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Reviews
ARQ (2016)
Not the worst thing ever
*some basic concept spoilers below*
This is a typical time loop movie. Think Groundhog's Day.
I'm not opposed to the use of the cliché. Edge of Tomorrow was a fun and entertaining take on the concept.
This movie is a lot less fun than that. It's low budget and it never really allows you to appreciate the characters. The characters are all just rats in a maze, scurrying around without giving us much reason to care about them. The female love interest, Hannah, in particular was quite annoying. Why does the main character love her? Why does he put up with her constant betrayals? I never figured any of that out.
Ultimately, I found that the movie ended in an unsatisfying manner.
I marginally appreciated the movie, but wouldn't watch it again.
Ring of the Nibelungs (2004)
A Surprisingly Good Film
I had "Dark Kingdom" and "Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God" on the recorder and I sat down to watch them last Saturday. I watched the D&D film first and it was your typical SciFi movie; with evil characters seeking world domination and good characters on a quest to gather the weapons to stop them... utterly forgettable.
To my complete surprise, Dark Kingdom is a very different sort of movie. Instead of good and evil characters who act in the only way they're capable of, it has real-seeming people who made decisions like real people would; some good, some bad, but always complicated by conflicting loyalties, emotions, and personality traits. While the D&D film was about good, evil, and fantastic magic with some forgettable people thrown in; Dark Kingdom was about characters and a story. Sure, the magic that I wanted was there as well, but it was the backdrop rather than the center-piece. I really hope that the SciFi channel gets a lot of positive feedback about Dark Kingdom and makes more like it.
Porn 'n Chicken (2002)
Not that good
Fairly innocuous, but lame movie. I was also using the computer while watching the movie, so the fact that it was boring didn't bother me so much that I needed to turn the channel.
After about 95% of the movie, I went to talk to the wife during a commercial. While talking to the wife about nothing special, I realized that the end of the movie was probably playing. I didn't really care, enough to go watch it, though.
That's how uninteresting this movie was.
Daredevil (2003)
Wait for the video, if that
I love a good superhero move... this is most definitely not one.
Ben Affleck stars in this stinker that seeks to do just about everything wrong.
I really hated this movie (minor spoilers):
- Daredevil is a lame superhero, but if you're going to do a movie about him, you've got to show how he turns the tables on typical criminals to bring his unique advantages to play. Instead, he was just your everyday superstrong, superfast superhero.
- Worse, though, everyone else in the movie was like a superhero, but we were given no reason why they were so marvelous. For example: Jennifer Garner's character was supposedly just a normal person who had studied martial arts, but she was jumping around and fighting just like Daredevil.
- It looked awful. The fight scenes were jerky and flashy. The director may have been trying to show us some of the fight through DD's eyes, but enough already.
- The script was overly contrived. It's one of those movies that's scripted about like professional wrestling -- where the hero appears to be just about dead one moment, but then in peak fighting condition the next. This doesn't happen just once, but several times... IN A ROW.
- Bullseye really stunk as a bad guy. For god's sake, his "power" was that he could throw things accurately! They actually had him turn paper clips into deadly thrown weapons... how lame is that?
This is a really bad movie that should never have seen the light of day.
Dogma (1999)
A bit disappointing
I was really hoping for more from a Kevin Smith film centered around religion/Catholicism. If you've never given much thought to religion, I guess that some of the religious observations might seem clever. Instead, ideas meant to be thought provoking: Christ was black, God is a women, etc. seem only cliche.
My next complaint is about the performances. They were fairly poor, filled with unconvincing vocal inflections. Linda Fiorentino was really quite painful to watch - she has all the range of your average junior high drama club member. Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Jason Lee and Salma Ha-yuck provided poor performances to watch when Linda wasn't speaking.
On the plus side, Ben Affleck and Alan Rickman did good jobs with their parts. Although Jason Mewes can't act either, his Jay character had some pretty funny lines.