The Great Movie Review: T2: Judgment Day

Wait! What about Terminator, the first one? This one has better ratings according to other people. IMDB, AFI, and so on. And the first one terrified me as kid so you can forget about it. I Was 9ish and over a neighbor-kids' house and they had HBO. I didn't sleep well for about a week. Also, I was banned from going over there again. However, this movie has a completely different tone to it and I'm no longer 9. By the way this is easily the most violent movie we've watched at movie to date. That includes The Godfather.

Assuming you watched the trailer, if not SPOILER ALERT, there are two Terminators in this movie; one good, one bad. There is this wonderful element of suspense featured through out the first twenty minutes of the film where you are unsure which is good and which is bad. Both are looking for John Connor, son of Sarah Connor who is the protagonist from the first Terminator. Tension mounts and you don't find out who is what until it all goes down a hallway, replete with shotgun blasts.

Ah-nolds' wooden acting lends itself very well to playing a machine with a penchant for popping a cap in people's knees. A stiff, expressionless muscle head is just what the doctor ordered. *Insert joke about Jingle All The Way. **It should also be noted I have seen Jingle All The Way ... more than once. ***Hangs head in shame. ****Googles correct grammatical usage of the * symbol.

The visual effects, for which it won an Oscar, have sadly not held up over the last 19 years. It's hard to CG reflective surfaces to start with, but try doing it two decades ago. Rest assured that those effects were ground breaking back in the day. Of course now they look like something that came out of Dave's School of Computer Animation.

I didn't realize I'd picked up an extended edition until I made it home from the store. This particular version, dubbed the Extreme DVD edition, had an extra 16 minutes of film not seen in the theatrical release. Which makes it a very long, literally, two and half hours!

Overall, it's a great "dog movie", where john finds his own Terminator, befriends it and then tragedy strikes as old age sets in and you have to put it down. It's pretty much just like Marley and Me. But with guns ... and stabbing people in the face. I've never seen Marley and Me, but i've been told that's what happens. There are several wonderful examples of cinematography to be found and enjoyed in this movie. Which gets nod to Cameron and his crew. As a side challenge, see if you can spot the scene where they used mercury instead of CG. It's a great action movie, with a good plot, decent acting and above all, killer robots from a dystopian future. This movie is a Watch. It is however also a screener, where you screen it before you let kids watch it. This movie earns 3.2 blow off knee caps, out of 5.

T2: Judgment Day

Group Ratings (out of 5):

Stevox: 3
Val: 3
Kyle: 4
Micah: 3
Jenny: 3

Average of: 3.2

Shares this rating with: "With my by myself."*

High School Yearbook Award: Most Likely to Shoot Someone in the Leg.

*Rating is to be sung in a lilting, yet nasally manner.

The Great Movie Review: Contact

I have always been fascinated by Contact. And I have no idea why.

By all accounts, I should not enjoy this movie as much as I do. Science Fiction? Satellites listening to outer space? Science fiction? Yet every time it's on television, I can't help but watch it. And I don't know why, but I sometimes stare at my DVD shelves looking for something to watch and decide, "I think I'd like to watch Contact!"

Contact is a 1997 science fiction film starring Jodi Foster as a scientist who has dedicated her career to the search for extra-terrestrial life. Her preferred method of search is listening to the sounds of distant galaxies on her headphones; this movie tells the story of what happens when she finally hears something.

Far more "science" than "fiction" (see how I slid that past the boys?), Contact is based on the only novel astronomer/astrophysicist/cosmologist Carl Sagan ever wrote. That book is his account of what it might actually look like if we ever did make contact with, as Jodi Foster's Ellie Arroway puts it, "little green men."

Influenced by Close Encounters of the Third Kind and, another GSMW classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Contact pushes the intellectual level a step further by showing us the details and equipment up close that making this kind of breakthrough would actually require. Things are never dumbed down for the audience, and the moment of discovery sees the scientists and astronomers speaking in terms that we couldn't hope to understand and utilizing programs and satellites that would intimidate even the most technical layman. Even further than that, the movie begins to slowly center itself in an intellectual debate on faith vs. science, pitting some of the main characters and allowing them to eloquently and logically converse on the topic without getting ugly.

Jodi Foster is predictably amazing in the lead role, bringing depth and passion to a character that never becomes tiresome, despite the fact that she is in nearly every scene of the film. Tom Skerritt is perfectly icky as the oily scientist rival, and James Woods (one of my favorite actors) steals every scene he's in as the skeptical bureaucrat who functions as the audience's mouth piece in early scenes of the movie, asking the "what does that mean?" questions that allow Dr. Arroway to explain to us what exactly is going on and why it's significant.

Even more than a decade later, the special effects still hold up wonderfully, and it's easy to forget that these graphics were created in an era before CG was a foregone conclusion of nearly every theatrically released movie. The musical score is also brilliant, and both highlights the action and underscores the emotional tones perfectly. The film received a nomination for an Academy Award for Sound, but lost out to Titanic.

My personal feeling is that a movie like Contact truly rises above many of the tired old tropes that most sci-fi films often suffer from, and I find it refreshing to see a movie in a genre typically filled with far-fletched plot lines and unbelievable heroes to be so well-anchored in reality. What would happen if we made contact? What would Congress do? What would the president say? How would the general public feel?

Indeed, in this vein of thought, Roger Ebert said in his 1997 review of the film, "It's surprising to find a science fiction film exploring issues like love, death and the existence of God; science fiction as a literary form has of course explored those subjects for years, but sci-fi movies generally tend toward titles such as ``Independence Day,'' and are about actors being attacked by gooey special effects."

Not everyone will like this movie- it's definitely not perfect. But it's worth a watch if you've never seen it, or if (like Micah) you haven't seen it in years and a second viewing might help your opinion of it!

Contact is a fascinating movie that will hold your interest, make you think, and maybe have you laughing over Matthew McConaughey's hair (did I not mention he was in this?). Do yourself a favor and go check this one out!

Contact

Group Ratings(out of 5):

Stevox: 4
Val: 5
Kyle: 3
Micah: 4

Average of: 4.0

Shares this Rating with: Many movies, including Rope, Children of Men, and Casablanca.

In a fight: You can't beat a classic like Casablanca.

The Great Movie Review: Minority Report

I'll be honest, Tom Cruise is not one of my favorite actors. But as of late he's been gaining points, however slow. I enjoyed The Last Samurai, and Rain Man was excellent, but somewhere in between I forgot about Minority Report. It's helpful that Spielberg directed, but for the life of me I don't know how I could see this movie, think to myself, that was pretty good and then forget about it until about three days ago.

We start in a utopian future, localized around DC. We get introduced to the experimental Pre-Crime Unit, who arrest people for murders they commit in the future. Cruise plays the main character, John Anderton, who is "framed" for a murder he will commit in the future. Just watch it, it'll all make sense. Maybe. If your lucky and you pay attention.

I don't think i could handle living in DC with this going on. Sure murder is nonexistent, but in the back of my mind i would be paranoid the entire time that i will be arrested at any moment. It'd be terrible. Don't talk to anyone, don't interact, don't even look at people! Just yell you're sorry and that no one is going to get hurt! Or is that the opposite of what you should do?

Anyhow, the acting is solid. Cruise and Colin Farrell (hereafter referred to as Bullseye) both give very good performances. I also enjoyed the performance by Peter Stormare as the eye doctor. Your not sure if he's good or bad. And Lois Smith was great as the creepy plant lady.

The special effects haven't aged too badly. The jet packs needed work from the start though. They achieved flight through the magic of the camera. Which means it wobbled around they yanked people around on wires. Bleech.

Story telling. This was the best part of the film. The movie itself was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. From the intro of the pre-crime unit, the explanation of the tech, to the unveiling of the murder that Anderson is being framed for, the chase and through the solving of the mystery, it grips you and moves you forward.

In the movie they discuss the ethics of arresting people for future crimes they have yet to commit. Obviously there is a great big Jabba the Hut sized problem with that. They haven't actually killed anyone. The justification is that even though it happens in the future, and they haven't done it, it would happen anyways. But by them stopping that chain of events that time line no longer exists. Meaning that the future crime they are supposed to commit no longer even happens. It's like getting arrested for nothing. But on the other hand, were they allowed to continue they would in fact murder said person. But they didn't, soooooo ... yeah the movie didn't do a good job defending this point of view either.

There's not a ton of funny in this movie. It's definitely a mystery/thriller. Even if you aren't into Sci-Fi, you should see this movie.

This movie is a Watch. Watch is good.

Spoiler alert!




Bullseye dies! How did i forget that!

Minority Report

Group Ratings(out of 5):

Stevox: 5
Val: 3
Kyle: 4
Micah: 3

Average of: 3.75

Shares this Rating with: North by Northwest.

In a fight: Minority Report all the way. Sure they have Hitchcock and he could pull out a plot twist/crop duster, but they'd just see it coming.

ReBoot

Welcome to The Great Society of Movie Watchers blog. It's been a while. We have no excuse. Anyways, this is a semester of rebooting, of changing it up, not taking no for an answer, eating all the custard i want, and studying the legendary Tricinemasaurus! Also, there may be chilling with Bob after fending off Megabyte and laying the smack down to Hack and Slash.

So what is this legendary Tricinemasaurus! you may ask. Well I'll tell you; it's means we make it up as we go. A group member will present a movie/movies for the group and we will then choose a theme based off of that movie. This past Sunday Stevox present us with three choices: Book of Eli, This is Spinal Tap and Minority Report. We chose Minority Report with a theme of Science Fiction. I was hoping for Chicks Who are Bald or Almost Bald as a theme. I have a film for that, and conveniently it's also Sci-Fi (go figure right.) But Sci-Fi is cool too. More on Mino Repo later.

*Side note: Science Fiction is defined as; Fiction based on imagined, future, scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets. So is it science? Is it fiction? I don't care, i just want my own Delorean Time Machine and Lightsaber! Preferably in green, but a darker green if that's possible. More Forest than Kelly, but nothing to do with DeForest Kelley who does not appear in this particular film.

After the movie is watched, and the theme is decided on; two "volunteers" pick a movie for the following two weeks based on that theme. Most likely this "volunteer" is someone who will be opinionated about said theme. Like me. Val is going next week and then I'm the week after. I'll most definitely use Val's movie to help me decide what to bring. Because lets be honest, this will most likely be the defining moment for Sci-Fi on this blog (I'd like to apologize in advance to all my fellow nerds.) So my picks gotta be good! Also, I really hope i can use my bald chick movie. And she's bald bald, not like Agatha in MinoRepo who's just kinda bald.

So buckle up the internet, we've only just begun. Alright, get this posted on the double Phong!