Reviews

Last night we saw the movie Life, which featured Ryan Reynolds (for about five minutes). Here is the entire plot: 1. "Don't open that door, the monster will get out!" 2. "Fuck that, we have to go in to save him, he is getting eaten by the monster." 3. "Oh he died let's cry for a while." 4. "I know, let's lock the monster behind a door" (Return to step 1 until all die).

Saved you two hours. Just re-watch Alien.

I have shown this episode to so many friends I can practically recite it from memory. Why? Because it's a message everyone who ever uses Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Twitter, Grindr, Tindr...IMDb ratings!....practically everyone these days...needs to hear.

The message is proceed with caution when you think everyone and everything should be rated and that you too are qualified to do so. Because you know how to run a restaurant? You know how to cure pancreatic cancer? You know how to produce a television series?

Who should have the right to rate you? The porn-watching attendant at the car rental agency? The taxi driver? The "sincere" customer service agent at the airport counter? Perhaps all those "4.5's" are secretly suicidal. No one can be that happy not even a two year old with a balloon.

If we live, or should live, for the ratings of others...for a swipe to the right and not the left, for five not three stars, what price must we pay to obtain it? Insincere hellos on the elevator? Practice our laughs in the mirror? Dare we speak our mind? Must we give up that which makes us unique?

Nosedive explores a day in the life of Lacie Pound when it all falls apart. Falling from a 4.2 to a 4.19 means she doesn't get an "influencers program" seat on the plane, or a discount on her apartment. Losing her temper leads to landing in jail. Where at least, there are no ratings and you can say what you feel.

Kudos to Bryce Dallas Howard for playing this brilliantly and credibly. The beautiful art direction is just over the top enough to show we are still seeing a pastel-laden world that isn't quite real....yet...but oh so close. Cherry Jones is perfect as the antidote to this world, providing the escape hatch needed to get through it. I mean, you don't look like a 2.8!

I am not a religious man but the phrase about let he who is without sin cast the first stone is simply laughed off today in a world where alternative facts rule and everyone thinks their opinions are sacrosanct. Where people take KellyAnne Conway seriously and our own President seems to only care about his ratings and lies about his Electoral College vote.

You may not like redheads or science fiction or genuine Mexican cuisine, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to agree with you, or that one rating is right for everyone. The high end restaurant you love is pretentious to someone else, and a vegetarian isn't going to rate a steakhouse highly. Nor does your bitchy comment about a film mean I won't or shouldn't like it just because you have more followers than I do.

Heed the warning. Show love not judgment. Invite the people you love not the pretty ones to your wedding. Judge not lest you be judged. We are one big, diverse human species. Let's stop trying to devolve that into a single rating of 4.276/5.0 from the masses, and respect one another's differences.

Taken alone, this is a good, fun, action movie...the action rarely stops (as opposed to Part 1 where it never started).

I gave up on the Harry Potter book series after the second book, but saw all the movies. I read Lord of the Rings 4 times as a child, and watched the films, and felt they did a very faithful job adapting them, despite the need to leave out huge pieces of the story. As such, at the end, I felt a great deal of satisfaction when Gollum finally steals the ring and jumps into the fire at the end.

No such deal here. Haven't we been waiting for six films for Harry to destroy Voldemort? Unless I missed something, after Voldemort is destroyed, there's not so much as a "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" or "Hooray for Harry" moment. It's like it never happened. Harry goes back and walks through the school, and while there's lot of destruction and obviously important characters have been lost, after all that wouldn't they have given Harry a round of applause for killing Voldemort? Shouldn't someone be happy? There is no moment for the audience to cheer - I clapped when he killed Voldemort but the audience in my theater was silent. They did not program in a moment to rejoice. Is rejoicing a bad thing these days? It was underwhelming.

There was at least some cheering when Bellatrix died, but again, she is so powerful and then Mrs. Weasly just got mad and called her a bitch then it was so easy to kill her?

Also unsatisfying was when Harry casually snaps the Elder Wand, the most powerful one in half (if it's so powerful, how do you just snap it in half even if you are it's owner?) and toss it aside? Couldn't Harry have used the power of the Elder Wand to rebuild Hogwarts or do something good? Wouldn't he have been tempted for a minute to keep it and been conflicted - it was Dumbledore's after all! Having read some of the reviews here from those better informed, I learned that Harry reflected back the death spell on Voldemort since he realized he actually controlled the wand. Big point, totally lost in the special effects.

Also can someone explain Draco Malfoy to me? Why does Harry save him at the end? He chose his side, and in the end leaves with his parents (not clear why) from everything.

I felt like some of these issues could have been addressed at the expense of cutting some time off the roller coaster ride at the beginning at Gringotts. 20% less action and 20% more emotionally satisfying time spent explaining the motives behind what happened, would have made the film not only visually interesting, but also emotionally involving.

ET, Close Encounters and Jaws were some of my favorite movies growing up, and as a child in the suburbs my friends and I made Super 8 movies to relieve our boredom too! So I loved the nostalgia in the movie and had great expectations. But like everything else about this film, the nostalgic bits were just formula, tossed in as just another recipe element, stirred and baked with no thought to what was actually being cooked.

Having just visited Universal Studios and done the back lot tour for the umpteenth time, I was reminded of the tricks to make War of the Worlds, Jaws, Jurrasic Park and others which are simply repeated here. Others have reviewed the detailed examples, so no need to repeat here. I felt like I was on the back lot rather than seeing an original film.

I felt as though the idea of the film was "more was better". I LOVED JJ Abrams' Star Trek where the light flares were original but in this film they were gratuitous and didn't make sense. I LOVED ET where the clever kids help ET to go home, but here when the kid finally confronts the alien it just seemed like I was watching a repeat, there was no climactic element to the scene. Then in the next scene, after ending up in a dead end with no escape, rather than showing an exciting way to escape from the alien's tunnel, the kids are back up in the town with no explanation. The alien was that stupid? "Sure, kids, take off since you are so cute!" After 30 years in captivity? Right.

If you're 12 years old and haven't seen Spielberg's films this will be very likable. For everyone else, it's lather, rinse, repeat. Too bad.

I recently came across the concept of the Singularity in a book "Why the West Rules...for now", which used its arguments. This documentary talks about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the impact of the exponential growth of technology and its implications on the evolution of humankind: essentially that they will merge, with huge implications.

Now I want to read his book The Singularity and explore the concept more thoroughly...I suppose this is a great outcome for such a documentary, but it's not for someone avoiding deep thought.

Ray is a great thinker, and an optimist and believes that death is essentially avoidable by essentially transforming ourselves to a different "machine" body, based on the unavoidable trend of increasing computer power, which will soon be able to reach the capability of one human brain. Once computing power surpasses the brain, then computers will design computers, and they will grow exponentially smarter.

But as is pointed out in the film, if we think we can control that process once it is smarter than us, we're being unrealistic. As these machines interconnect, the power of one brain becomes pretty insignificant.

One incredible scene follows the promise of machines that can read printed text and read it aloud to the blind. Starting with a $20,000 machine decades ago that Stevie Wonder used, to something today that fits in a shirt pocket, which is the equivalent of a $100 million computer a few decades ago.

Another interesting points is his prediction that the cost of a watt hour of energy from solar sources will fall below that of fossil fuels in 5 years. Once this happens and solar power can be obtained from flexible panels installable anywhere, the geopolitics, economics and pollution from extracting, buying and using fossil fuels begins to go away.

I'm 49 and this makes me think as I type this on my <$500 laptop computer, after watching the movie on a $500 Ipad which I downloaded from the Internet, then I'm writing a review on a database of films where you can call up information on almost any film ever made; that none of this was doable just 15 years ago.

I can go to a city I've never been in, load up maps on my Iphone, find my way around, use a translator I can speak into in English which will speak in another language, and access money in another country to pay my bills.

The darker side as was also announced today as I write this is someone figured out that your Iphone stores your whereabouts for a year or so, and so we lose our privacy. Romances are made on the Internet and lost when a spouse sees a text message setting up an affair. My father recently died of small cell lung cancer. Within a week or so reading everything I could on it, i knew as much as many of the doctors I was dealing with (one asked if I was a doctor), and could help guide his therapy.

My life, in terms of photos, comments, interaction with friends, things and places I like is already being compiled in Facebook, and that will live on long after I die...

Our stupid political arguments now that you see on Cable TV are a disgusting waste of time: Was Obama born in the US? Should we cut the deficit by raising taxes on wealthy people, cutting medical care and financial support to older and poor people? Should gays be allowed to marry (20 years ago this was only an idea, now it's viable in a fast growing number of cities, states and countries).

We don't talk about the big issues: what does it mean that China now uses more energy than the US does. That it's economy is #2 and will soon outpace us? That the US is really not #1 anymore in anything significant (life expectancy, literacy, income, science achievements, etc) but one among many. What does it mean that we are clearly destroying our planet and using its resources (food, fish, air, minerals) at unsustainable rates....where does that leave us? These are the kinds of questions this film made me think about, and it answers in an optimistic way: in 15 years the advances in life expectancy as we "reprogram the bad software that makes up the human body" will be growing at more than 1 year per calendar year, essentially meaning if we make it 15 years we may live forever.

But more importantly, who has control of this technology or does it control us? There is no real way to program morality into a computer, it's too complicated and no one agrees on one correct moral path. Does that fact that eventually we can "upload" our brains into a net where there are billions of others, and all interconnect mean we'l never want to unplug for fear of being lonely or nonfunctional? (like the Borg in Star Trek)...? Can you live without your Facebook, cellphone, texts, email or Internet for even one day without feeling out of touch? Watch this film. We all need to be thinking about these issues, not the bullshit on cable TV news.

I rented this DVD with no expectations but loved it! Don't know why it didn't do better at box office, as it seems like alien for the 2010s. I liked how you figure out what is going on with the characters as their memory returns. and that it is not clear whats real and what is psychotic visions. I had dreams thinking about this film as the essential premise is true...we will have to find another planet since we are using this one up.

Ben Fosters character brings a welcome touch point of sanity, a good plot tool to engage the viewer. Very suspenseful!

Great special effects and well done as part of the plot not extraneous. Id love to see the second of the trilogy!