A good friend asked if I could recommend a few good films that were available through the Amazon Prime Video program, so I started digging. Now they specifically asked about whether the movies are available for downloading, a cool feature of the Prime program that’s available for some, though not all, movies you can watch through Prime Video. Unfortunately, there’s no list of movies that meet this criterion on the site so it’s up to…Read More
Review: G.I. Joe: Retaliation
Some films require a specific demographic for full enjoyment, and in the action genre, it seems there are a lot aimed at teen boys. A prime example: Gone in Sixty Seconds. It’s not that it’s a horrible movie, it’s just that the storyline is incoherent, the characters are all one-dimensional, the ending is obvious from sixty seconds past the opening titles and the performances are all uninteresting. And the male/female relationships? It couldn’t be more…Read More
Review: Olympus Has Fallen
The previews looked cool. I mean, it’s an audacious concept to have terrorists storm the White House and take the President of the United States hostage. What could go wrong with a fast-paced action movie that has that as the main plot device? The answer is everything. In fact, Olympus Has Fallen has no redeeming qualities at all. From acting to dialog, set pieces to special effects, exterior shots to the pace of edits, just…Read More
Review: Looper
In the closing years of this century, organized crime syndicates have a problem with the standard tactic of threatening to kill someone for not cooperating because it appears that every person on Earth is tracked and can’t die without leaving vital information about their death behind. By a lucky coincidence, however, it turns out that time travel has been invented and while it quickly becomes illegal, it does offer a rather neat solution for the…Read More
Review: The Expendables
Sylvester Stallone! Jason Statham! Randy Couture! Dolph Lundgren! Jet Li! How can you be a fan of action movies and not love the idea of teaming them all up as a mercenary army ready to take on the biggest bad guys in the world? That’s how Stallone undoubtedly lined up the funding for this big, loud mess of a movie. Actually, The Expendables is worse than that, because the first half of the film is…Read More
Review: Surrogates
Some films start out with bad buzz from the get-go and never seem to shake it, even as people actually see the film. The comments end up being “it’s not as bad as I thought it would be” or “ah, it’s okay”. Surrogates had this problem, and it’s because of the star: Bruce Willis. He’s an actor who has had what Hollywood types call a “checkered career”, with some great films (Die Hard, The Sixth…Read More