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shinobiivan
Reviews
Annihilation (2018)
Stalker meets Lovecraft, but acting too high-brow for its own good
A meteor falls into a lighthouse, bringing otherworldy weirdness with it, Color Out Of Space style.
An exclusion zone is formed around it as expeditions are sent in, Stalker-like.
Nobody returns from them, until one dude does, and so his wife decides to rush headlong into the next one going in.
It's filled with vivid imagery and clever self-references, but is stifled by a combination of Hollywood Impracticality (such as not knowing why no expedition returned but following zero quarantine protocols when entering it themselves) and a desire to make Ockham reach for a pair of scissors by making needlessly convoluted references and circular references just to... Confuse the audience?
As a result, you get a film that tries its darndest to be a Smart Film like Interstellar, but fails by not making the allegedly smart characters act smart, and denying any chance at Bellisario's Maxim working because you're not supposed to "oh, it's a popcorn flick, let the plot holes go" at a Smart Film. Which is a shame since it's got a lot of jawsome ideas about Cosmic and Existential horror, and slow burns through it masterfully whenever you're not focusing on how half of what's happening on the screen was avoidable with just the tiniest bit of foreplanning.
At least we're unanimous it looks AMAZING.
Red Notice (2021)
A "dumb" heist movie well worth watching
There are heist movies that are all about a great plan being prepped and then executed, and then there are heist movies that go for the quick flashy unspoken plan guarantee and glue you to the screen more with hijinks and fights and fanservice.
This is the second kind of movie.
With fights that make you wonder if this whole thing was made by people nostalgic for Jackie Chan movies, Evil (Actually Just Doing Their Jobs) Russians thrown in seemingly just for padding, ridiculously diverse locales and three leads that are very easy on the eyes, all on top of more references, subtle and not, to great films of yore, than you can shake a stick at, this movie simultaneously delivers both the tired-and-true Summer Blockbuster feeling, vying for the way the late eighties action flicks felt, and the "actually, what you thought was a plot hole is a plot POINT" of the Netflix era.
And you know what? In no way is this a bsd thing.
PAW Patrol: The Movie (2021)
Perfect high-budget continuation of the series, not for boring adults
For all the people posting 1/10 and 2/10 reviews: this movie, like the series it continues, is for kids under the age of twelve. If you find it boring or too by-the-numbers, IT IS NOT FOR YOU. Kids have to learn those nunbers somewhere.
If you give it 3/10 for showing cats in a negative light, WHY ARE YOU WATCHING A DOG-FOCUSED SHOW?
Anyhow. The Paw Patrol comes to the big city - Adventure City, in fact, because Mayor Humdinger cheated his way into the mayoral seat and keeps making life in the city worse. As the pups struggle to keep the citizens alive and deal with Chase's PTSD (in a surprisingly maturely handled manner for a kid's film) related to the way he left the City to join the Paw Patrol ages ago, they will not only gain the adoration of a whole new populace but also a new team member!
The visuals took a MAJOR step forward from the series (as its prior direct-to-DVD movies barely differed from the TV series in fidelity) with brand new models for everyone, wonderful fur detail, and tasty tasty light effects after the absurdly flat shading of the original. A feast for the eyes (except for a slight misstep with the two mayors - Humdinger looks good but too different from his original appearance, while Goodway looks recognizable but somehow creepily off). All the engineering marvels of the new pup vehicles is impressive and well thought out.
Bottom line: my five year old loved. My wife and I rather enjoyed it. If you're not a kid or a dog lover, find something else to watch, maybe?
Moskva-Kassiopeya (1974)
Soviet Star Trek
This is, in essence, a Soviet rendition of Star Trek with a teenage crew. The story revolves around a project to send a manned spaceflight to Alpha Cassiopeia to investigate a signal received from there, and, due to the relative slowness of the fastest available engines, the trip is predicted to take something around 27 years in one direction. Therefore, a crew of teenagers is recruited - in hope than when they reach their destination, they will all be aged around 40 and capable of carrying out whatever adult actions necessary to establish First Contact. But, as always, things go awry... The storyline is split up into two parts - this is the first, dealing with the foundation of the plot and the ship's launch.
It should be noted that this movie is novel in several interesting ways, including but not limited to featuring its own equivalents of Trekker favourites such as a Holodeck, The Borg, Warp Drives and even our own Soviet version of Q! The sci-fi element follows the same ideas as Star Trek does - an as-real-as-possible (at the time) approach to showing the high-tech stuff, as well as an interesting look at how unexpectedly people making up the crew can act and interact under nominal and stressed-out conditions.
If you're even remotely interested in good sci-fi (and good OLD sci-fi specifically), you pretty much owe it to yourself to watch this, probably playing a drinking game along the notion of "Yes, this was in Star Trek only AFTER this movie was made".