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Archive for ‘Reviews’

3 results.

I Am Legend

by tiffany ross on December 15, 2007 at 8:06 am
Posted In: Movies, Uncategorized

This time, I thought I’d spend time with my husband. ;) I don’t like going to movies unless it’s with something because unless I REALLY want to see it … I find the moviegoing experience a little worthless. Even if it only costs $5 a ticket. A new AMC just opened up yesterday a mile from where I live, very nice, 12 theater one in Highland Village. There are possible spoilers as you keep reading.

It’s a Will Smith movie through and through and no, I have not read the book, nor do I really have any intention to. I already need to watch at least six actual holiday movies to undo what I Am Legend did. And it’s not that it’s a bad movie or anything, actually, it’s pretty good. (I had gone online and read the ending for the book and the synopsis of the movie, simply because I do that with movies I’m iffy on paying a ticket price for. I wouldn’t go see The Mist because of its ending :D Most of the time, I DO avoid spoilers of all kinds.) I am also NOT fond of zombie movies. Actually, I HATE zombie movies. And I hate infectious disease movies. :D

First of all, we were treated to numerous trailers, one of which was Jumper (Whoohoo!) and another was The Dark Knight (Big Whoohoo!). Heath Ledger will be the most awesome Joker. He just sounds so unlike himself and … sinister in the most evil kind of way.

Then, we get to the movie and see day to day life. It’s well acted and well done and despite other comments I’ve seen, it’s easy to identify with Will Smith’s character even if you aren’t a scientist. The history behind the events is played out in flashbacks (Vertigo has put out a prequel to it, which I read samples of and it looked interesting.. but creepy.) The filming itself is wonderful. The empty city is believable. What isn’t believable… uhm… there are animals all over the place. :D Exactly how do said animals flee from creatures that are so aggressive they attack anything that moves or might be food? Now, maybe there is only one ‘hive’ as Will Smith’s character called them, in the city and the animals just have to outrun the slowest. ;) I guess I can buy that.

You get to see quite a bit of the insanity that comes without any socializing and then… he makes his first mistake by capturing one of the ‘vampires’. I forget the term they used. But he traps one alive to test a cure and obviously ticks off the leader of the vampires in the process. Later on, said leader retalliates. :D (I understand in the books that he would hunt them and kill them and they were much more intelligent.) They do appear intelligent, just with a hive mind to follow the leader and mindlessly throw themselves into deadly situations.

And.. the cure fails. :D

I get treated to a bunch of heart rending sad flashbacks and the death of his dog, which is really, really upsetting. Then, a rather cool murderous rampage by Will Smith :D Which is one of those on your seat moments. I will leave it there to avoid any real big spoilers, because I really was caught off guard by what happened next. It suddenly turned into one of my favorite themes, and I say that in a good way, that things happen for a reason.

I liked the ending, although it didn’t seem to quite ‘flow’ well from the prior scenes. I think I could’ve done without the flashbacks and just had them show the details about the illness and let what happened to his family be completely open ended.

Overall, it’s a great Four of July Weekend movie! (NOT A MOVIE FOR THIS TIME OF YEAR!!! *GROAN* Of course, I knew that going in.)

My husband complained about the teasing and HUGE Batman/Superman movie logo for a 2010 premier. :D There were also Green Lantern and Teen Titan movie posters.

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Stargate SGU aka SFU (8 Comments)

by tiffany ross on November 9, 2009 at 11:50 am
Posted In: Reviews

I’m pretty sure the topic sums up exactly what I think of Syfy’s SGU.

I have watched Stargate SG:1 and Atlantis from the beginning. I loved them and long time readers know I did. Now, I DID stop watching SG:1 in its last season and Atlantis in its last season because it started to get repetitive. That does NOT mean I stopped loving the series and universe that was created within it. Just that what they were doing was no longer really drawing me in as much as I wanted it to.

I was greatly interested and enthusiastic about Stargate Universe when it was first announced. Darker, grittier Stargate! Sounds like fun! (I enjoyed BSG … after watching the pilot three times and going from: Oh good grief, what is this pile of garbage to – hey, this actually does have an interesting story. It was just hidden beneath the stuff they throw in to get people who don’t care about stories and just fluff to watch.) I defended it before it actually came on when the titles Stargate Gallactica and Battlestar Gate were tossed around. I gave it a chance. I wanted to give it a chance.

First tipoff that SGU might be bad … was the commerical commenting that it was going to be ‘sexier’ than the other two series. I actually took it as a slam against the other two, but thought Ok… that has one of two implications. One is good. One is bad. One is we’re going to sleek this series up, make it more exciting, toss in a little bit of sex and with purpose. (Bunnytrail #1 – Defying Gravity – The trailers for this one initially turned me off because it was advertised as a soap opera and I hate soap operas. To me, they are the lowest form of tv programming, BELOW reality tv dating shows. AS it turned out, Defying Gravity was NOT a soap opera, it was actually a very good, interesting scifi series with interesting characters, with real problems and handled tastefully within the context of the series. I LOVE DG.)
The second implication: We’re just going to randomly toss in sex scenes in such a disjointed way that they’re obviously just there to titillate your senses and have NOTHING to do with progressing any sort of storyline.

Within the first ten minutes of viewing the pilot … I lost consciousness. I just could not concentrate on it. I suffered blackouts that lasted in fifteen minute stretches, broken only by commercials that were more interesting than what I was watching. There were tiny little blips of interesting things that would happen … but nothing every came of it.
I’m beginning to wonder if there actually was a story somewhere in there that I just missed because I kept blacking out with utter boredom. Reading a recap of some of it … I’m actually glad I missed all the drama. I just can not watch soap operas. And that’s ALL this is! It’s like someone had this idea for a dramatic series they wanted to do, but it lacked a hook. So the executives at SyFy were like, hey, why don’t we take this idea that’s aimed at one group of people and MERGE it with an existing one. It works for our monster movies. I mean, you have Boa and Python movies and we combined them into something new, Boa vs Python! So smashing Stargate and this new soap opera format will be just as awesome.

I feel as though a bait and switch has occurred on me. You can have a dark, gritty scifi series and still have humor, but nobody told Brad Wright or anyone in charge of this train wreck that bit of information. I and I’m sure many other of the people who loved Stargate are still watching for one reason… and one reason only – we wanted it to be something wonderful, new and invigorating, but what we got was a second rate crap fest.
The amount of anger being spewed at the existence of SGU is coming from people who love the originals and had such high hopes for something amazing, which were then squashed by huge disappointment.

Unlikeable characters, missed opportunities for storytelling, scenes that are wastes of time with no payoff whatsoever. I want them to just kill everyone on the ship except Eli and then have Eli going around the universe loading the ship with alien crew members who are more human than the one dimensional cast that’s there. There are so many ways this series could be fixed and salvaged if the writers are all FIRED!

And you know.. when the people in charge start to show that they’re going to start reacting to the comments in the way that they are … they KNOW something is wrong. They KNOW they’ve taken a misstep and they’re on the defensive. They don’t want to admit they were wrong.

Creator Brad Wright took on a reviewer for calling it boring.
And Joseph Mallozzi, executive producer also ranted about it.

If you’re going to try for a gritty scifi series, you should be studying Firefly or any number of brilliant scifi animes. The whole thing smacks of the same type of mentality of people who mimic an art style on the surface without understanding the culture behind how to make it work. It brings it all back to me … the guys at the convention hawking a crappy comic book with a ‘penguin’ hidden in it who told me: Hey, there’s this penguin in it named Pen-pen that you have to find and win a prize! We don’t know anything about it, but it seems pretty popular. 9.9 Those were the exact words … and yes, I know who Pen-pen is.

In short: Stargate Universe is a BADLY written series and it takes a LOT to be badly written to a point that I’ll take the time to rant about it. (The original V was also badly written with lots of mistakes that could be corrected, but you know what … at least it was INTERESTING.)

I could write better episodes and I have no idea how to write.

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The Gates (And I HATE ABC) (3 Comments)

by tiffany ross on July 7, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Posted In: Reviews

Several weeks ago, ABC premiered their new Sunday night lineup, Scoundrels and The Gates.  Scoundrels I didn’t get into.. but The Gates – oh, I LOVE The Gates.

Sadly, ABC chose to AGAIN pitch against its genre.  I was immediately turned off last year when they premiered Defying Gravity as Grey’s Anatomy in space.  I do not watch Grey’s Anatomy.  Don’t care for it or its type.  But I DO like scifi and guess what .. that’s what Defying Gravity was – despite the fact that once you watched it, it clearly WAS scifi down to an alien on the ship.  Only toward the end did they even hint at such a thing.  (And I’ve learned that it’s common for scifi fans like myself to NOT like soaps like Grey’s.)

On to The Gates – hey.. it’s Desperate Housewives with a very downplayed supernatural emphasis… that’s what they’re advertising it as, which also immediately turned me off.  I admit to watching and enjoying Desperate Housewives for the first season and a half and then losing interest as it, so I gave it a try because hey, it was VERY obvious that there was at least a vampire in it from the commercials and looking at the gate, you see a very obvious wolf and a witch.  The commercials are so BADLY done.  They need to just say it.

First of all, you have the vampire couple, Rhona Mitra is wonderful as a vampire. :D   She’s a bit more typical of the blood is an addictive drug type – and honestly, I was sold on the series after reading an interview with her that went in depth on her and her husband who turned her and does not have the same issue .. and their adopted little girl who has no idea they’re vampires.

Second, you have a pack of werewolves.. a good number of them too with a lot of them being teenagers. :D   Oh, I LIKE the werewolves because they’re a pack and you have one who’s trying to be good and fit in more with humans while being lured to do what teenagers and apparently, teen werewolves like to do, which is run around wildly.  I like him.  Everything about them is very wolflike – down to their relationships.  :D

Third, the new sheriff – I think… moves here with his son and daughter, the son immediately falls for the girl who the teen werewolf is dating and you get a nice amount of conflict without going overboard.  The characters are pretty much all likeable and well thought out.  Obviously .. there’s a body that pops up with a mystery about where it came from that the sheriff is investigating.

Fourth, oh.. the girl who’s a succubus who has no idea she’s a succubus. :D   I don’t know why, but that whole storyline is really intriguing me.  Her mother is dead, she has no idea she’s a succubus, but her father does. :D   I so want to know how it’s going to play out and how exactly that all happened!  She’s a danger to people who get close to her, I’m assuming a bit Rogue-style, although it hasn’t been shown yet since she’s just now coming into it.

Fifth, there’s a very nice good witch who’s a doctor and genuinely cares for people and the community vs a very bad .. bad witch who’s manipulating people (including the female vampire who so desperately wants to put a curb on her appetite for blood).  Oh, she’s creepy evil.

That’s from the first two episodes, which are available for online free viewing on ABC’s website.

I enjoy it … because I REALLY enjoy vampires and werewolves .. but I really am not all that fond of the sappiness that is Twilight or the overboardness of True Blood.  (I really don’t want to watch True Blood anymore. :D )  While Vampire Diaries is close, it also veers a bit too much into the Twilight area and isn’t on at a convenient time to watch it. :D   So I have The Gates – which I consider PERFECT.  I mean, it’d fit right in there with Supernatural – although not as dark.  Give it a try.  Pleeeease?  I really want it to stick around and I believe I have about 10,000 of you I can show this too!

- Tiff

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