John Wick 2 opens with John putting a pin on the Russian mob vendetta he began in the first movie.
This movie gets going when an old acquaintance calls in a favor John owes him. Things do not go quite as smooth as everyone hoped on their end. This leaves John with a larger vendetta than the first one.
The movie definitely sets up the final chapter in this trilogy.
I did enjoy this movie a good bit. I still think the first John Wick movie is better. But it had the good luck to introduce this world to me.
Passengers hit a lot of right notes for me, but it was more straight forward than I thought. I think maybe I have become a bit jaded, but I was constantly on the lookout for the “twist”. Was this really happening to our characters? Was this perhaps an elaborate simulation? Aliens? A bad trip at Re-Call? I am glad it did not meet my expectations.
Is this the Martian? Nope. But it is at parts a relationship movie and a survival movie. In Space.
Chris Pratt plays Jim, a mechanic, who is going to colonize Homestead 2. The trip from Earth will take 120 years so the crew and passengers go into hibernation or cold sleep for the journey. But Jim’s pod opens 90 years early. As Jim explores the ship, we are introduced to the environment and the technology of this universe. After a year, Jennifer Lawrence’s character Aurora, an author, wakes up. They both frequent a bar run by an android played by Michael Sheen. This android is the only other humanoid they come into contact with.
Throughout the time we see Jim and then Aurora awaken, we see small glitches on the ship. Eventually those glitches get bigger and bigger. They culminate in a failure that threatens the entire ship and everyone sleeping and awake in it.
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia, Vince Foster, Julee Cerda, Aurora Perrineau
We all know how this story is going to end. But that is not the point. It is the journey that really matters.
Star Wars has been a part of my life since as far back as I can remember. And this movie did not disappoint story-wise.
I highly recommend seeing this movie in the theater.
This movie kept the dirty aesthetics from A New Hope. The special effects were overall good. But. I do want to get my only real negative out of the way. There are 2 CGI human characters in the movie that totally take you out of it. One is only shown at the end. We did not need to see that characters face to know who it was. But the other character is in a large part of the movie. Every time I saw this character’s face, it completely removed me from the movie. This role could easily have been recast. The de-aging effect performed on Michael Douglas for Ant-Man was way more believable than the work on this character.
Okay. Negatives done. Back to gushing about the movie. (more…)
Office Christmas Party is a fun little movie. The plot revolves around the “Save the Rec Center” and is predictable – but was fun anyway. This movie would be best seen with a huge crowd in a theater.
The premise of the movie is that a brother has to save his failing branch of the family’s tech company before his sister can close them down. To say they do not have the best of relationships would be an understatement. To land the deal that is supposed to save the company, the brother expands their canceled wine and cheese christmas party to an over the top event. With a DJ, snow machine, live reindeer, eggnog luge, etc.
We get to see how things start out fine, then progressively worsen as the night goes on.
Starring: Jason Bateman, Olivia Munn, T.J. Miller, Jennifer Aniston, Kate McKinnon, Courtney B. Vance, Jillian Bell, Rob Corddry, Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park, Sam Richardson, Karan Soni
Ultimately, Arrival is like Contact. I liked the design of the aliens in this movie, the path to communication, and the gut punch revelation for the main characters, but this was a long movie. I left the theater multiple times and did not feel like I missed anything when I got back.
Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
