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jongleur
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Rage of the Yeti (2011)
Works for me!
Another low-budget Syfy feature, better than most due to some humorous interplay between the leads; David Chakochi and Matthew Kevin Anderson. Face it, like most Syfy feature movies, it suffers from a lack of money, so the CGI is primitive, the cast is made up of lesser-known actors, and the story isn't the strongest.
I'm a big fan of low-budget productions, they test and hone the skills of the entire crew. When they manage to overcome the limitations and produce something that is entertaining enough to sit through an hour and half, I consider that a credit to their abilities. This movie passed that test, maybe not with flying colors, but good enough so that nobody associated with this movie should be ashamed to have it on their resume.
Along the way, they managed to pay homage to other, bigger successes in the genre, notably references to the Stargate franchise and Farscape. Good enough!
Gravity (2013)
Wrong Stars
Overall, I thought this was a pretty good movie, but I found myself far more engaged by the character portrayal and acting performance given by George Clooney as Matt Kowalski than I was by Sandra Bullock's performance as Ryan Stone. Some of this is due to some lame-brained thinking by the writers, the rest is Sandra's fault.
**Spoiler Follows** To start with, 'Ryan Stone' is unprepared for her mission. Back in my day, I was a member of an aircrew, and Emergency Procedures were drilled into us to the point where you could have wakened one of us from a sound sleep and we would have recited the right thing to do from rote, and when something really happened during a flight we didn't hesitate in our responses. Ryan questions, then delays acting on the clear instructions from Mission Control and from her team-mates aboard the Space Station. While one could quibble as to what the effects of those delayed actions might have in the way the emergency played out, no one who ever went thorough that sort of training would question that someone who exhibited the attitude that she did would have washed out in training, well before ever going aboard the ISS.
Beyond that, Sandra's performance was stiff and generally not conducive to encouraging me to feel sympathetic to her plight.
On the other hand, George Clooney as Matt Kowalski was great. If you listen to and watch old footage of the conversations between Mission Control and the astronauts that they had to deal with, Matt's/George's 'voice' rings true. The combination of relaxed professionalism, humor and 'the drawl' that so many of them learned, is perfectly captured by George Clooney, and I found it easy to fall into the belief that he had trained right alongside the likes of Chuck Yeager, Wally Schirra and John Glenn.
The technical effects were superb, I saw the film in 3D and the debris flying into my face made me flinch more than a few times. The spectacle of the Earth slowly gliding beneath the camera, along with the effort to convey the silence you'd encounter when atmosphere is absent also added to the atmosphere, making it easy for me to believe that I was right there with the action.
I was somewhat disappointed in the bad science that allowed them to move from station to station, pretty much completely violating all the laws of orbital physics, but I'll chalk that one up to artistic license. Without that license, the movie would have been nothing more than a rewrite of Tom Godwin's great SciFi short story "The Cold Equations".
**Spoiler Follows** My one thought as I left the theater was "Really? You HAD to kill off the one character I believed in, and let the other live?"
Escape Plan (2013)
Good popcorn movie
I went into the theater expecting pretty much what I got. Two hours of watching Stallone and Schwarzenegger gently sparring with each other while attempting to break out of a supposedly unbreakable prison, with some nefarious types responsible for them being there. Both of them have secrets, and they only slowly reveal their secrets to each other, while both are attempting to just stay alive as well as seeking a way to escape. The rest of the prisoners get short-shrift for the most part, they are generally only caricatures with no real attempt to provide any character development.
The acting is okay, pleasant seeing John Caviezel in another role, in some ways similar to his current persona on Person of Interest. I will almost certainly watch this film again when it get out on DVD or shows on television. And will almost certainly have a bowl of popcorn in my lap when I do.
Virus (1999)
Derivative No-Brainer
This awful techno-thriller brought me nothing new for my $7. Most of the little droids looked like they had been stolen directly from the set of "Runaway", and all of the big ones resembled mish-mashed clones of electronics and the alien queen from the "Alien" saga. Crew members Kit Foster (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Steve Baker (Alec Baldwin) never seem to wake to their peril, and Capt. Everton (Donald Sutherland) never develops out of a standard evil/greedy freighter captain. The one pretty good role belonged to Nadia (Joanna Pacula), the lone survivor of the striken Russian satellite monitoring ship most of this movie is played out on. Try as I might, I could not find any reason why a sentient computer virus would care to get dropped into this dull movie, surely there have got to be more intelligent plots it could have wreaked havoc upon!