netflix bill. Right? That's what *I* thought. Don't take an IQ test immediately after watching this film. I'm gonna go take a nap. Maybe this didn't really happen. It couldn't happen.

What exactly is this film's point of view on prescription drugs? We have a kid selling his personal prescription's pills, (much too casually prescribed ), to schoolmates. After talking with the kids about their problems, he fakes their symptoms to his doctors to get an array of other drugs to sell. His shrinks are so willing to drug him up, that they immediately take his word on each and every problem he describes to them. Is this an indictment of the psychiatric profession's lack of any empathetic interaction with patients? Their zealous promotion of dangerous mood-altering drugs? It certainly could have been, and rightfully so, but no: When Robert Downey's "wise" character sincerely and authoritatively chimes in on the subject, it turns out that these drugs are fine, as long as they're prescribed by trained professionals. Wait one minute: They WERE prescribed by trained professionals!, with less depth of investigation than the kid did with his customers. So instead of ending with a valuable insight into some very real problems that we face, the film disregards the details of it's own story-line, and creates conclusions out of the blue. It's irresponsible, false, and harmful.

Martin Clunes is the best in his field. His acting is meaningfully more authentic than the actors who usually do this type of comedy, (what can at best be described as mediocre comedy skits masquerading as a cohesive show). In fact, Clunes is good enough to have potentially rescued this series from its less than funny scripts, (if only the producers had realized how good he is), but for one additional mistake: The God-awful laugh track, so wrong, in so many ways: 1/ Laugh tracks always suck. 2/ This particular laugh track is unrelenting, barely giving us a chance to hear the last word of any of the supposed punch-lines, (and many lines that no sane person would consider to be a punch-line). 3/ Clunes' forte is dry humor, and it seems as though the writers, (within their talent's limitations), are aware of this, but the guffaws that follow his lines are -not- how one laughs at this type of humor. Thus, what might have been a passable comedy with a subtly entertaining lead character, is, instead, virtually unwatchable.

Does anyone really dispute that mainstream cancer treatments are a miserable failure for 99% of cancer types? Allopathic medicine was once was one of -many- choices for medical treatment in America. As they gained financial & political power, they launched into a campaign of bullying & lies to force other practitioners to go to -their- schools & do things -their- way, or have their practices marginalized, even destroyed. We've grown up in an America that's been brainwashed by the AMA into believing that allopathic medicine -is- medicine, & every other mode of treatment is somehow -not- medicine. The AMA, ADA, & ACS exist only for the perpetuation of their own increasing wealth, & as an army in the war against all other medical philosophies. Personally I believe the information in this film, but in any case, what would be wrong with a little propaganda in the fight against the AMA / ADA / CDC / ACS / FDA / Monsanto / Dupont / Bayer / Dow / Johnson&Johnson / Pfizer /Roche / GlaxoSmithKline / Novartis / Sanofi / AstraZeneca / Abbott / Merck / Lilly / Bristol-MyersSqibb / Alcoa conspiracy? They're the largest propaganda machine in world history!

Beginning at 1:30:00, Professor Richard Dawkins, (the most public of modern Darwin proponents), makes two very important statements: 1/No one knows how life started. 2/Life may have been seeded on earth by a previously existing, more advanced civilization. /// At this point, Stein loses the thread: He's won the argument for the possibility of intelligent design. Stein goes on to argue about God. WRONG! Intelligent design is not the argument for the existence of God, it's the argument for admitting that we don't know how life started, and thus must remain open to possibilities other than Darwinism. When Dawkins softened his "seeded" statement with assurances that the possible previous civilization would itself have developed via Darwinian evolution, THE NEXT QUESTION STEIN -SHOULD- ASK IS: "And how did life start for THAT civilization?" The answers of course, are: "no one knows", and "perhaps a seeding by a previously existing advanced civilization", all over again, and again, and again....

....but this whole film seems to be based on the foundation that every prediction Raymond Kurzweil has made so far has been correct, and that every invention he's created has been successful. I find this to be disingenuous at best. The handful of correct predictions presented as evidence merely serves to make me wonder : Did Kurzweil only make this small list of correct predictions, and shut up the rest of the time? Was his plethora of correct predictions so overwhelming that severe editing was required for brevity? I find this impossible to accept. If you want me to be impressed with your successes, Ray, you must admit your defeats. Kurzweil's claim that man's lifespan used to be 25 years is a blatant misuse of statistics. His claim of rapidly multiplying information ignores that much new information disproves old information. I'll stop now.

In suspended animation for what might have been 40 years: "Time is distorted,jumbled, telescoped accordioned, but there is a sens of time even so." Were the scientists who invented this means of suspended animation aware of the mind's circumstance? The thoughts of an intelligent, isolated man for 40yrs, (suspended or not), and their effect on him, could be investigated much more deeply than a mere forty-year romantic obsession. (Scientists could include a method of sleep- education, but even un-aided, the mind would be greatly altered.) The astronaut could conceivably come back as the most enlightened being the world has ever seen , or the most insane, or both.

In answer to the reviewer who questioned the wisdom of taking a "mere" million dollars of gold through time: The price of gold averaged $35.25 per ounce in 1961. On May 18, 2011, (today, one-half the one hundred years in the story), it's valued at $1492.60 per ounce, over forty-two and a third times as much: That million dollars of gold would now be worth $42,343,262,40. Too bad they couldn't sleep for fifty years instead of one hundred. Inflation across the board has been 6.5472. Thus the gold will purchase 6.647 times in 2011 what it would in 1961, $6,647,384.84 in purchasing power as these men would understand it. Let's put aside the twist ending in the story: The reality is inflation will only get worse, and gold will only get higher. If the next fifty years repeat the first fifty, this gold will have *fourteen*! times the purchasing power that it had in 1961,(and that was already plenty).

Who originally accused the parents? We have the right to face our accusers. Surely we aren't considering the children to be the accusers; they weren't brought in for questioning out of nowhere. Even if the accusers were (wrongly) granted anonymity, all bets should be off after their accusations have been proved maliciously false. Send -those- people to prison for 300 years. ( My God, don't tell me these charges were brought on the basis of anonymous phone calls!)/// OK, the existence of the children's medical records was denied, but why didn't the - defense- DEMAND medical examinations?/// How much ignorance, incompetence, collusion, deception, careerism, and presumption of guilt can we tolerate while these political hacks continue to claim that there was no evil intent. How evil does evil have to be before we call it by its name?

Spoiler: When the totem-top keeps spinning at the end of the movie, are we really supposed to wonder if it's going to fall or spin infinitely, (reality if it falls, dream if it spins)? Please! : It spins a LONG time. It's another dream. IE:The beginning, thus the whole movie, may be a dream. There's not necessarily any such thing as shared dreaming, inception, nor any real character except for the lone dreamer, & he's invisible to us: Not necessarily bearing any resemblance to his conception of himself in the dream. Is the ending a return to the 1st level or a deeper level? (I think neither: Speaking for my own "dreams within dreams", I've never returned "back up" through the levels. Lighter levels of sleep perhaps as wakefulness approaches, but new dreams from beginning to end.) As a rule, this sort of thing bugs me: Suddenly telling me the characters I cared about a minute ago were never real is cheating. "The Red Jacket" & "Jacob's Ladder", (dreams of dying men, but dreams nonetheless), come to mind as otherwise potentially good movies that ended by saying:"never mind, nothing's real". Why doesn't "Inception" bug me in the same way? I'm not sure. Maybe because Nolan was willing to take the concept so far that caring about characters was a non-issue. (We were never even really asked to sympathize with the lead character's elaborately widowed status.) Maybe because the bulk of the film was already known to us as a dream, I feel no need to complain that the dream's still a dream. In any case, well done.

The imperfections of a rehearsal actually resulted in a more perfect presentation of Michael Jackson the dancer than we have ever seen on film or video. A major issue that'old-school' dance fans had with MJ,(and all modern popular dancers), was the isolation shots of the feet, (or any other body-part), speed-ups, slow-downs, and any other camera tricks that took away from real-time, camera 'pulled back', whole-body shots of the dance. Here, for the first time on film as an adult, is MJ in full-body, real-time, unaltered shots for extended dances. The good news is that MJ's up to the challenge: He may well have been moving better than ever, with an almost supernatural relaxation even when executing the crispest of moves, and independence/coordination only apparent when we can see the whole Michael in the shot.

Anthony Quinn's performances are always compelling, especially when he portrays primitives ,(as he does here),whose physical power & aggressive instincts might have made them kings in earlier times, but are merely misfits now. Everyone else does the best they can with the phoney-hipster dialog. Hollywood is well-known for tainting the language & mannerisms of every subculture it touches, but this is the textbook of absurd exaggeration. Even the script itself calls attention to "Honey" being impossible to understand, due to her "hip lingo". The implication is that Lt Mitchell, who mentions it, is too "square" to "get" her. Well then, so am I, for there are at least 3 characters who are so severely hip that they're virtually indecipherable. Perhaps if this was taken a step further into absurdity, & made an out-and-out comedy, it would be quite good. As is it's not authentic & not funny either. 5 stars for Quinn.

Opening scene 'explains' why Hurt is later 'immune' to the 'Contaminated Man'. Too bad it doesn't explain anything else: How did he get whatever he 'caught'/what was it/why does it work so fast. Then we go to "Present Day Budapest". OK, was the opener in the past or the future? It turns out to be the past, of course, but for a minute it looks just as likely to be the nd of the movie moved to the beginning. Sorry, I should have paid closer attention, huh? Or maybe it's just badly done. Then a lot of confusion about the different jobs he's had in related fields, and finally a mention about how he should have died from the original experiment the n s a did on him. Aha! So the n s a and private industry got together to poison one of their top guys to watch the effects? He must have been one of the top guys, he's friends with the c e o of the Chemical company, for God sakes. Then there's the substance itself: Technically a poison, but it mutates in immune 'carriers', so we can have whatever we want; a poison, a disease, an allergic reaction, all very different things in real life. Magically, it's not contagious from one dying victim to another, only from the carrier. How convenient. Then there's the h a z m a t protocol: They jump into a situation without having any idea what's in store, or how prepare for it. Did the producers not have enough money to show a proper wash-down after the crew just left the scene of a deadly unknown substance? I kept thinking Hurt was going to die from bad cleanup technique, and the open scene would turn out to be the closer after all.

Even as a 10 year old, I was skeptical about the existence of an alternative ending. After all, it was a sure bet that the so-called 'votes' weren't actually being counted. (Besides that, they messed up the voting: First, they "stopped the movie" so the viewers could hold the luminous 'thumbs- up/thumbs-down' up to the screen and register their votes, before the end came on. After the movie, a phony voting machine was in the lobby for viewers to slide the same paper in and, what, vote again? (It was probably just to avoid a mess of little papers everywhere, as I think the contraption kept the paper). N O W: It turns out that William Castle really -did- make an alternative ending! OK, where is it? Has -anyone- ever seen it? I've only seen the 'bad' ending....I'd also be interested in knowing if anyone still has one of the little voting papers. it was smaller than a playing card, and the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" hand on it appeared to be the same luminous green as was used on watch dials. If the 'voting machine' -did- "eat" them, between that and the nature of little pieces paper to get thrown out or destroyed, this has to be a -very- rare item.

Jack LaLanne will be receiving a "Lifetime Achievement Award" at a Muscle Beach ceremony at Venice Beach, California, on September 3rd, 2007...and rightfully so. Lalanne, at the age of 93, now remains as the last of the original bodybuilders, men who used weights to enhance their health and fitness rather than just to build big muscles. LaLanne also incorporates gymnastics and swimming into his routine, and pays close attention to diet and supplements. He's fond of saying: "I can't die, it would ruin my reputation!". Indeed, his reputation remains intact. In the 50s, there were many short exercise shows, marketed to the huge number of stay at home wives after WWII. LaLanne's was the best of the bunch. while other shows tried to attract viewers by making the workout much too easy, LaLanne presented a reasonable but effective challenge to the homemakers to actually get in shape. The extreme chest-to-waist taper of Lalanne, especially as shot in the shadows for the show's introduction, was as much of an inspiration to young sons as his coaching was to their moms. Steve Reeves, (Mr. America, Mr. Universe, and the first & best movie Hercules), has been quoted as saying that he was inspired by Lalanne to develop his graceful taper. The DVDs of this 56+ year old show are still popular.(June 9th,2010; Just a short correction to the other review: The term 'Aerobics' was coined by Dr Kenneth Cooper, while he was with the US Air Force.)

No matter how down and out a character is portrayed in 'money' productions, they're still so darn attractive. I'll admit to having been around enough drunks to know that Cage's portrayal was quite accurate, but the aspect that reinforces the audience's sympathy for him to the end is also a weakness in the movie: He's a hunk, still, to the end. All the ravages of alcoholism on one's personal, financial, social, and,(for the most part),love life don't amount to a hill of proverbial beans if you can maintain your lean muscular physique, smooth complexion, perfect teeth and hair throughout the abuse, and still be able to make love when you're on death's door. As well as Nick did on many personality characteristics of this performance, I think I'd prefer to see Mickey Rourke in this one. If you can still be sad at the end of Mick's version, perhaps you really have seen through to the inner person. Much truth in this movie, just try to imagine some uglier people in the roles.

OK, so it's not likely to ever actually occur in real life, but if the Batman story were "based on a true story", it would have to resemble this version a hundred times more than any other Batman-based theatrical release or television show before it. Many of the previously taken-for-granted aspects of Batman/Bruce Wayne's motives, abilities, and "tools-of-the-Batman-trade" are explained in as reasonable a fashion as they ever could be. Casting for the lead is perfect, with the expertly-earnest Christian Bale believably obsessed with his mission, buff enough to succeed at the athletic aspects of being a super-hero, and attractive & charming enough to pull off the playboy cover identity. The fight scenes are more true-to-life than most films, letting the action get lost in a blur of confusion rather than over-defining the technical details made me feel as if I was in the middle of the action. The movie-ending first mention of "The Joker",(of the presumed sequel),has me on pins and needles. Apparently there is much speculation about who will play the Joker. Whoever is cast will have his hands full making the character as insane as he needs to be while not seeming silly in the more "adult" format. I'd hope for extensive biographical work to explain Joker as well as Batman has been explained here.