A Discovery of Witches

`A Discovery of Witches' is a fantasy series based on the similarly named novel of the `All Souls' trilogy, written by Deborah Harkness. Teresa Palmer portrays Diana Bishop, a historian who discovers a bewitched manuscript in the Bodleian library. As she attempts to unravel the secrets this book holds about magical creatures, she is forced back into the world of magic, full of vampires, daemons, witches and forbidden love. Forming an unlikely alliance, geneticist and vampire Matthew Clairmont, portrayed by Matthew Goode, helps Diana to attempt to protect the book and solve the riddles within, while at the same time dodging threats from the magical creature world. 

After seeing the trailer multiple times on various devices, I decided to watch the series. Series one's episodes were nebulous enough to continue watching it. Although it plays in the fantasy realm (as far as we know), the actions of various characters do not deviate from the plots of other "power hungry" movies too much. 

The interesting part starts with the time walker discovery. As many theories suggest the paradox of time travel, it does not seem have an effect in this series or does not play a role. I'm curious to see the possible change after the characters return to the presence. As suggested in the movie "The Butterfly Effect" the slightest change will have great consequences. I'll see what happens here in the mind of the authors soon.

Two days later

So I watched it to the end. No butterfly effect here, in the greater scheme of things it is not important to the story line. Although one fact lingers in my mind: Diana is pregnant in 1590, returns to 2022 - pregnant - this must be the longest pregnancy in the history of mankind, also, the twins are 432 years old when they were born ... 

It was an interesting plot line with enough intrigue to keep watching. The cinematography was outstanding, so were the costumes. The scenes in Venice with the boat steering towards the hidden island got somewhat old after frequent switches between countries. The slow gathering of species over several episodes was well done. Some of the travel between the countries did not make too much sense, especially in the last series where the imprisoned witch is in Poland and drives to France, Matthew drives from France to Poland. This takes a long time by car, however, the actions in either location have not progressed too much in the meantime. Little parts which jump out and make the episode look chopped up in the last series.

The discovery of the dependency of chromosomes between the species was a logical explanation for the ending of the series, which also led to the dismantling of the old hierarchy. 

"If there is something wrong with the hive, you have to replace the queen" (from the Beekeeper) would be very relevant in this scenario.

Back to "one of those again"

Two years ago I wrote about "one of those again" movies. Since then I came across many of  "one of those again" detritus movies. Some worse than others, although I'm not sure what is the next lower level of worse. Some of the "movies" or "documentaries" about conclusions or ill devised interpretations of a possibly bad drug influenced mind crossed my path today on Amazon Prime nevertheless. I always thought that some of the documentaries about aliens were very much far-flung interpretations of existing ancient art or artifacts. However, this one is definitely is taking the cake

Alien Contact - Secret Societies

Reality Films is a world renowned producer of cutting edge films by world class authors, researchers and experts from across the globe. From Ancient Mysteries, UFO’s and Aliens, Secret Societies and Conspiracies, The Paranormal and Occult, Quantum Theory, Prophecy, Spirituality, Religion, Esoteric Teachings, History and much more, Reality Films ventures into mysterious and unknown realms with its unique brand of life altering documentaries and feature films. Visit exotic places, mysterious realms and discover the secrets of all ages by entering a domain where Strange Is Normal

Reality Is What You Make It

SERIOUSLY?

Budget (estimated) $1,000,000 for a slideshow "documentary". There list of "movies" is tremendous, but all garbage more or less. OK, so I started watching it and fast forwarded through this ill received piece of "art" and now I'm wasting my time to write about this grab too - must have been really bad.

Actually there are numerous distribution and production companies out there who throw anything at the consumer for a buck. One company wrote back that they made their money with the DVD and recommended another DVD produced by the same company - which equally or more than bad and that was just reading the title. However, the executive who responded to my email quit afterward siding that this company is not worth it (not the exact words - just cleaned up). 
I concluded that I'm in the wrong business ...

The Circle

WOW, impressive movie with a myriad of ways to interpret the underlying meaning.


Although it is almost impossible to take the movie as an entertainment face value given today's advances in technology.  Contrary to past "futuristic" environments this movie almost documents the current environment we live in.

Not to spoil or give away the plot line, here are some thoughts you might ponder after the movie.

Back in the 1960’s after the erecting of the Berlin wall it took an army of secret police, in this case the STASI (Staatssicherheit or State Security), to spy on the East Berlin population. 

In tandem, today for example there are 500,00 cameras in London, one camera for every 16 people. Greenwich  Village and SoHo have about 1 camera per 84 residents. None of the counts include private security cameras, police body cams or police cruisers equipped with license plate scanners and dash cams. Dash cams are becoming more and more affordable for private cars and being used on a regular basis, not to mention the obsession of the smart phone cameras and other surveillance cams such as baby or nanny cams, and last not least the fear of FOMO. The latter is simply footage voluntary provided by the public to the public which could in some cases back fire. Granted of course is the fact that it is not all about spying on the population but sorting out the bad, the good, and the ugly.

Along the same theme line there were some movies which appeared a while ago, such as “Enemy of the State”, featuring the intrusion of private lives. Edward Snowden showed the world that this was not so far fetched with his revelations. Perhaps it would take a scenario as depicted in the movie “Transcendence” to change the entire world the way it is.

To take it a step further, entire behaviors are being recorded in the name of “deep machine learning”, providing corporations with brilliant statistical evidence about certain behaviors. To single out some algorithms, being accident prone for insurance companies, or a person relying on credit cards because of their spending habits, for the medical field the makeup of the DNA, shopping habits, targeted advertising, predicting sales, the stock market, and many more - benefiting entire industries . All part of using an objective, neutral, and cold entity analyzing a person and drawing conclusions as a general blanket for all. This data is taken mostly from payment methods and/or reports.

Now imagine live video footage of every single moment of your life with anybody watching.

... and there are people (perhaps me included) who try to sort through family pictures and events - forget that -  just ask Google or Facebook, either one can give you a slideshow of your life - free of charge. Search yourself and find all the foot prints in the virtual sand...

One of those again

Several years ago I wrote about the unskilled movies with big names as a draw in them. It was not pretty, neither were the movies.
I stumbled on another one today. It is called "The Prince" with the cast including Bruce Willis and John Cusack.
It was a 2014 film with a 4.5 rating, the synapses sounded somewhat interesting so I decided to fill some time and watch it. Well in short, it was amateurish in all facets of movie making. Very disappointing overall. Going into more detail would be more time wasted.

Blackhat

Curiosity got the better of me last night and I watched it. Although the trailer looked somewhat promising, the movie itself was not as good. Michael Mann did a good job directing it in his personal style, the plot line itself was very disappointing.
I suppose that the "cyber" movies will become more popular in this day and age, however, the content needs to be worked on big time. I thought that Sneakers, a star studded movie from 1992 or Enemy of the State from 1998 had more debt than this movie when it comes to technology.
There were several BIG questions marks in this movie. One of the first ones was the possession of a smart phone in a prison cell. Perhaps it was to establish the "hacker" persona, who knows. Others included the display of the code, Norton Utilities to the rescue. I have seen smarter decoding or reverse engineering schema scenes. And, above all, downloading a key logger within the NSA - seriously? If it would be that easy any 13 year old "hacker" could do that routinely. Using a hotspot as a connection for a Dropbox, why? To use android advertising? Bluetooth would have been less conspicuous bad guys.
Then there is  the motive of this entire schema. Some wild looking Aussie with some bad ass following doing all this for what? Obviously not to take over the world, but have some gain in the stock market? Since it was so easy to get inside the targeted dam, would it be more efficient to just blow the dam, and, if you have all this money already and perhaps access to more, why go thru all this?
All in all from an entertainment point of view, not too bad. From a "cyber" point of view - lousy. I'm not sure if even the general public bought this one.

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   1. 5.4/10·IMDb

      34%·Rotten Tomatoes

      51%·Metacritic
   2. My rating 3/10

Predestination

Based one of the great science fiction writers Robert Heinlein's " '—All You Zombies—' " comes this mind bending movie Predestination.

It was written in one day, July 11, 1958, and first published in the March 1959 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine after being rejected by Playboy. The story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel. In 1980, it was nominated for the coveted Balrog Award for short fiction.

Although it is slow to watch, it keeps you interested in the plot line. It is not until three quarters into the movie until it all comes together and it leaves you puzzled long after the movie is over. 
One has to admire the imagination of the writer to come up with the "find the beginning of a circle" scenario.

1. 7.4/10·IMDb

   83%·Rotten Tomatoes

   3.5/4·Roger Ebert

   69%·Metacritic

 My Rating 9/10

John Wick

John Wick, somewhat different to your shoot up movies. But that seems to be a new trend. 
Keanu Reeves plays an retired hit man who, by chance, encounters a spoiled brat son of an Russian Mob boss. Eventually the kid and his entourage rob John Wick of his reason of living. Although, the ex hit man part develops slowly in the first half of the movie, it leaves his entire previous life in a fog (similar to the Equalizer) and deals with the here and now. Overall the film is well made and directed by Chad Stahelski and David Leitch who integrated a great deal of fight choreographes as well as gun fu techniques. However, my personal favorite is the desk clerk at the  Continental, a hotel that exclusively caters to assassins, with the rule that no business can be conducted on premises. Cool, calm, collected and discreet, a role well handled.
I'm not sure if Keanu was the right character for the movie, he seemed very stiff. Although this stiffness made him perfect for the Matrix series, for this movie, not so much. Jason Statham would have been perfect for this role. He is and has been portraying that type of character for some time and is by all means totally believable. However, judging by his movies of similar character, this movie did not quite have the somewhat indebtedness of his style.
BTW, what is up with the Russian mob being portrait and used lately? What happened to tradition and the Italian mob? 

Rating:
Rotten Tomatoes  83%
IMDb with a 7.2/10
Peter's 2 Cents 6.5 out of 10

Johnny English

Just came across this movie Johnny English from 2003. Personally I always liked Rowan Atkinson in his British comedy.

Johnny English is a 2003 British  comedy film parodying the James Bond secret agent genre. The film stars Rowan Atkinson, Ben Miller and John Malkovich. Atkinson had previously appeared in the 1983 James Bondfilm Never Say Never Again. The screenplay was written by Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, with William Davies, and the film was directed by Peter Howitt. The film grossed a total of $160 million worldwide. The film was followed by a sequel, 2011's Johnny English Reborn.



Rating:
Rotten Tomatoes 33%
IMDb 6.1/10
Peter's 2 Cents 7/10

Lucy

Here is another movie I have been patiently waiting for - Lucy. 

Somehow I never made it to see it in theaters, however, it was released on DVD as well as iTunes. So today I had a chance to fully immerse myself into the movie. You have to be open minded to see it, criticize it after you seen and digested it. This goes along with the movie Cloud Atlas, just to name a recent movie, in terms of digesting the concept. Of course, Morgan Freeman in his role as the behind the scenes scientist is brilliant as usual.
Scarlett Johansson seems to be everywhere, along the lines of Lucy (in experimental terms) she starred in Under Your Skin. "Johansson is phenomenal in every sense of the word," enthused Peter Travers for Rolling Stone. "She joins Glazer in creating a brave experiment in cinema that richly rewards the demands it makes. The result is an amazement, a film of beauty and shocking gravity."

Lucy is a 2014 English-language French science fiction action film written and directed by Luc Besson and produced by his wife Virginie Silla. The film was released on July 25, 2014, and became a box office success,grossing over $458 million against a budget of $40 million. 

Rating:
Rotten Tomatoes 66%
IMDb 6.4/10
Peter's 2 Cents 7/10

The Equalizer

A man believes he has put his mysterious past behind him and has dedicated himself to beginning a new, quiet life. But when he meets a young girl under the control of ultra-violent Russian gangsters, he can't stand idly by - he has to help her.

Director:

 Antoine Fuqua

Writers:

 Richard Wenk, Michael Sloan (television series)

Stars:

 Denzel Washington, Marton Csokas, Chloë Grace 

One of the long anticipated movies since I saw the trailer in September 2014.
Denzel Washington did not disappoint. After a slow start in which the main character was established the action was almost non stop until the end. This was a well directed movie with all the right nuances for an action movie.

Rating:
Rotten Tomatoes 61%
IMDb 7.2/10
Peter's 2 Cents 9/10

The Interview

 Dave Skylark and producer Aaron Rapoport run the celebrity tabloid show "Skylark Tonight." When they land an interview with a surprise fan, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, they are recruited by the CIA to turn their trip to Pyongyang into an assassination mission.

Directors:

 Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen

Writers:

 Dan Sterling (screenplay), Seth Rogen (story)

Stars:

 James Franco, Seth Rogen, Randall Park 

All I can say initially is @#$%^&*I%$ were they thinking?
I should have, and probably did in the back of my mind, known that the Seth Rogen and James Franco combination amount to an "An Idiot Abroad" scenario.
If it was a comedy, the old comedians would turn over in their graves. If it was not, it must have been an Denis Rodman visiting North Korea including the wishful thinking scenario according to Seth.
Unfortunately, I too had to see what all the hoopla was about - time I don't get back.

Homefront

Another well done character movie by Jason Statham. Direct and to the point.

Quick synapses:

1. Hoping to escape from his troubled past, former DEA agent Phil Broker (Jason Statham) moves to a seemingly quiet backwater town in the bayou with his daughter. However, he finds anything but quiet there, for the town is riddled with drugs and violence. When Gator Bodine (James Franco), a sociopathic druglord, puts the newcomer and his young daughter in harm's way, Broker is forced back into action to save her and their home. Based on a novel by Chuck Logan.
2. Although described as a druglord by however wrote this short synapsis, James Franco portrays nothing more than a hillbilly style moonshiner who dabbles with drugs instead of moonshine. Jason Statham does what he does best, portraying a character who is trying to mind his own business, somewhat shy, yet believing what is right.

Rating:

Rotten Tomatoes 42%

IMDb 6.5/10

Peter's 2 Cents 7/10

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The Green Hornet

Following the death of his father, Britt Reid, heir to his father's large company, teams up with his late dad's assistant Kato to become a masked crime fighting team.

Director:

 Michel Gondry

Writers:

 Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg

Stars:

 Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz |

My take on it:

Good movie, if Seth Rogen would not have played in there it would have been a great movie. Jay Chou carried the movie as a cool, calm, and collected side kick. Seth played himself, which was bad enough.
Great use of gizmos and gadget made by Jay, I especially like the espresso machine.
Entertaining for sure.