Category: Reviews

Movie Review: Closure

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“Closure” on IMDB

Thriller,  80 Minutes, 2007

Revenge films tend to form a mixed bag.  They can be very easy to pull off (all you really need is to show somebody doing something horrible to somebody else) which means that a lot of them suffer from laziness.  Others spend so much time on the mechanics of the situation – long, intricate, graphically violent scenes – that they lose focus on the human impact.  It’s difficult to find the sweet spot.  This one starts out strong but unfortunately wanders aimlessly through its last two acts.

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Hurricane Movie Review: The Five-Year Engagement

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“The Five-Year Engagement” on IMDB

Romance/Comedy,  124 Minutes, 2012

[Hurricane Sandy is currently causing all kinds of hell for all kinds of people.  Here in Scranton, PA we’ve still got power and Internet (at least for now).  We’re going to watch movies until either Sandy puts a stop to it or we can actually leave the house.]

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RiffTrax Live: Birdemic

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As a belated birthday treat for my son my lovely bride and I took him and a van load of his dumbass friends to see the latest RiffTrax Live event from the fine folks at RiffTrax (presented by Fathom Events).  The movie this time out was the modern crapterpiece “Birdemic” [my less than charitable review].

Birdemic was made for this.  Not only did Mike, Bill and Kevin make suffering through the movie enjoyable they quite literally turned the experience into the funniest experience I’ve had with a movie… well, since the last “RiffTrax Live”.

The experience is not unlike inviting a bunch of friends over to watch bad movies.  The difference here is that the screen is 40′ tall, you have 300 friends and you don’t know any of their names.  It’s some of the purest, simplest fun you’ll ever have in a theater, hands down.

Minecrafting: Cool World Seed

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I’ve been playing with generating Minecraft worlds based on custom seeds and I came across a nifty one that happens to be super easy (for me) to remember: “I Love Carol” (or “-1731112262” for you squares) in honor of my lovely bride.  (This was done in version 12w42a, by the way.)

There’s a jungle temple (x: 22, y:74, z: 119) very near the spawn point (x: -19, y: 67, z: 249)  with quite a bit of gold.  Not far from there lies a very large plains village (14 buildings including a blacksmith’s with diamond and several wheat fields, x: 324, y: 73, z: 196).  Close by is a massive series of criss-crossing chasms with a ton of exposed coal and iron (x:321, y: 69, z: 113) and there’s a decent-sized pumpkin patch on the plains.  All of that is snuggled up to an “Extreme Hills” biome for the emerald hungry.

Further away there’s very tiny village (only two buildings,  x: -218, y: 74, z: 597) with a surface opening to an abandoned mine very close (x: -165, y: 63, z: 575).  Finally, an easy walk from this village (and intertwined with the nearby mine) is a massive fortress (the portal is at x:-178, y:11, z: 751).

Happy mining!

Movie Review: The Babymakers

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“The Babymakers” on IMDB

Comedy,  95 Minutes, 2012

The basic idea here is that this guy has been hit in the balls so much that his “sperm are bad” but he’d still like to impregnate his wife.  He remembers that he used to donate sperm all the time and tries to get retrieve some of that but he finds out his last batch has been sold and will be used soon!  So he collects his stereotypical group friends – the fat crazy one, the dumb one and black one – and plans a sperm heist.

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Movie Review: Vile

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“Vile” on IMDB

Action,  98 Minutes, 2011

The so-called “torture porn” sub-genre of splatter films, epitomized in the modern era by the “Saw” [IMDB] franchise but predating it by decades, is difficult to execute correctly.  The point that most low-budget attempts forget is that it isn’t the actual pain being inflicted to the characters.  Focusing on purely the physical is, as films go, crude and ultimately boring.

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Movie Review: The Dilemma

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“The Dilemma” on IMDB

Drama (not a Comedy), 111 Minutes, 2011:

I think my big problem with this is that I sat down to a comedy.  But this isn’t a comedy.  It’s a drama.  The marketing machine that decided to present this in trailers and commercials as a comedy did the film a disservice because people going in expecting to laugh (like I did) are going to be confused and quite possibly pissed off.  It’s a drama.  Oh, to be sure you’ll get some chuckles out of it but it’s a drama.

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