Synova

I finally figured out what was wrong with this movie. First, it was a great movie. It was fun. It held my attention every single moment from the beginning of it until the end. But even so I have to admit that some of the less than fabulous reviews have a point. The movie is missing something. Mostly, it seemed to me that it was missing a big payoff at the end. It was great while it was happening, but when it was over it was just over. Some critics said it could have been Cowboys vs. anything... that the aliens were pointless. Anyhow, I figured it out. I figured out where the essential mistake occurred when they made this movie. They failed to identify whose story it was. It was Ella Swenson's story. It was the alien's story. In the trailers they have her explaining that the aliens killed "her people" and you suspect that she's Native American. She's not. Her "people" are an alien race. But because they did not make it her story, the p...

He agrees with me . :-) It's amazing how brilliant someone sounds when they say something that you've said yourself a million times, but with new and different words. The movie Silent Running is a " peaty slab of crap" he says. And I'm all... that's brilliant! "Peaty slab of crap" is exactly the phrase I've been looking for all of those times when I wanted to express just how stoopid that movie is. How often can you use the word "stoopid" without it getting old? Peaty slab of crap! Or it could be that the movie itself is brilliant, if you look at it from the right direction. The proper direction. If you look at it as a skewering of the modern environmental movement it's got every single thing it needs. Lileks mentions the most egregious detail... "Gosh: you’re orbiting a planet beyond Jupiter, and there’s insufficient sunlight to keep trees happy. Who could have seen that coming." Because Silent Running is ...

Has anyone seen this and want to discuss it? I watched it last night and although the movie itself wasn't disturbing, I kept on trying to figure out what they'd done wrong, why it didn't work as well as I thought it ought to have worked. I woke up in the middle of the night with a bug in my head trying to figure it out. To start with just one tiny nit: This was a good example of why you should put your skeptic in the movie instead of on the couch watching the movie. In The Eagle, Marcus and Eska travel northward through the non-Roman parts of Brittan keeping Marcus's Roman identity secret. Both my husband and I were waiting for someone to cry out "Roman!" and point at the tack on the horses as evidence. Neither of us knew that they hadn't changed Roman tack for what would be normal in the area they were traveling but there was nothing in the movie indicating that anyone had worried about it. (My husband thought that the fact that they ...

I finally got my nerve up to watch the three episodes of Combat Hospital that are on Hulu. I dreaded even trying to watch them, knowing that there was no way that either the US military or our presence in Afghanistan could possibly be subject to a television show without the producers making sure they didn't come across as uncritical of either of them. Joy of joys... the show is Canadian. The main characters/doctors are Canadian. One is a civilian Brit. One is American. The head nurse is American and a number of other characters are American but probably the same number are Canadian or British. The "gone native" special ops guy is American. The shadowy unidentified (CIA, undoubtedly) is in the back-ground (I don't care about that as the special ops guy is obviously a hero). What being Canadian does is allow them, in one of the very first episodes, to have a situation where a soldier is shot in a friendly fire incident and the good guys *cover it up*. I d...

The Warrior's Way - I liked this a whole lot. Very stylized. Very Eastern. Thoughtful, too. Still, if you're put off by the thought of mystical ninjas, cowboys and a cast of circus people, you probably shouldn't challenge yourself. Unknown - Good enough. I sort of hate to be so tepid over it, because there wasn't anything wrong with it. About half way through, though, I leaned over to my husband and whispered into his ear (since we were with friends) "Bourne Identity." Sucker Punch - I suppose this was interesting and supposed to be artistic, maybe Sin City-ish or something. I didn't see the problems that the critics complained about. But I can't complain about what bothered me without spoiling the end... Oh, what the heck. I'll spoil the end. Right at the beginning we see the girl getting a lobotomy. We then spend the entire movie in her multi-layered fantasy world hoping that she doesn't get the lobotomy. She gets t...