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2010 (1984)
1/10
Worst Sequel in Cinema History
14 January 2024
Warning: Spoilers
The film's introductory text is the first warning this is a sloppy job. The monolith excavation is said to be located on the Sea of Tranquility. But the film names it the "Tycho Monolith" (Peter Hymans apparently never read the briefing charts on the 2001 moon bus). The name adds further nonsense, considering the Sea of Tranquility is at least 1,000 miles from the Tycho crater.

Former space agency bureaucrat, Dr. Heywood Floyd's angry, "I was never told" (about HAL's secrecy) is a direct contradiction to 2001. He appears on the briefing film that pops up after HAL is lobotomized in 2001. Man-up Heywood !

HAL did not malfunction in Jupiter space. The scene would have been markedly different looking, with a looming gas giant planet in the background.

The Leonov's aerobraking would had to have happened before visiting Europa. The ship had to first be slowed and captured in Jupiter's gravitational well. A flyby at inbound high velocity would be too brief, as demonstrate by NASA probes.

Clarke's central theme is that the monolith is completely inert (aside from serving as a stargate) leaving a lot to the imagination. The idea that is has some sort of self-defense mechanism completely undercuts this compelling Sphinx-like enigma.

Leonov is markedly smaller than Discovery - like a school bus next to a tractor trailer. But somehow there is lots of elbow-room for crew. Add to that some sort of huge weird docking mechanism that it uses to clamp onto Discovery. The vast Xmas-tree lit flight deck looks like something off a big nuclear submarine (like in The Hunt for Red October). All this contradicts the ship's screen size in my opinion. Just compare their flight deck to Discovery's modest flight deck - with windows! Bottom line: Discovery looks plausible, not Leonov.

The external shots around Io are static. The ships are in orbit such that day and night would come and gone over a rolling terrain. Just like the videos from the Earth-orbiting ISS.

Floyd illustrates how the two ship would dock by using floating pens. But he's living in artificial gravity on the Leonov. (A cute takeoff on the Orion shuttle pen shot?)

When Discovery's engines shut down the ship stops moving and the Leonov undocks and keeps going under its own propulsion, leaving Discovery in the dust. This is as common error in sci-fi films. Nobody remembers Newton's law of motion from H. S. physics?

Following the 1979 Voyager 1 flyby, Europa looked unique as a world with a subsurface ocean. But now we know a lot moons in the outer solar system are similar. If you melt Europa it would simply be a ball of water - twice the volume of Earth's oceans - wrapped around a rocky core (like some exoplanets we know of).

If "2010" had a technical consultant, they were out of their league. 2001 had space scientist, rocket historian, and author, Fred Ordway as consultant. And the movie shows it.
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1/10
Soggy, Sappy Melodrama That Goes On Forever
6 August 2023
Warning: Spoilers
The first 30 minutes of the sequel had me engaged with drama.

But the story pacing falls off the cliff once the forest aliens go to waterworld. It's like watching two hours of someone's Hawaii vacation videos. And I really could care less about a dysfunctional family's woes.

Once again, a gusher of nonstop razzle dazzle computer graphics that outpace the Disney Little Mermaid's underwater world don't substitute for a lackadaisical story.

It gets soooo boring I would have fast forward the video if I were watching it alone. I think I kept looking at the clock about every ten minutes, counting down to the grand finale.

Of course in the last 30 minutes all hell break loose. Some scenes of the sinking "whale-hunting" ship are reminiscent of Cameron's "Titanic" and "The Abyss". I'm convinced the man is preoccupied with water sports.

The story is nonsensical that Jake Sully, supposedly the great military leader, has to run and hide with his family as the moon is being overtaken . Jeeez, he's no George Washington. It really makes him look ineffectual. His escape obviously can't slow down the invasion, and it's inevitable that Sully is gonna be hunted down on the small moon.

Equally nonsensical is that the sequel shifts from the search for "unobtanium," to a need for humanity to colonize a small moon. That's a pretty expensive and misguided effort to get some modest celestial real estate.

And if that is not enough, the Earth invaders want to harvest some precious fluid from a sea mammal's brain after it is killed. Uh, just synthesize it in an Earth-lab like we do in modern medicine, like insulin.

The fact that the cloned bad guy Quaritch manages to survive for another day of mayhem, leaves the film wide open to a string of sequels which I hope are less monotonous.
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The Munsters (2022)
2/10
Sheri Moon is no Yvonne DeCarlo
2 October 2022
Warning: Spoilers
This boring, zig-zag remake tries to be faithful to the original 1960s sitcom. They even allude to Fred Gwynne's "Car 54" TV show, which is cute. Jeff Daniels and Dan Roebuck do a respectable job of portraying the original show's family characters.

My complaint is that the new Lilly actress (Sheri Moon Zombie) - unlike Yvonne DeCarlo - apparently didn't want to submit to hours of blue makeup and body paint. She just looks like a normal woman with heavy eye makeup. DeCarlo's sexy Halloween makeup treatment was her Munsters signature, and kept her in character with the other ghoulish-looking actors. Sheri tries to channel her persona, but it's a flop.
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Moonfall (2022)
1/10
NONSTOP LUNACY
11 September 2022
Warning: Spoilers
The entire two-hour long film is an absurd amalgam of every fanatical space alien crackpot idea out there. All the writers had to do was surf numerous UFO enthusiast Internet bulletin boards to pull all the nincompoop ideas together into a mosh pit of nonstop idiocy: the hollow moon, government coverups, interstellar breeding, nanotechnology run amok, impossible physics, etc.

The film's inane errors are too many to list here. But to name a few: If the moon was hollow it would have an inconsequential gravitational tidal pull on Earth; you can't pull a graffiti-covered space shuttle out of a museum and launch it overnight without a ground crew; you can't refuel the space shuttle in earth orbit because it has no fuel tanks (this is blatantly obvious just by looking at the shuttle architecture); The NASA administrator just can't resign and someone self-appoint themselves as the replacement (the U. S. Congress would have something to say about this); The EMP weapon is never defined as an electromagnetic impulse. (Even Goldfinger took time to explain what a laser is to James Bond.)

I am also sick of out nation's honorable space agency, NASA, once again being portrayed in films as a grotesque caricature of three-piece-suit administrators conniving to hide facts from the public. This is the favored staple of the Moon-hoax conspiracy nuts.

The film is so goofy I couldn't stop laughing through much of it. Moonfall belongs on a Mystery Science Theater episode. The editing gets cluttered as it weaves between dysfunctional family issues and pieces of the moon raining down in us. The ending, predictably a special effects orgasm, actually gets boring because it is so drawn out. The film's eventual depiction of aliens is a direct steal from the movie Contact - apparently the producers couldn't come up with anything more imaginative.

From start to finish, this film is the latest disgrace in sci-fi cinema, just pure, insipid stupidity from beginning to end.
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First Signal (2021)
1/10
As low as you can go in pure banality
22 December 2021
Warning: Spoilers
A mind-numbing nearly two hours of banal dialogue around a meeting table? This has to be the lowest budget sci-fi film ever made. I recommend it only for insomniacs, or conspiracy nuts who soak up this kind of sappy soap opera melodrama. The seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey sweeps audiences into an experiential visualization of finding evidence of intelligent life off the Earth - without all the yakity-yakity-yackity-yakitying. I've seen much, much better student high school films. A zero rating would be too generous for this anemic attempt to entertain UFO cultists.
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Capricorn One (1977)
1/10
SPACE IDIOCY
26 October 2021
Warning: Spoilers
This movie is a delusional feast for government conspiracy lovers everywhere. It's an amalgam of every crackpot paranoid idea about a secret NASA space program. Regrettably, clips from the film have been used to bolster the numbskull allegation that the Apollo moon-landings were a hoax.

At least the "Men in Black" film series is a fun-loving parody of all the government coverup nonsense. But the "men in black" in this tall-tale are serious: they murder people, chase people around in helicopters, hijack astronauts, and threaten to murder astronaut families.

The screwy story lumbers along with one idiotic improbability on top of another. A clueless astronaut crew is kidnapped from atop a rocket booster minutes before launch. A NASA engineer who catches onto the scam is has his identity erased. A hapless news reporter stumbles around the truth for at least half of the film as he is being chased by assasins. The kidnapped astronauts easily escape a minimum security hideaway. But, they are unlucky enough to steal a jet plane with a near- empty fuel tank. They then wander around desert like the crashed astronaut crew in "The Planet of the Apes." A crop dusting biplane engages is an aerial dogfight with two black ops helicopters. Even Monty Python could not come up with a sillier story.

Finally, the film's paranoid premise that NASA funding would be cut following a space disaster is the opposite of the reality. Public support for NASA increased after the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster. And, conversely, public support for going to back to the moon plummeted after the Apollo 11 landing.
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Archive (2020)
Sluggish pace
12 September 2020
Warning: Spoilers
I watched this film with my who family and everyone was bored to tears. So much so that halfway through we began to fast forward past clips.

To me, the story just wanders all over the place in the huge maze-like labyrinth of the robotic research lab.

Sci-fi fans will love this movie for all the high-tech eye candy. The female robot is one of the sexiest treatments since the classic, Metropolis.

The lone robotics genius has a wonderful interaction with his robot creations, Reminiscent of Bruce Dern's relationship with onboard robots in Silent Running.

Though it drags and drags, the Twilight Zone / Black Mirror inspired ending is worth the patience.
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Ravage (2019)
1/10
complete waste of 77 minutes
12 September 2020
Warning: Spoilers
Some movies are galvanized by being very memorable in the final 5 minutes of screen time - the Sixth Sense being a classic example.

This bloodbath of nonstop gratuitous killing is just the opposite. At the end you simply say "that's it? What the hell!"

The story is not terrible plausible. We have a bunch of hillbillies schooled on medieval torture techniques. The backwoods gang in Deliverance is much more believable.

The lead character, a waif of a female nature photographer, goes out of her way to get into trouble and then abruptly turns into Rambo for most of the film.

She runs around the Virginia countryside for at least three days before coming upon civilization. Maybe this was plausible in the 1800s.

Bruce Dern adds some depth and intrigue, but only for the handful of minutes he's seen in the film's only chilling moment, where fear is left to the imagination.

Not all movies need a happy ending, but this one really doesn't leave much closure and no irony.
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The Invisible Man (I) (2020)
2/10
Invisibility Leaves a Lot Missing
5 September 2020
Warning: Spoilers
This spooky murder-mystery barely held my attention because it is so dragged-out. The many scenes where Elizabeth Moss feels she's being stalked by a ghost, and later, invisible man, are at least twice and long as they should be.

Her perpetual look of despair and anxiety is almost as monotonous as Joaquin Phoenix's Batman Joker character depiction in the 2019 film.

By far the biggest flaw in the film is getting the audience to hate the bad guy, Moss' boyfriend, actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen. She describes him as really evil, but we never see his character in action until the final minutes of the film! So, his character development is pretty anemic.

This film has a few parallels to the 1991 film Sleeping With the Enemy. A women is trapped in a abusive relationship in a luxury oceanside home with a despicable mate. A death is faked and the woman goes into hiding and is stalked by her former partner.

But in the 1991 film we see so much brutality we are primed to want the male abuser dead, dead, dead! In the Invisible Man all when have is a long-winded narrative from Moss about what a creep the guy is. And, as any marriage counselor says, there are two sides to every story.

Also implausible is the boyfriend's huge basement workshop that is full of as much techno-gear as Iron Man's lab. This never got Moss' curiosity until after he *disappears?* She must have at least been curious how he made big-bucks.

The invisibility suit is cool and somewhat based on current technology experiments, and so, is plausible. But I wish that was true for the rest of the film.
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Joker (I) (2019)
No Joke
18 January 2020
Warning: Spoilers
I'm dumbfounded this film gets such a high IMDB rating.

If this was meant to be some kind of social commentary on the ravages of mental illness, it could have been done without hijacking one of the most colorful characters in the Batman comic book genre.

Viewers are held hostage to two hours of somber, relentless depression, murder, and mayhem. There are endless shots of a solitary, anguished Joaquin Phoenix, which get pretty monotonous.

In a nutshell: adopted boy suffers brain damage from a brutal father, lives with a sick mentally ill mother, and, after getting beat-up by street hooligans, builds a self-pitying clown alter-ego that's going to hold up a mirror to a dismissive society. *Yawn*

Of all the actors who have played Joker, Heath Ledger got the right balance of being a scary, crazed, murderous, diabolically clever sociopath who could go toe-to-toe with Batman. The pathetic, hapless Phoenix character lacks all of that persona.

Yes, Phoenix does an outstanding performance worthy of an Oscar. But that alone doesn't save a film that is a boring flop because it is monotone, dark, dour, and mostly pointless.
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Ad Astra (2019)
Completely Absurd Film From Start to Finish
22 December 2019
Warning: Spoilers
This movie is so bad I had to watch it twice.

Why? because it is so boring, I dozed off several times, And on the second viewing dozed off again. There is simply very little interest, empathy, or character development in the very long distance son vs. daddy conflict between Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones.

The actions scenes are a pathetic attempt to give the snoozy, introspective narrative a kick in the pants. And they are all idiotic beyond words: a space pirate battle on the moon, uncaged apes gone wild as they orbit an asteroid (?!), fistfights and guns inside space capsules, falling off an absurdly tall space antenna (which is just a rework of daredevil Felix Baumgartner's real supersonic freefall, shot by shot.)

From the point of technical or science accuracy the film is a complete sci-fi abomination. The seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey was crafted by bringing together some of the best technical advisers in the aerospace industry for design engineering.Their vision hold up today, 50 years after 2001's debut. But not for this lazy butcher job. The sets are just an uninspired rehash of the look in stock footage from NASA's manned space program on the International Space Station.

What's more, it's terribly idiotic to show monster rockets blasting off the moon and Mars, which are really designed to climb out of Earth's deep gravitational well. Even more absurd is landing a giant stacked rocket onto Mars. Aerospace designs for nimble Mars landers go back to the 1960s. Even more stupid is an interplanetary vehicle stopping along its trajectory for a rescue mission. Space propulsion and trajectories simply don't work that way. It's not like pulling off to the side of the road.

There has never been a film so unscientifically embarrassing since The Core. Brad Pitt casually takes an excursion across several billion miles of space and back as if he's riding a bus across the country. Also, the search for signals from extraterrestrial civilization has been going on from the surface or Earth for the past 60 years, no need to fly to Neptune and beyond. The scriptwriters apparently never watched the film Contact, from Carl Sagan's novel. And, if we did have to go outside the solar system that it would be done with unmanned probes - like the NASA Voyager 1 that is now ten time the distance of Pluto from Earth.

The film starts with the text "in the near future." In reality it should be "in the impossible future."
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The Lion King (2019)
5/10
beautiful but low-voltage as compared to the original
22 July 2019
Warning: Spoilers
For those of you who grew up with the 1994 animated Lion King, this film is nice trip down memory lane. It's worth watching just for the exquisitely beautiful CG effects that are completely indistinguishable from reality - making the film a real landmark in cinema effects history.

But, unlike the original cartoon-animated Lion King, the film falls flat on fun-loving excitement. The characters aren't as lively, and maybe this is due to the constrains of re-telling the story with photo-realism.

Also, parts of the film are too dark for a young audience. The hyenas will give kids nightmares, the evil Scar is as creepy as the Grim Reaper.

Inexplicably, one of the funniest side-splitting scenes from the original was changed to the point of being terse. This is the scene were Timone dresses in a hula skirt and plays a ukulele to distract the hyenas. Why change it at all? Was the idea of Timone dressing in drag considered tasteless, or un-PC?

Similarly, the three hyenas came off as four-legged Three Stooges in the original film. But that nyuk-nyuk slapstick goes missing in the remake.

A wonderfully illustrated film that lacks comic energy of the original.
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First Man (2018)
4/10
Gosling is No Neil Armstrong
2 February 2019
Warning: Spoilers
You would think that a film about one of our nation's great pioneering heroes would be so uplifting it would leave the audience clapping. Not this one. It does do an excellent job of chronicling Neil Armstrong's brave, death-defying career. But fails to reach orbit due to one fatal flaw: Ryan Gosling.

He is terribly miscast as an almost anti-hero. I thought his monotonous sourpuss was bad enough in Bladerunner 2049. But it returns again to cast a rainy day on this film. Gosling comes off as mysteriously brooding, sullen, if not clinically depressed. Maybe spacy? But not in a good sense.

I grew up in the glorious Apollo years and saw the real Neil Armstrong on TV plenty of times. The character Gosling crafted has little resemblance. I doubt he even studied archival interviews with the first man on the moon. Armstrong was terribly shy, soft spoken, but had a wry sense of wit about him. In fairness, Armstrong's children do say his cold family interactions are correctly portrayed.

That said, the film has a good pace and dramatically captures the mind-numbing dangers and claustrophobia of early manned spaceflight. So, it's worth watching just the get an insight into the barnstorming years of NASA's space race with the Soviets.

However, the Apollo 11 moon landing at the end is terribly anti-climactic. We just see Gosling wandering around. The only flash of creativity is to have him do a 360-degree pan of the desolate Tranquility base landing site.

The controversial omission of erecting the American flag, according to director Damien Chazelle, was to focus on "loss and sacrifice and failure." Guess what Mr. Chazelle, American is built on bold pioneering efforts that always involved loss, sacrifice and failure. Nothing worth doing is ever easy. It's presumptuous of the director to take the "glass half empty" preachy tone, and therefore dismiss such an iconic image of American "can-do" technological prowess.

Unlike the film Apollo 13, this film is easily forgettable.
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1/10
Muppets Gone Wild
20 January 2019
Warning: Spoilers
The film is nothing more than a disgusting, vulgar attempt at adult humor with Muppets. This Roger Rabbit wannabe flops miserably on all counts.

There is absolutely nothing funny about this movie unless you find some scrap of humor in offensive and deplorably graphic puppet antics.

I'm no prude. I thoroughly enjoyed Comedy Central's obnoxious Crank Yankers risqué puppet skits, as well as Team America's.

But when a string of lewd scenes and potty-mouth dialogue have no redeemable satire or parody value, it's just crude and gratuitous.

God help any parent who rented this travesty for their kids thinking it was just another cute family movie with the misleading title. "Happytime."

Shame, shame, shame on the Disney folks for thinking that they had to pander to an adult audience for this tasteless Muppet misadventure.

Muppets creator Jim Henson must be turning in his grave.
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Alpha (II) (2018)
10/10
Endearing, Unclutered Tale of Boy and His Wolf
20 January 2019
Warning: Spoilers
This was a delightful film, reminiscent of the early Disney TV adventure tales. Parts are also a little reminiscence of "Quest for Fire." It's a simple and endearing story that presages the eventual domestication of dogs - not only Man's best friend, but his first.

It is enjoyable to have a film about early humans with minimal language that is not - ugh - in English. My only small criticisms are that the costumes look a little too well-tailored for 20,000 years ago, the son's wilderness survival seems awfully implausible, and constellations would not be a reliable to guide to your way home unless they were circumpolar, like the Big Dipper.
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1/10
Soooo-Low
1 October 2018
Warning: Spoilers
Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, we have the saddest example yet of the Disney empire vampire sucking all the electrifying fun out of the Star Wars mythology. This insipid film is the antithesis of everything the original Star Wars was: lacking any edge-of-seat excitement, action, adventure, breathtaking pace, or clever humor. It's like comparing a roller coaster ride to a stroll down a hiking path. Even an accomplished director like Ron Howard could not save a lackluster and convoluted screenplay, and lethargic, forgettable cast.

Much worse than the bland story is the terribly miscast Alden Ehrenreich as a 20-something Han Solo. (Remember, the Harrison Ford version of the character first appeared in his mid-30s.) It seems to me that Ehrenreich was too lazy, or conceited, or simply lacked the talent to have taken time to study and emulate the Solo character that Ford develop with his wry wit, wise-guy smirk, and charming playfulness. It seems like Ehrenreich settled for just playing himself. He's as miscast as if Cher was asked to play Lucille Ball.

The only redeeming character is the feminist robot, L3-37, who has the only fun lines in the entire 135 minutes of mediocrity.

Is this really the best formula the Disney folks can come up with? Taking an uninspiring story, slapping Star Wars names onto the characters, and wrapping it in tons of special effects eye-candy. Sorry Disney, the electrifying pace, wild adventure, and side-splitting humor of Guardians of the Galaxy is passing up the now geriatric Star Wars at light-speed.
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Lost in Space (2018–2021)
6/10
Space Oddity
15 April 2018
Warning: Spoilers
The Nextflix remake is much better that the original 1960s series, which was just horribly silly at the same time Star Trek seriously dramatized interstellar exploration.

However, this new version reminds me of a crazy old uncle - quirky but endearing. The children all have entertaining characters are I especially like the treacherous new Dr. Smith (so long as she doesn't blurt "oh the pain!"), and the cyclops-like robot.

But a few things made me laugh and cringe at the same time:

The Robinson family is playing cards while the ship automatically lands on a dangerous-looking planet with rough topography and fierce weather. (this may work for self-driving cars but not starships.)

The mother Maureen Robinson looks at the robot and says "oh your synthetic." (duh!) and questions whether it qualifies as the first bona fide discovery of extraterrestrial life.

She says they are "trillions of light-years off course" - hundreds of times the size of the observable universe. And husband John Robinson - who's no Stephen Hawking - adds that this must be due to some "new kind of physics."

Finally, my iPhone couldn't survive being dropped into the toilet, I doubt an entire submerged and flooded starship could do much better, as seen in the first episode.

I've just seen two episodes so far and am eager to see how these dysfunction space pioneers, with a phony family counselor onboard, make it through those "trillions of light-years."
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Oh No! A Prometheus Sequel!
27 August 2017
Warning: Spoilers
When I go see an Alien franchise sequel, especially when directed by Ridley Scott, I expect to see H.R. Geger's nightmarish alien from the first film.

No such luck — except for an un-scary cameo appearance.

It was nice to see some allusion to the flavor of the first Alien film in the sets. But as a story, the film is a boring, contrived, and convoluted sequel to the disastrous film, Prometheus.

Despite the infinite capabilities of CG to create a truly bizarre and arresting planetary landscape, the colonists are filmed walking through a forest that looks suspiciously Earthlike. I'd expect more from a nearly $100 million budget.

The original Alien remains a cinematic horror masterpiece that works even without all the CG effects of today. James Camron's sequel, Aliens, ratcheted up the terror. An Alien 3 film should have been about getting the evil species to the Corporation on Earth and having all hell break loose.

Instead, the franchise has mutated into confusing gobbledygook with some gratuitous blood and gore.

Why can't the Aliens series just be about the quest for evil xenomorphs that have value on Earth as a military weapon? Nice and simple. They don't need to be genetically engineered by some android with a God complex.

Also, spare me the confusing melodrama of embattled evil and benign androids, and some still mysterious ancient humanoid race of space-seeders.

I'm glad I streamed this cinematic disaster so I could fast forward through all the pretentious, dull dialogue.
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Trolls (2016)
1/10
Humorless, Creepy, And Boring For All Ages
19 February 2017
Warning: Spoilers
Given the cuteness of the wacky-looking and iconic little 1960s Troll dolls, there were infinite possibilities for a lively and fun-filled movie adaptation—along the lines of Toy Story.

Instead, children and their parent are given a mawkish and edgy fractured fairy tale. The creators try to prop up this train wreck with a lot of psychedelic razzle-dazzle computer graphics, dancing, and gratuitous pop music adaptations – From Simon and Garfunkel to Percy Faith. Nevertheless, though the CG is rich in lively colors and choreographed scenes, the dreadful story is humorless shades of gray.

The film starts out with very creepy characters called the Bergens whose only joy in life is to eat Trolls on – believe it or not – "Trollstice." Really? Maybe the title should have been something stolen from the Twilight Zone, i.e. "To Serve Trolls."

This is not a terribly engaging or buoyant start, and too dark for younger audiences. It goes downhill from there when we learn that a lead character's grandmother was eaten by a Bergen long ago. And so he's a pouting Grinch through most of the movie.

An insufferable 90 minutes of screen time is wasted on learning how the Trolls avoid being the next dinner entrée. This long-winded tale of forgiveness and redemption is lost on children and a dragged-out bore for adults.

Unlike such contemporary animation classics as Shrek, there is only squandered energy in this film. There is nothing terribly humorous, no cadence of seat-of-pants action scenes, no slapstick comedy relief. The only running gag is a sparkle Troll that sprays enemies with glitter, like is some secret James Bond weapon. And, a hippy-dippy cloud that makes a slightly amusing cameo.

This film is so anemic, it is light-years from anything ever created by the Disney geniuses - a dismal failure of imagination, simple playfulness, and comic relief.
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10/10
Belly Busting Nonstop Laughs
16 July 2016
Warning: Spoilers
I never found the original 1984 Ghostbusters all that funny -- especially Bill Murray's quirky shtick. I went to the sequel out of curiosity to see what happens when the roles are swapped. Would the whole thing just be a gimmick?

I was delighted to find nonstop laughter from a far more energetic and fast-paced sequel from the original --propelled by a clever script and great comedy acting. It's hard to go wrong when you have the wacky antics of Melissa McCarthy in the mix. And, SNL's Kate McKinnon plays a wonderfully amusing geeky and slightly maniacal scientist that just keep you giggling. Also, nice to see the Thor hulk, Chris Emsworth, play a Monty Python-like silly character in his role as office secretary. The flirtatious play between him and the ladies is lots of fun.

I was also glad to seen the film pay homage to the storyline and style of the first film. However, having the predictably gratuitous cameos by some of the original cast didn't add to the laugh momentum at all.

Despite the negative reviews I certainly would not consider anything in the film tokenism or sexist. Are people so thin-skinned about what they perceive these days as "politically correct?" This film would not have been nearly as engaging with an all-male cast. It would have been just another boring sequel that would have invited endless comparisons to the original actors.

About halfway through the film the tight-paced hilarity throttles back for the predictable huge battle with an army of ghosts. These inevitable climatic special effects orgasms get tiring.

This is by far one of the most entertaining and funniest films I've seen in a very long time. I'm delighted that they seem to have left the door open for a sequel.
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Spectre (I) (2015)
1/10
License to Bore
14 February 2016
Warning: Spoilers
Watching the newly rebooted "Millennial Bond" film series is like watching a plane in a descending spiral. Just when you think the next Bond installment can't get any worse, it does, and just keeps plunging into a bottomless abyss of pure insipidness.

After the awful un-Bond predecessor "Skyfall" I swore off seeing any more agent 007 films. But the title "SPECTRE" enticed me to give its creators one more chance.

After all, in the previous Bond films SPECTRE a powerful global terror and crime juggernaut. Its syndicate has the audacity of stealing and ransoming atomic bombs, trying to nuke Fort Knox, hijacking manned spacecraft, carrying out cunning assassinations and blackmail. The ruthless leader, Ernst Blofeld, is the Steve Jobs of global mayhem.

But not in this film.

Actor Christoph Waltz is fatally miscast as Blofeld. Rather that exuding the sheer evil of a terrorist mastermind CEO, he comes off as quirky fruitcake. His maniacal smirk and stare makes you think he just got released from a mental health institution. He might do better as "The Joker" in Batman. Blofeld's extent of terror is to inexplicably play at the keyboard of some computerized torture device. Blofeld couldn't find an iPhone torture app? Bond dispatches this psycho-clown with little effort.

Frankly, the Blofeld character has never been properly cast with previous actors either. The character is most unsettling when you can't see his face, just his cherished Persian lap-cat. This was sobering in "Thunderball" and "From Russia With Love."

All you see of SPECTRE as an organization is a boring boardroom meeting in a set reminiscent of Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," and a nonsensical secret desert base that looks like it belongs in a sci-fi version of Area 51. The base doesn't last long. Bond blows it sky-high with little more than a hand grenade disguised as a watch. I though this kind of silliness was only reserved for an Austin Powers movie.

We see so little of SPECTRE that filmmakers don't even bother to spell out Ian Fleming's acronym – Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. Too polysyllabic for today's audiences?

Once again, Craig – our blue-collar Bond - struggles to be charming and romantic with his leading lady, actress Léa Seydoux . There is a gratuitous, brief one-night-stand on a train -- and that's about it. Craig's sex appeal is in need of Viagra.

The concept of SPECTRE has been so bastardize in this Bond-age bore poor Ian Fleming must be turning in his grave.
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Everest (2015)
3/10
Snow Job
3 October 2015
Warning: Spoilers
Having read John Krakauer's account of the doomed Everest climb in his book "Into Thin Air" I was anticipating a much more dramatic film with a gripping script. The wonderful ensemble of actors didn't have much to work with. The film is monotone with no edge-of-seat moments -- given the life-or-death extreme setting. And not much of a dramatic soundtrack either. The film has no cadence at all and just comes off as a flat docudrama. The only highly emotional moment is when a dying Rob Hall makes a final call to his wife in New Zealand.

I am especially disappointed that a compelling part of Krakauer's narrative is almost completely left out. If there is one pivotal anti-hero in this story it is the NY socialite Sandy Pittman Hill. She's accused of causing many of the crucial delays to the other clients' ascent. Without these delays the climbers likely would have likely gotten back to base camp before the storm came. The film shows one of these critical delays in the absence of rope lines being fixed to the summit. But the film never bothers to explain why this happened. In reality Pittman's distraction of the Sherpa responsible for installing rope lines is to blame – at least according to Krakauer.

This would have made for high drama, but the filmmakers inexplicably show her character in just a few brief shots. One wonders if they were threatened with a libel suit by Pittman, or simply co-opted by her when, I assume, they interviewed her for background.

The blend of special effect and cinematography is excellent, and it's not to be missed in 3D. But the story suffers from lack of oxygen.
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Noah (2014)
1/10
Deluge-ional
17 August 2014
Warning: Spoilers
This is a uniquely bizarre movie in that I am at a loss to imagine what kind of audience its producers thought the film would appeal to. Neither saint nor sinner can take much away from this fractured fairy tale.

It is not for Christians because the film goes out of its way to bastardize the biblical account of Noah's Ark and marginalize God.

As a tall tale for the non-devout it is bleak, ponderous, sullen, brooding and just freakin' weird.

It is so unredeeming it ranks as one of the absolutely worst movies I have ever suffered through. I just sat there saying, "this can't get any worse," but it does. I imagine a lot of people simply walked out the movie theater midway through this train wreck.

The plot derailments:

1. The fallen angel rock monsters just leave you scratching your head saying WTF?! They are a huge distraction. They warp the story into some freakish fantasy/sc-fi yarn.

2. The bleak, barren landscape behind the action looks like the Great Flood has already come and gone. Where are the people and their cities (we can't even see an orgy in Sodom)? When we do see to shots of the barbarian hordes it look like they are having their own twisted Renaissance Fair in the woods.

3. The politically correct vegetarianism, i.e. man is evil because he killing all animals theme is mawkish. It reminds me of the preachy remake of the "Day the Earth Stood Still" where the conclusion is that the world is better off without humans. This is antithetical to the whole Genesis story.

4. God is MIA in this movie. There is an odd aversion to putting the name "God" into the script. There are several pathetic scenes where Noah stares helplessly into blank clouds looking for a sign from "The Creator." This leaves little doubt that the ark patriarch is truly delusional. I would have settled here for a piece of Monty Python animation.

6. CG would have offered tremendous opportunities to show pairs of animals boarding the ark -- the crux of the whole biblical "Earth reborn" theme. But we see very little of our forest friends as Noah plays out his schizophrenic struggles on the upper deck. Even more perversely, a bad guy hiding out on the ark starts eating the animals! He is a one-man mass extinction.

7. The ending is totally anticlimactic. Your are left thinking, "really? I sat through 2-1/2 hour for this?"

Artistically, the CG of the ark weathering the deluge is beautifully biblical. Also, the animation of a curious evolutionary version of Genesis is nicely done.
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3/10
Mission Impossible
22 September 2013
Warning: Spoilers
If you are in the mood for a razzle-dazzle action thriller that pits terrorists against good old American blood and guts ballsy fighting, this is a flick for you. The nonstop carnage may be too much for the tastes of some viewers.

But the excesses the director goes through to make a riveting tale turn the film into a comic book fantasy rather than something more chillingly plausible as the film version of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears."

The biggest bloopers:

1. Foreign nationals would never be admitted into the White House bunker during an attack on the U.S. (center to the film's plot)

2. The nuclear warheads on an intercontinental missile do not explode if the missile self-destructs.

3. In the post-9/11 age I imagine the U.S Capitol has far more robust surface-to-air defenses than the film imaignes.

4. How do terrorists hijack a large Air Force gunship without it being shot down immediately? (never explained in the film).

5. There is no way to cut off all power and communications to the White House to leave the occupying terrorists blind and deaf?

6. I doubt that the President, V.P., and a cabinet member have to memorize any military codes for nuclear missile control. I have a hard enough time memorizing my computer passwords!

7. Camp David is in western Maryland; the nearest fund-raiser would be a 2-hour drive (in the dark of a stormy night?) -- unless the President was going to a fire hall spaghetti dinner in a rural town.

Yes, most good stories require some artistic license, but this film crosses a red line that makes the terrorist attack scenario so far-fetched that it's nothing to worry about. Little green Martians would be more likely to show up on the White House lawn first.
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1/10
Nothing Funny About This Piece of Idiocy
1 January 2013
Scientists say that nature abhors a vacuum. But a comedic vacuum has managed to survive inside the mind of Adam Sandler and his co-creators.

This film doesn't stop at the bottom of the barrel for its sheer stupidity, but lands about three floors below the barrel. It is miscatagorized as a comedy because there's absolutely nothing funny about it.

The oddball lead character – who looks like the love child between Prince Valliant and a beaver -- is as annoying as nails on a chalkboard. The CIA should use outtakes of him for torturing confessions out of terrorists.

The film's ongoing orgasm/ejaculation shtick is utterly tasteless and just makes you queasy. This is the most pathetic waste of celluloid I've seen in a very long time.

This box office flop must have come straight out of one a Sandler's pubescent wet dreams.
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