i guess i get to be the first one.....


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Ender's Game

let me first say that by the end of the movie i actually really liked it....for what it is

what is it?

it's a very fast paced film based off of a very slow paced character driven novel

it felt more based of of the "cliff notes" rather than the book....but in all honesty this was not necessarily a bad thing....it was like giving up the deep characters and psychology for a fast paced action sci fi film....

which really makes sense....i'm not saying that the most important character is not well written and very well played here....after all this is Ender's story....Ender himself is very developed....but the film is very fast....and is...much like the book in three acts....there is very little battle school here with a little more concentration on command school (which will really only mean anything to anyone who has read the book)....in all honesty for the film version to work....i felt this was a good call

all of the important moments of the book are represented in the film very well....but again....it's very fast paced

i have to admit that i went into this ready to come out fighting....and i feel that this is really about as good as they can do when trying to transfer such a word dependent book into an enjoyable film

and they did leave in what i feel is the most important part of the book....the "Giant" game :)

plot and translation aside...the movie is gorgeous....the battle room scenes...although few and far between....are spot on and absolutely thrilling

all performances are spot on....with high points awarded to Asa Butterfield (Ender) and Moises Arias (Bonzo)

and i feel that had i not already known the outcome i would have been emotional....or at least more emotional at the end


also i've now seen ALL of Smaug in the theater....cannot wait for December 13th

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All is Lost

This has been a fantastic fall as far as superior and unique films is concerned. I’ve been waiting to see this since I first heard about it over the summer and it really didn’t let me down. I was fortunate enough to see it with a audience that for the most part was courteous as there is barely any dialogue in the entire film and really leans of the sound editing to carry the mood. The story was simple yet very effective at keeping the tense situation realistic and engrossing. I haven’t seen Margin Call yet but I know that it received huge praise for its writing and I’d like to check it out after seeing this. J.C. Chandor crafted a beautiful script with deep meaning to go along with a great survival story. It’s not an easy thing to do.

Robert Redford carries this film. He has to. He’s the only person in it. He barely speaks but has managed to turn in a career performance and arguably the best this year. I still need to see Captain Phillips a second time so I can focus more of Tom Hank’s performance but I was just floored by Redford’s ability at his age to carry a film still. It helps that he’s playing a man who is a total badass. I learned a lot about being at sea from this film and even though the guy could have used a GPS tracker, it was a realistic visualization of what being stranded at sea can be like. I also really appreciated the ending. Some people don’t like ambiguous endings but I love trying to fill in the blanks and come up with my own theories on what happened.

All is Lost is a fantastic film and anchored (yeah, puns happen okay?) by a monumental performance by Robert Redford.

4.5/5

i hate living in a small redneck nevada town

Oh yeah I saw that the other day too. I thought it was good but not great (better than what I thought tho). It was really nice to look at. The battle room was done much better than i could have imagined. But like you said the pace was much faster than the book, and I do get why they had to do it that way but i digress. The dialogue during the movie tho.. oof some parts were hard to watch (the beginning of the movie was cringe worthy and i was so nervous watching it thinking this is how its all gonna be). And I didnt really think Bonzo was that good tbh :\ he wasnt intimidating at all and he just sort of blurted out highschool bully cliches all movie. Asa as good an Ender as you could find tho. Oh and I was deeply saddened by the fact that Bean was almost completely ignored in this and replaced with Petra (wtf??). Bean was my fav character in the book although that might be skewed by Enders Shadow but still..

The more I think about it, the more i pick apart haha but for the most part i did enjoy the film. It's a tough one to make since most of the book was in Ender's head.

New York has spoiled me.

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Dead Heat (1988)

Awesome little forgotten comedy-horror gem from the late 1980's written by Terry Black, brother of Hollywood action screen writer legend Shane Black. Basically it's your typical buddy-cop movie except during an accident in an investigation, one of the cops winds up dead and brought back to life as a Frankenstein-esque style zombie. He and his partner (played by Joe Piscapo with a hilarious mullet) set out to try and solve his murder.

There's a great scene in a Chinese butcher shop where the revivification technology brings a bunch of dead animals back to life, include what's left of a cow carcass, and it's really funny to see the zombie cop slowly decompose physically, but retain his professionalism and dedication to "the job". It's on Instant Netflix and I would highly recommend it.

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Surf Nazis Must Die (1987)

It feels kind of weird to call this a bad movie given the fact that the title could have already told you that, but even judged by the standards one must adopt when watching Troma movies, this is still awful.

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Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

For whatever reason I've always preferred Michael Myers' string of progressively worse sequels to those of Jason Voorhees, but for whatever reason I never got around to watching this one. I really only watched this one because it's one of Paul Rudd's first roles and I always like watching actor's early works. Out of all the Halloween sequels, it's not quite as bad as Halloween: Resurrection or Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, but it's not very good either. Weirdly enough with these things, the story is actually one of the stronger aspects of the film as it finally attempts to give a reason for why Michael Myers is immortal and has a hate-boner for his family. The problems mostly come from nonsensical goofs like Michael going out of his way to kill a Howard Stern style radio host for no other reason than because he's a jerk. Can't say this will change your life, but there's definitely worse...

Speaking of which

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Sasquatch (2002)

Recently I found a pretty decent little Bigfoot movie on Huluplus called Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012) which exceeded expectations by not being completely shit, so I've been on the hunt for similar movies and Netflix was happy enough to cough up this Lance Henrikson dud. Henrikson completely phoned it in on this, and I can't say I blame him, but at least he got paid for it. There's some truly mindbogglingly stupid dialogue with some equally mindbogglingly bad cinematography that actually started to make me feel a little sick (like all the dutch angles in Battlefield Earth (2000)) and a super abrupt ending where I'm not fully convinced something went horribly wrong during the editing process and they just had to cobble together an ending from all the footage they had.

Can't say I recommend it, not even to laugh ironically at it.

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Chernobyl Diaries (2012)

If this movie did one thing right it's that it's not a found-footage movie. The setup is absolutely perfect for it and the fact that they didn't go for it is admirable if nothing else. In fact the movie actually starts off pretty well at least with building atmosphere and tension but really lets itself down in the 3rd act.

man you're crazy....this is a masterful piece of art.....and may be the only film ever to combine a surf board with a switch blade knife :)

I can't take another oscar wank movie about a solo actor/actress trying to survive mother nature.

Don't they get sick and tired of making those types of movies. I'm definitely passing on that flick.

I Love You Phillip Morris

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Amazing movie.

pretty messed up but definitely a thinker.