Z/Web

The concept of teens inventing a time machine was intriguing, but there’s so little science here it might as well be magic. There’s minimal realism, and several odd time machine side effects that aren’t explained and make no sense at all. (Like when you go back in time and run into yourself, both versions of you vanish.)

But the worst crime is that it takes forever for anything to happen. It’s halfway through the movie before the time machine is ready, and almost the end before the bad side effects start to happen. And then the resolution is far too simple and weak, wrapped up in thirty seconds like a cheap sitcom.

Despite all that, however, the movie is still a lot of fun. The cast is pretty good, and there are few glimmers of good ideas in the cool stuff the kids do with the time machine. (My favorite was buying expired VIP backstage passes cheap on eBay after the concert was over, then going back in the time to the concert and using them to meet the band.) There’s certainly nothing profound or innovative about this picture, but if you go in with extremely low expectations, it’s entertaining.

Author: Jeffrey Archer

I’ve never read Jeffrey Archer and I think I thought these were mystery stories, but they turned out to be simply little quirky things, sometimes about crime, but often about ordinary life. Not bad, but nothing truly remarkable. My favorite was one in which a guy meets a beautiful woman and it had four different endings, ranging from him getting the girl to not getting her. Quite fun.

I did really enjoy the short story format — it’s been years since I’ve read short stories and I need to get back into writing them.

I finally stopped watching the TV Show Agents of SHIELD because it got too annoying (all the good guys turning Benedict Arnold and SHIELD disappearing), but lo and behold, that’s pretty much the plot of this movie.

If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have watch the movie, but it turned out it didn’t bother me the way it does on the show. Here it made more sense as that is the plot. It didn’t work at all on TV, where it felt like the show was going in the wrong direction. (How can the show be called Agents of SHIELD when SHIELD doesn’t exist? Stupid. I think they started writing the series before they learned the direction of the movie and had to rapidly — and incompetently — change course.)

This movie isn’t as good as Captain America, but it’s not bad. Too long and the action is over-the-top, though I do find Captain America’s fighting more interesting as the shield he uses both as a weapon and as a defense is unusual. But the whole “keep the identity of the ‘Winter Soldier’ bad guy a secret for as long as possible and then have him stop wearing a mask” was just silly. Nothing makes that much sense, really, but it was fun and there are some good set pieces. Still, I wish Hollywood would put the kind of effort they put into these popcorn flicks into real movies.

Interesting low-budget Spanish-produced science fiction movie about robots. It has some big stars like Antonio Banderas and Dylan McDermott and Melanie Griffith, but I’d never even heard of it (and it’s a 2014 release so it’s not old).

The story is about an insurance investigator looking at why some robots are repairing themselves — supposed to be against their programming (the bots follow rules similar to Asimov’s three laws) — and he basically uncovers artificial intelligence. That part is very weak, as everything is implied and we don’t really see the impact of anything. There’s no good reason given as to why robots shouldn’t be allowed to repair themselves (the theory is that they’d quickly advance beyond our understanding), making me think it’s all just a way for the manufacturer to keep charging for repairs.

Supposedly the setting is in the future after sunspots destroy all but 21 million people and leaving the planet heavy with deadly radiation, so robots are made to help rebuild civilization. Except I kept trying to figure out how such a devastated society could build robots we can’t build with all our technology today!

The bottom line is this is a gimmicky film. It has interesting visuals and the story sounds intriguing, but there’s little depth and nothing much actually happens. There’s weird conspiracy side story which brings action and violence into things, but I found that strangely out of place and tedious. I didn’t care about any of the characters (except maybe the one robot). But it was still an interesting film for robot and Asimov fans.

Author: Warren Meyer

An interesting book. I discovered the author after reading a free story of his on Amazon, and there were some positive comments about his novel. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite have the right idea of what it was from the description. The idea sounded neat: something about a company that invents a way to market coolness to teens. The reality is a lot more prosaic, however, as the novel isn’t something innovative but descends into a mere trivial thriller with murder and mayhem.

That said, it’s still a pretty good read, and I would have had a lot more fun if my expectations hadn’t been so high. I was anticipating something intellectual and the book hinted at a lot of that. There’s a really cool character of a certain rich guy who seems to be able to see money-making ideas in unusual places. For instance, he notices people throwing coins in a mall fountain and wonders who gets the money. He talks to the mall owners and finds out they donate the coins to charity. So he creates a company that gives fountains to malls and other locations, and offers free lifetime maintenance… in exchange for keeping all the coins. It turns out to be quite profitable.

There’s also a shady underground organization which controls a media empire and has hooks into senators in Washington and a powerful attorney. The three of them help each other out. The media can make the politician look good, while the attorney sues the politician and media guy’s enemies. They decide that BMOC (Big Man On Campus), the rich guy’s new radical company to sell coolness to teens, will ruin the media business, since that’s basically what they do in a less direct manner. So they organize a plot to ruin him. They murder a teen and make it look like suicide, with her note blaming BMOC.

Everything up to this point is excellent: great characters, interesting conspiracies, and a terrific plot. Then everything just becomes a bit of an action farce, with shootouts and chases and an ending that’s far too wimpy. That’s disappointing, as the first 70% of the book was outstanding. The book’s also slightly hampered by a few amateurish typos and glaring errors (such as using “site” when he means “sight”), but then it was only a $1 in Kindle format. It’s still a fun read, and even the weak ending is fairly exciting.

This film is about Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who basically invented the computer, and his efforts during WWII to build a machine to crack the Nazi’s “unbreakable” Enigma code-making device. We basically follow two stories: one during the war, and one a decade later, when cops following up on a break-in at his house figure out he was a homosexual and decide to arrest him. There are also occasional flashbacks to Turing’s school days.

That dual storyline is a little confusing — the time jump between scenes was not always well established (at least the childhood ones were clear) — but the concept did help propel the movie and provided some additional tension.

Overall, I thought this was fantastic: the performance of Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing was excellent, with just enough drama to be compelling without going over into hysteria or melodrama, and the supporting cast was also terrific. The story was good, well-paced and interesting, and the personal revelations were helpful in understanding the man.

The film is heavy-handed in overemphasizing the discrimination Turing faced (a bit “preachy”), and I really wanted more details about exactly what his machine did and how it worked. (The film is remarkably short of technical details, perhaps out of fear that it might bore viewers — but without it we really don’t understand half of what Turing is doing in the movie! It also makes it more difficult to truly appreciate his genius since we don’t know what he actually did.)

Despite these flaws, the film works. There are tons of absolutely fabulous scenes. Turning’s “job interview” at Bletchley Park is absolutely masterful in revealing Turing’s personality. I loved it when a guard tries to send Joan, a woman applying to be a codebreaker, to the “secretarial pool,” and then she solves a crossword even faster than Turing. But my very favorite scene scene was when young Turning is at school and a mate gives him a book on ciphers and explains that they are encrypted messages that everyone can see but only those with the key can understand. Turing asks him, “How is that different from talking?”

For him, you see, everyone seemed to be talking in a code he couldn’t break. He was oblivious to the hidden communication that most humans practice. (Example: a colleague mentions three times that they’re going to lunch, obviously inviting the still-working Turing to come. Finally, exasperated, he tells him this, and Turning is surprised and says: “You didn’t invite me. You merely said you were going to lunch.” Which was literally true.)

Ultimately, the film is a little sad, as Turning’s work was kept secret for fifty years and he never received the recognition he deserved. Breaking Enigma pretty much won the war for the Allies — at minimum it shorted the war by years and saved the lives of millions. I found it fascinating that a man who really didn’t understand other people could be responsible for saving so many. And Turning’s work on early computing is responsible for all the computers we have today. That’s an amazing legacy for a man almost forgotten by history simply because he was an “odd duck” and hard to work with.

What a convoluted shambles! This film has a terrific cast, an intriguing script, and a semi-interesting premise (a lawyer gets involved in the drug trade and learns the cost of that when things go wrong), but bungles it all by shrouding everything in so much mystery that it’s incomprehensible.

Things start off bad right from the beginning as we’re suddenly inside an intimate sex scene between two main characters. There’s no setup, so we have no idea who these people are, and thus the scene feels invasive, as though we’re voyeurs. Later I realized the purpose of the scene was to establish how much the two genuinely loved each other, but that completely backfired: because the initial focus was on their physical relationship, I assumed that it was just about lust and kept thinking that there would be a twist later in the film where all their lovely spoken promises proved to be just words. Instead, their love is supposed to be the heart of the entire film!

From there the film goes into the drug business and makes its second big mistake: it assumes we understand everything about the drug business. There are a dozen characters doing a bunch of seemingly unrelated things and there’s very little to connect everything.

Some of that is acceptable, of course. As the viewer I’m willing to give a film some time, but this film never does explain everything. It’s also virtually impossible to gain an understanding through the convoluted dialog — which is pretty and colorful, and sometimes interesting, but obtuse and vague and never speaks plainly.

Another problem is that several of the characters look similar to each other and the way the movie is shot — with angled views that don’t show a clear view of the character — makes that even worse, creating more comprehension problems. Few people refer to others by name, except in later conversations, so everything is quite baffling.

There are moments of interesting action and some dramatic scenes, but everything’s piecemeal. It’s like instead of the jigsaw puzzle coming together as the film continues, the pieces are just rearranged. By the end, we’re just as confused as at the beginning.

I’d caught part of this on one of my movie channels and it looking intriguing and I really wanted to like it, but it’s a wannabe, not real movie.

I liked the first one but this feels like a by-the-numbers sequel. Is the fact that I fell asleep during about a third of it and didn’t feel like I missed anything indicative of failure?

It’s not bad and there is a lot of fun, but the “plot” is incredibly tired (evil woodcutters are cutting down the rain forest and it’s up to Blue to stop them). I did like the music and the crazy animals, though it did seem rather childish. The bottom line is that it’s a typical sequel: harmless, but rather pointless. I’d have been better off watching the first one again.

I was curious where this was going since the first two movies pretty much exhausted the book. Like the previous film, this basically drags out small scenes into elaborate action sequences. So instead of a thirty-second sword fight we have a 20-minute one.

Fortunately, the action is excellently done (though wildly over-the-top and a bit fake at times), but at least Peter Jackson doesn’t forget that characters matter and the action is paired with occasionally emotional performances and character scenes. Though he does take some liberties with the story (i.e. the elf-dwarf romance), it’s mostly all based on stuff that’s actually in the book. Still, storywise, this is unquestionably the weakest of the three Hobbit films.

But overall, I really enjoyed it. Though it’s a long movie, it doesn’t feel like it, and it somehow captures that magical quality of Middle Earth and the world of Tolkien. It’s really great to go back there and visit that land. I’m sad that the movies are done.