Selma : very good movie Birdman : very great movie American Sniper : very pretty good movie Kings of Summer : good flick, especially if you are or were or have or know teenage boys
Even then I don't see justification for a sequel. Not everything has to be a franchise. Interesting that Live. Die. Repeat. became the de facto title for it when in the theaters it was Edge of Tomorrow.
Well that's what they put on the posters, right? Or the previews? I remember it from their marketing, for sure.
Alex Cross - 2/10 I know why I STARTED watching this on Showtime the other night. It's because I remembered the character from those two Morgan Freeman movies several years ago, and they were pretty good. But I have no idea why I CONTINUED watching after ten minutes. Tyler Perry... yes, Tyler Perry.. carrying around a shotgun, engaging in 'fisticuffs', actually BEATING the trained crazed killer assassin.. I almost have no words.. I kept thinking, well, maybe it will get good any minute. But then after a while, when it just got worse, I figured, ok well I have watched it THIS far, I have to at least find out what happens at the end. First, memo to Tyler Perry: You are not a bad mofo. You cannot PLAY a bad mofo. You do not have it IN you. You are big sweet cuddly teddy bear. You cannot play 'dark and dangerous, filled with rage and revenge'. You just can't. I can only assume some studio owed you a massive favor, considering how much money you make them, what with your putting out a new movie every week, for what I am guessing must be extremely small budgets. So, you wanted to play a Denzel-type badass. Ok now that you have it out of your system, put the dress back on and do what you actually CAN do, and never pick up a weapon in a film again. It was bad enough that you were in Star Trek, for crying out loud. So, apart from all that.. you know how when internet douche-nozzles, in their infinite know-it-all wisdom, sometimes crap all over a movie by saying something like 'the script was terrible!' ? Well, THIS is that movie! By that I mean, take the 'bad guy' for example. The Character of Alex Cross is supposed to be some kind of super-smart 'Profiler', specializing in serial killers. I guess this movie was some kind of 'prequel' to that, as he discusses a move to the FBI from his current job as a regular old detective. Anyway, the 'bad guy' is apparently some kind of insane nutso, played by Matthew Fox, and enjoys pain, and enjoys sadistically inflicting pain. He beats up some MMA fighter in the ring, apparently so he can impress some rich woman who is watching, so she'll take him home with her. So he can then torture her to death, after sneakily sneaking in a gun in his shoe and killing all her body guards, all secret-agent-like. So after he chops off all her fingers, he then spends extra time drawing some kind of charcoal Picasso drawing of the crime - BUT WITH SPECIAL HIDDEN CLUES THAT ONLY ALEX CROSS COULD FIGURE OUT!! So ok, this fits with the 'Alex Cross - Serial Killer Profiler' routine, right? Except, no. While the assassin may have been a nut, he had no idea who Alex Cross was until he showed up at the spot of the NEXT victim's assassination. So.. WHY did he draw a picture with the embedded clue? No reason. Just because. So THEN, after Alex and Pals thwart the next 'hit'.. then Alex and his team come under the cross hairs of the bad guy. A bad guy who is apparently not only just a nut, but somehow also some kind of dedicated hit-man, and who seems to be trying to 'work his way up the ladder' of some sort of vague world-wide corporation. Why? No reason. Just because. But that makes the guy NOT a 'serial killer', and instead just some high-dollar assassin. The assassin abducts the cute chick on Alex's team and... kills her? Tortures her? Does she live or die? The movie does not bother to tell you. I think MAYBE we are supposed to assume she died, but the movie just ignores that little thread - you know, of a major character being abducted and (probably) killed by the bad guy, and Alex and remaining-pal (who happened to be IN LOVE with said abducted cute chick by the way) never really address it other than sort-of in passing. Oh and the assassin kills Alex's wife, while on the phone with Alex. Ooooooh.. AND she was pregnant. So Alex is gonna be MAAADDDDD. Well, sort of. A little bit anyway. And his grandma or someone like that doesn't want him to get all revenge-y, because.. well, it doesn't make any sense beyond 'revenge is bad' or something like that. But he's a bad mofo, so, he ain't listening to Grandma. So anyway, Alex is magically convinced that the killer's ultimate target is the TOP dude in the company, some French guy, played by, of course, Jean Reno, because, you know, French guy, so who else ya gonna call? Anyway, Alex visits French dude, and French dude just kind of wastes everyone's time for like ten minutes, and then they just move on. The movie tells you NOTHING about French dude's character, what he really does, who he really is, nothing about his character or motivations, what, if any, connection he may have to anything which might make him an ultimate target of an assassin. So anyway, bla bla bla, they figure out that the assassin is going to try to kill these corporate big-wigs during some kind of 'conference' downtown, or something stupid like that, even though there is a CREDIBLE THREAT to their lives, and the police have 'locked down twenty blocks' all around the building (just on a side note, who is going to be AT this 'conference, seeing as how the police have 'locked down the area'..?? SMH) . Oh, and the 'Chief' of police is played by the D-bag mean doctor from Scrubs - you know, John McGinley, the Chief of Police mind you, who only wears a regular cop uniform the whole time, and is really still just playing the d-bag mean doctor character even still. And he's dumb and mean and he won't listen to Alex when he says they are all IN DANGER!! DANGERRRRR!!! Anyway, of course the assassin has gone to the extremely complex and elaborate trouble of setting himself up on an elevated train with some kind of RPG containing (apparently) a small NUKE, and of course he blows the crap out of the whole place at JUST the right moment, because 'having the whole area locked down' does not include stopping the trains which run right by the place. Sigh. Anyway, On-Star(tm) and Cadillac (tm) help save the city of Detroit(tm) by guiding Alex directly to the bad guy's location, because he pointedly drives a really pretty new Cadillac.. anyway, Alex smashes his car, and then they go play in the attic of some old theater-turned-parking garage. Then teddy-bear Alex undergoes fisticuffs, and actually beats the guy, and drops him through a hole in the floor down to his death below. Yay, good guys win. But wait, IT'S NOT OVER. In a scene which looks mostly like an epilogue, Alex gets on the phone with French dude, who happens to still be alive (even though we thought we saw him get blowed-up by the assassin! Gasp!)! Alex (off camera and with ZERO information as to what led him to this conclusion) has deduced that it was French dude who hired the assassin to kill the underlings in his company. Something about money. So the assassin was just some nutbag ex military killer for hire. Not a serial killer at all. So the whole 'Alex Cross, Serial Killer Profiler' thing is suddenly null and void. So the whole 'drawing a picasso with clues in it' for absolutely no reason has even LESS reason than you thought before! Sigh. Anyway, Alex is still kind of peeved that his wife was was killed by this twerp, so Alex (cop, detective, GOOD GUY, remember), amusingly plants about a ton of cocaine in French dude's house, and while they are on the phone, apparently the Phillipino cops bust in and arrest the guy, and Alex sort of laughs and reminds him that he will probably be executed for being a drug dealer. And then it was mercifully over. Among the worst movies I have ever seen. Seriously, if SNL had decided to do a spoof of an Alex Cross movie, they literally could have done many parts of this movie, and it would have been hilarious, because some of the super-serious stuff they try in this thing, it just comes off as almost satire. Do NOT waste your time. And sorry about all this, I just had to vent.
The Amazing Spiderman 6/10 I don't understand why they made this move. Spiderman came out like 2002, the graphics and effects are not that different now days. I can understand if it had been in the early 90s when Spiderman came out but this was too soon to be re-made. I watched it hoping it was a different take, maybe situations and scenes would be different but no, it was the exact scenes from the original only with different actors and a Lizard instead of Green Goblin. I understand you need to stay true to the source material but in that case, there was no reason to re-make this movie. I'm glad I didn't pay for it, I just saw it on FX the other day. Should I give the amazing Spiderman 2 a try or is it another similar story as the Toby Macguire spiderman movies?
Don't watch The Amazing Spiderman 2. It is much worse than the first movie. They basically took three different movie concepts and threw them into one movie.
Such a POS of a movie, almost as bad as Transcendence. Birdman - Amazing piece of film making, should win the Oscar for Best Picture and director. Keaton and Norton as just awesome. - A Boyhood - As as plot, it's actually really mundane even though Richard Linklater really knows how to capture universal moments in life. What they actually pulled off is just insane when you think about it. Hard to deny the innovation or achievement. - A
Gone Girl 9/10 Finally got around to seeing this movie. If you haven't seen it, get it and see it. I am not going to spoil things here, so don't worry. I will say, this movie has a lot to spoil, so do NOT read much about this movie before seeing it. As for my thoughts on the film: Obviously I liked it very much to give it such a high score. I don't know anything about the source material other than the fact that it was a best-selling novel. From what I have read, the movie manages to stay very true to the tone of the novel, if not all the specific details. If that's true, it must be a hell of a book, because the movie is an absolute meat-cleaver to the back of the head. It makes you think - about your own life, about your relationships, about what it means to trust another human being. And it is truly both horrifying and terrifying. The performances are all absolutely top rate. Affleck, Pike, NPH.. even Tyler Perry, who will probably never be better than he is in this movie. While the movie is very very good, it's not *perfect*.. there is one major element with which I have a problem: (spoiler, do NOT click this if you have not seen the movie!) Spoiler When Amy murders NPH's character, the police apparently do not investigate it at ALL, which is essentially an impossibility, ESPECIALLY because NPH was a rich white guy.. no way she would have gotten away with that as easily as she did. Had any real investigation occurred, her story would have collapsed due to having so many holes in it. But that would have destroyed the powerful ending of the film, so they had to just sort of skate over that part, which to me is a flaw, so I dock a point at least for it. Oh, also.. I wouldn't really advise picking this up as a 'Date Movie'.. you're probably not gonna get a lot of warm fuzzies from any woman with whom you happen watch it. You have been warned.
John Wick - 4/10 I don't know why I thought this movie was going to have any substance to it, but it certainly didn't. Honestly was pretty boring after the first act. Just guns, guns, and more guns. Of course that is all you expect, but I thought the revenge rampage would be more entertaining. It wasn't.
It was the tag line, but at some point the studio seemed to start using it as the title. The Bluray box art has it front and center and 'Edge' is in small print next to Cruise and Blunt's name. In fact they actually did rebrand it... http://variety.com/2014/film/news/tom-cruise-edge-of-tomorrow-gets-repositioned-as-live-die-repeat-on-home-video-1201283383/ Smart move imo. Edge of Tomorrow was a pretty bland title.
It'd take me 17 times longer to read your review than it would for me to turn that goddam movie off. You lost me around sentence #2.
