Posts Tagged ‘thrillers’
May 20, 2013
Okay, my initial review of Star Trek: Into Darkness (is there a colon in the title? It feels like there should be a colon) was a bit threadbare. Yeah, it’s hard to talk about the movie without getting neck-deep into spoiler territory. So, here is my SPOILERRIFFIC™ discussion of Into Darkness. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t click the READ MORE link. Just, uh, hey click this link and read about another movie with Darkness in the title. It’s called Creature of Darkness, and it really crazy. Seriously. It’s got this alien that dresses in a raincoat and hat and hunts people, and…well, just read it. Unless you’ve seen Into Darkness. Then, click away…
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Posted in Movies Q-S | Tagged action, aliens, Internet, military, monsters, movie reviews, movies, sci-fi, thrillers | Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2013
In preparation for my review of Star Trek: Into Darkness, which will be posting soon, I’m re-posting a couple of previous Star Trek reviews. Live and long and prosper, amigos.
Now this is a summer movie.
After the self-serious, leaden, insert-gun-in-mouth grimness of Wolverine, we now have a blockbuster that understands the importance of being light, airy, and fun. And inexplicably, that movie is a Star Trek film. Well, I guess if we can elect a black President, we can make a summer blockbuster out of Star Trek—a franchise which seemed to have hacked up its death rattle sometime around the early 2000s.
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Posted in Movies Q-S, Wrap-ups and Round-ups | Tagged action, aliens, guns, military, monsters, movies, Reviews, sci-fi, Star Trek, thrillers | Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2013
In preparation for my review of Star Trek: Into Darkness, which will be posting soon, I’m re-posting a couple of previous Star Trek reviews. Live and long and prosper, amigos.
Okay, kicking off Reader Request Week here at The Flickering Screen we have Star Trek: Nemesis for loyal reader Quiconque. Qui left a comment on my review of In the Spider’s Web stating: “if you’re willing to sacrifice a few more brain cells, I would greatly appreciate an analyisis of Star Trek: Nemesis, if only to have someone else explain the plot to me. I watched it last night on cable, and I saw a clone and a Deanna Troi rape scene plucked fresh from fanfic, but other than that I don’t know what happened.”
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Posted in Movies Q-S, Wrap-ups and Round-ups | Tagged action, aliens, guns, military, monsters, psychological thriller, Reviews, sci-fi, Star Trek, thrillers | Leave a Comment »
May 6, 2013
Well, that kicked just about as much ass as there was to kick, didn’t it?
I gotta admit, I didn’t go into Iron Man 3 with high hopes. It’s not that I set the bar low—quite the contrary. After The Avengers served pretty much as the Omega of the Marvel comic superhero franchise, and especially after the obnoxious, deadly-dull Iron Man 2, I set the bar very high for this movie. I didn’t think there was any way it couldn’t suck. Well, it looks like my instincts are a nothing if not consistent (though, I’m still pretty sure that Kozmo.com stock will go through the roof any day now…), because it’s pretty tough to see how this movie can be topped—whatever else comes out this summer.
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Posted in Movies D-I | Tagged action, graphic novels, Marvel Comics, military, movie reviews, movies, Reviews, sci-fi, superhero, thrillers | Leave a Comment »
May 2, 2013
Another school year is drawing to a close, and another class of students is advancing—maybe to a new grade, or maybe out into the world. The leave behind them scores of proud, satisfied teachers—men and women who spent the past nine or so months giving everything to classroom after classroom of students. Amid a barrage of public criticism unprecedented in history, vilified by pundits, scapegoated by politicians, they still get up at the crack of dawn every day to stand in front of dozens of students crammed into too-small schools and shape the very future of America. No film I’ve ever seen has really communicated the nigh-miraculous job these people do better than 1996’s The Substitute, a film which shows us if this if we are to fix our ailing school system it’s going to take more than budget cuts and empty rhetoric. It’s going to take Tom Berenger and a team of heavily-armed mercenaries.
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Posted in Movies Q-S | Tagged action, drugs, guns, martial arts, military, movie reviews, movies, murder, thrillers | Leave a Comment »
April 30, 2013
It’s tempting to say that with Pain and Gain, Michael Bay has finally found a movie about as vulgar and excessive as he is…and I’m not going to resist the temptation. He has. He’s found his Holy Grail. With this, his first film in six years not to feature giant robots—let alone gunfights, car chases or his usual hallmarks—Bay has moved in a direction that’s actually fairly bold…for him, anyway. This departure from form sharply divided critics, with some so effusive in their praise that you’d think he’d made Citizen freaking Kane, and other so automatically inclined to hate anything the guy produces, they’d heap on the vitriol even he actually made Citizen Kane. By objective standards, Pain and Gain is an okay movie, but by Michael Bay standards, it’s actually pretty darn good.
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Posted in Movies M-P | Tagged action, drugs, guns, movie reviews, movies, murder, thrillers | Leave a Comment »
April 16, 2013
I’m not sure why I watched this movie, but hey, why does anyone do anything, right? Yeah, humanity is just one big unknowable riddle, but then, that’s also what makes us so amazing. We are unlike anything else in creation in our capacity for self-determination, and its forays into unpredictability. That having been said, there’s really no good reason to watch 8 Million Ways to Die. Maybe I was bored. I know wasn’t drunk. Whatever, I watched it. Wanna hear about it? Oh yes you do…
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Posted in Movies 0-9 | Tagged action, drugs, guns, movie reviews, movies, prostitution, Reviews, sno-cones, thrillers | Leave a Comment »
April 11, 2013
This one is just sad. No, not the movie—it’s not good, but not terrible—but what’s on display in the movie. And that is Burt Reynolds on the edge of his long fall from grace. Stick was made in 1984, and was the first movie he made after his flop City Heat—on the set of which, he was struck with a metal chair that basically broke his face and left him in chronic pain, addicted to painkiller, and, for a time, unable to eat solid food. Stick is the project of a broken man, desperately trying to evade the truth of his situation, and that’s sad. Plus it’s another failed adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, and that’s never fun.
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Posted in Movies Q-S, What Went Wrong? | Tagged action, drugs, guns, movie reviews, movies, murder, Reviews, thrillers | Leave a Comment »
April 6, 2013
Okay, so GI Joe: Retaliation. Yeah, here’s my experience with that movie. I went with a buddy of mine—a fellow Gunmonkey—and he basically boiled his expectations down as thus:
“Dude, don’t sit next to me. People will think we’re gay. I didn’t go through a shit-ton of work marrying a beautiful woman who’s also a totally cool chick just so people could think I’m gay. You picking up what I’m putting down?”
And:
“What the hell was up with the last movie? Like, laser guns and shit? I don’t sign on to a GI Joe movie to see laser guns. I want a dude with an M203 spraying a curtain of lead when he’s not lobbing grenades. That’s GI Joe. Why can’t I have an M203? Where’s my M203?”
This man served in the Iraq War, so, hey, what am I gonna do? Deny him his non-gay buffer seat and wait for him to go all PTSD on me? But beyond that, he and I were on the same wavelength. The last GI Joe movie sucked, and that’s pretty much the reason GI Joe: Retaliation was green-lit. It’s a rare instance where Hollywood says to American public, “Whoa! Yeah, that sucked. Even by our standards, that sucked. So, um, do-over?” So, that’s GI Joe: Retaliation: a big do-over. And, know what? That’s not a bad thing.
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Posted in Movies D-I | Tagged action, guns, martial arts, military, movie reviews, movies, Reviews, sci-fi, thrillers | Leave a Comment »
March 24, 2013
Olympus Has Fallen kicks off the summer movie season…sorta…I mean, it’s not even April yet, but what the hell. Think of it as palate-cleanser before the main course—not quite substantial enough to stand among the big boys of summer, but also not a complete embarrassment to be ignominiously shuffled into theaters during the dead zone of January. You can see why: It’s a big-budget, big body-count, action spectacle starring, ah…well, something approaching an action-movie star. It was also massively successful and spawned a lucrative franchise, you know, when it was released in 1988 and called Die Hard.
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Posted in Movies M-P | Tagged action, guns, martial arts, military, movie reviews, movies, Reviews, thrillers, US Secret Service | 2 Comments »
