Countdown -- Prime I much prefer the binge format for TV, so I hate that everyone is going old school with releases one day per week. In this case, I only watched this show because I couldn't binge. Sitting two or three episodes in one night would have driven me away. This show is just not that good. Some East European terrorist has a fissile weapon in LA so a superteam of cops across the spectrum -- FBI, ATF, US Marshall, a couple of LA cops -- is made into a task force. They get their man. In episode 10 of a 13-episode season. They spend a good 15 minutes wrapping up the case, showing where everyone disperses to after the task force disbands. And then in episode 11 they start a new case and the task force has to be re-assembled. The pacing is just all wrong. Are they going to catch this guy in three episodes, or are we going to get the de rigeur cliffhanger? It's the latter. And it's over wrought. I won't spend any time waiting for season two.
Deadwater Fell [2020 - 1 season/4 episodes] A bit Broadchurchy (not b/c of Tennant), but the vibe and the setting (small town, solving for a case). It's not a bad show, and it's nice to only have 4 episodes, but it's not going to blow your mind.
Appointment with Death (1988) It's not every day that master sleuth Poirot takes a vacation. It's only every time we see him. This time he is taking a cruise to see the Holy Land, which in 1937 was still in British control. On the ship he sees wealthy Emily Boynton sternly control all aspects of her adult stepchildren's lives and them seethe under her oppression. There are whispers of plots, even an attempt at murder foiled by accident. Poirot decides to keep a close eye on them. Someone clearly has an appointment with ohh, now I get the title. I liked Peter Ustinov doing his over-the-top Poirot and I liked the location filming, but the rest mostly left me unimpressed. Despite the wide outdoor locations and hundreds of extras it just kind of felt cheap and of the 80's instead of its time. The direction wasn't appropriate to this kind of film - Michael Winner had made a career out of doing gritty action films and this work so dependent on interpersonal moments was full of jarring cuts and angles that always made themselves noticed.
Karate Kid: Legends [2025] And the 2nd movie on the plane. If you were to look up the word "cliche" in the dictionary, this movie would pop up.
Festival of Trees - 2024 (UPtv) So...the first episode of season 2 of High Potential sent me down a rabbit trail that ended up with me realizing that my list of Christmas movies last year was incomplete. Whoopsie. This was the first UPtv movie of the season and, honestly, it's miles better than the three I already watched. The story is as simple as it gets. A designer is trying to get sponsored for the annual Festival of Trees, a bigger name steals her design, and she ends up going to a children's hospital where she gets her inspiration for a new design that she enters into the Festival without a sponsor (apparently that meant something). Along the way she bonds with a sick kid who is, of course, the daughter of the random guy she yelled at earlier in the movie who is also the owner of the local Christmas Tree farm and has the last name Holliday just to top it all off. There's even a zinger of a Boris & Natasha joke about the two assistants of the famous designer. Nothing groundbreaking in the plot, but the dialogue is smarter than usual and the acting elevates the script even further. This might be the most perfectly cast cheesy Christmas movie I've seen. Every role seems like they made the exact right choice. Kate Miner is genuinely good as the lead, Jacqueline, and honestly comes across as a less annoying Kaitlin Olsen. Greg Perrow is good as Brandon, the dad/tree farm owner/love interest. The highlight of the movie is the brilliant turn by Sara Hayter as Heather, Jacqui's assistant and someone who should be working in major films and TV roles. Jojo Regina is spectacular as Brandon's daughter, Rachel, and the best of a really good group of child actors that were delightful every time they were on screen.
Colossus - The Forbin Project (1970) Early in the Cold War there is a fear that a well planned Soviet nuclear strike could cripple US command and control and negate a response, thus allowing a Soviet victory. To counter this, a massive supercomputer named Colossus was built inside a mountain. Utterly impervious to nuclear attack or infiltration from the ground, the system is self powered and self sustaining. This computer is given direct command of all nuclear weapons, and has a wide array of data inputs it interprets to decide what to do with them. While not designed to be creative, it was given ways to learn and room to grow. When Colossus starts to exhibit behavior beyond it's design, leader of the Colossus project Dr. Forbin pats himself on the back for designing such a brilliant device. But then Colossus starts demanding more of people, and it has nuclear weapons to threaten with. What hath man wrought? While I've seen a lot of movies with AI (55 from the Wikipedia list), this is probably the most accurate regarding the kinds of behaviors and problems we could see from one given real world power, which is quite remarkable considering computers of the time were so primitive and many basic AI concepts had yet to be imagined. The difficulty is in something called "alignment", that is, how close the AI's own goal aligns with the goals we mean for it to have. If we decide an AI's goals don't match ours we can try to change it, but since the AI already has a goal it can attempt to bully or deceive or persuade us so it can keep doing its original goal. We interpret how well the alignment is going during the training process, but you get a problem (called "distributional shift") when the training world and the world the AI is released to are not the same. There's also a problem of terminal goals and instrumental goals (terminal goal is "I want to go on vacation" and instrumental goal is "I want to collect enough money so I can go on vacation"). Maybe the terminal goals are aligned and the instrumental goals are not (they want Colossus to preserve peace by implementing a MAD strategy, but maybe it thinks it can preserve peace by other methods) or maybe our terminal goals are its instrumental goals (for example it's doing what we want for the moment but has some greater goal in mind). So I think this is an interesting and important movie. Which is probably why no streaming service has it and the DVD is out of print. I'm pretty sure OpenAI doesn't want you to see this.
Superman - 2025 I like most of the casting for this and the story feels like a comic book. Unsurprisingly James Gunn understood the assignment. The Peacemaker tie in wasn't overdone either. I still want to see them pull off something serious in the new DCU,
Drop [2025] It seems like Meaghan Fahy is everywhere now. The movie is definitely not worth anyone's time, unless you have hours to kill on a plane. Not original, and really, very typical for this genre. Skip it.
Witchboard (2024) Dir. Chuck Russell After a cold open in 17th century France, in which we see a coven of witches attacked by a posse of townfolks, the story resumes in present day New Orleans. Emily's boyfriend Christian is on the cusp of opening a restaurant in the city's famous French Quarter, alongside some friends. The small group are gathering mushrooms in the woods when Emily comes upon a strange item: a circular board, clearly old and with markings upon it. The viewer will recognize the board as the item the French witches used in their rituals. Emily thinks it's an antique that can be used to give the decor of Christian's restaurant a bit of mystical character. Unfortunately for her and her friends, the board still is packed with potent supernatural energy. Essentially a remake of the 1980s horror film of the same name. I never saw the original. This remake is a not so great cursed object horror film. Can't really say they do much that can be described as original or even interesting with the material. The scenes where I briefly hoped the movie would perk up a bit were the 17th century France flashbacks, but even those kind of fall flat when the filmmaker does not do nearly enough with them. I think a slightly better film could have been found in a true dual narrative. I wasn't familiar with the large majority of the cast, other than Charlie Tahan (most famous for Ozark and also in the excellent Super Dark Times), who only has a relatively small supporting role. Perhaps it says something about the extent to which the movie otherwise entertained me, one noteworthy thing I wondered about: how does a low-budget or low mid-budget horror film manage to license Cream's Sunshine of your Love? I can't imagine that is a particularly cheap piece of music to get the rights for.
Station Eleven [2021 - 1 season] Still not quite sure what to think of this show. It's somewhat Shakespearean take on a post-epidemic world. Definitely an interesting take on this genre.
I did. Loved the book, still by far my favorite of Emily St. John Mandel's work. I think the show is a mostly faithful adaptation, if not necessarily in terms of following all the narrative beats, but definitely in terms of remaining faithful to the tone of the source material. One of the most hopeful and humanistic takes on the post-Apocalypse genre.
I agree with this. There are some changes to the story, even some that could be regarded as "major," but yet it still felt like a televisual expression of the book in all the most important ways. Really just a wonderful book and show.
Babylon (2022) Dir. Damien Chazelle 1926 California. We meet a small group of protagonists, just as the silent movie era is coming to a close, with the release of WB's The Jazz Singer just around the corner. There is Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant to the U.S. who hopes to break into the movie business proper instead of merely being a dogsbody for studio boss Don Wallach. We also have silent movie mega star Jack Conrad, a man with almost as many ex wives as he has hit movies. And there is wannabe ingenue Nellie LaRoy, one of the many young women coming to Hollywood in the hope of making it big. Manny has a true case of love at first sight when he meets Nellie. By chance, the pair both get their big break at roughly the same time. Manny turns an opportunity to work for Jack Conrad into an ascent that eventually lands him a studio executive job. Nellie turns her first opportunity at on-screen performance into an instant hit that briefly turns her into the new it girl. As for Jack Conrad, he initially sees the shift from silent movies to talkies as the evolutionary sea change he had been waiting for. All three soon face the disillusionment that accompanies the hard reality of Hollywood. This is the first Damien Chazelle movie I have ever watched. I primarily gave it a chance because I admired the ambition. Here is a young film director who got a marker to make whatever he wanted after a few hits and he exchanged it to make a deeply personal three hour drama about Hollywood and film-making itself. That's the kind of wild swing I would want a person to take in that situation. Unfortunately the movie itself was a very uneven experience for me. By far the best thing about it is Margot Robbie's performance. I have noticed that she has expressed regret at it not doing better at the box office and I can see why the project holds a special place in her heart, on the screen you can see an actor having the time of her life playing this character. Brad Pitt essentially plays an amalgam of John Gilbert, Wallace Reid and Douglas Fairbanks. There are other characters there who are meant as a stand-in for real-life people. Lady Fay Zhu, as played by Li Jun Li is clearly meant as Damien Chazelle's version of Anna Mae Wong. There is even a Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle stand-in, with an overweight actor whose wild party with a young actress ends badly. My two major issues, not wanting to overstate the problems, is that some of the dialogue feels too artificial for some of the actors to sell it. This is most apparent in some of the Brad Pitt scenes. And the tonal shifts are wild. Some scenes go for completely bonkers absurd comedy. Whereas some of the dramatic scenes are rather dark and portrayed in a severe manner. I am not saying that it is impossible for a movie to contain such a tonal breadth, I just had to conclude that Babylon is not that film. Apart from the above mentioned three main characters and their plot treads, there is a fourth, though it feels underdeveloped. Like something Chazelle either lost interest in in the middle of the writing process, or only tacked on late on. I am talking about the jazz musician played by Jovan Adepo, Sidney Palmer. A shame, because the actor is very charismatic and the few scenes where he has something to do pop. Another side-note, I was aware of the closing montage in the movie theater scene because it had been so widely mocked by movie goers and some critics at the time of this movie's release. I don't really get the issue. I guess the 'problem' is that it contains so many very popular films, including even James Cameron's Avatar. I think that is precisely the point. I see that montage as a reflection of the scene earlier in the film where a grief-stricken Jack Conrad lectures his wife (I think wife number five) about the value of the working man's art form, cinema. Thus it makes sense the montage contains primarily very popular films. Ultimately a bit of a flawed piece, but I don't regret seeing it and its three hour run time sort of flew by.
The Trust (2016) Stone and Waters (you can guess their personality types) both work for the Evidence Department of the Las Vegas Police. What they have in common is that they are both bad cops (but in different ways) and they both hate their jobs. Stone comes across a police record of a recent arrest and sees something the LVDP doesn't care about - he paid a very large bail in cash. Whomever he works for is loaded and has ready access to it. So they tail him on their own time, and find out there is a small out of the way store that seems to be taking a lot of deliveries. Stone and Waters decide to make a withdrawal. Heist film that has more of the air of verisimilitude than pretty much all movies of the kind. Most of the movie didn't really move me, and it has that mix of slight humor and shocking bleakness I don't find enjoyable. But that ending really stuck inside me and my insides have been all mixed up for a while now. Fundamentally, morality is a way to predict if someone is going to be trustworthy in the future based on actions in the past and these two entered a world where normal world morality doesn't work.
A Minecraft Movie ~ J. Hess Almost forgot I saw this at a movie in the park thing for my son's school on Friday. Almost.... A completely execrable film. Whereas a lot of the "children's toy intellectual property" films like this have built a plot and used the toy to interplay with it (e.g., the Lego movie), this film exists solely for Minecraft memes. The plot is incoherently slotted in at various points, but in competition with every other scene with "jokes," so it never develops. The actors all look lost in a green screen with Jason Momoa and Jack Black just trying to outdo each other in obnoxiousness.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) Dir. Matt Shakman Several years after Sue Storm, Reed Richards, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm went into space and were forever changed due to cosmic rays that changed their DNA and gave them superpowers, they have become Earth's greatest heroes as well as worldwide celebrities and cultural icons. Sue and Reed are blessed with an unexpected pregnancy. The idyll is short-lived when a harbinger of impending doom (pun not intended) arrives in the form of the Silver Surfer: she is a messenger, there to announce the fact that Galactus, the devourer of worlds, has put Earth on the menu and will come annihilate the Fantastic Four's home planet soon. As Richards and company try to find a way to defend Earth from the threat, it is revealed that their newborn son Franklin might be key to the planet's survival. I went in with very low expectations, due to the quality of the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe releases and found this to be surprisingly enjoyable. It's definitely not a MCU gran cru, but then when did we last have one of those? It is a simple story, told well, and efficiently, in that it's the rare Marvel feature that clocks in at under two hours. I like the four main cast members, who are all doing a good job. I do agree with the idea that the nature of the Reed Richard character does not give Pedro Pascal much opportunity to showcase the things he is especially good at as an actor, that doesn't mean his performance is not good. Though if we want to talk about wasted talent, Julia Garner is too good an actress to play this one-note, mostly CGI version of the Silver Surfer. Definite improvement upon some of the recent releases (I haven't seen Thunderbolts), it would however overstate the quality of this film to claim that it has made me excited about the rest of whatever phase of the MCU we are currently in. I do admire the fact that the people who made this clearly love the source material, including some of its goofier aspects.