"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘John Brancato’

Trigger Warning

Wednesday, November 20th, 2024

TRIGGER WARNING is a b-action vehicle for Jessica Alba (MACHETE, MECHANIC: RESURRECTION). You don’t see her in big movies anymore but she looks basically the same as you remember and she’s playing a CIA covert ops badass whose father dies, so she comes home to her small town, uncovers a criminal conspiracy and fucks up some motherfuckers.

When I saw the trailer I was thinking it was like how Netflix gave tough lady action vehicles to Allison Janney and Halle Berry and different people. But then it opens with a war scene in Syria and I thought oh no, this is more like a recent made-for-VOD movie that Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke would each have a couple scenes in. That’s the general feel of the thing, and storywise it’s all well-worn tropes, very low on original spins. It’s generic – all the numbers are there, all in order – but slightly above average for this sort of thing. Alba seems very dedicated and is cool in it, so at the bare minimum level of “is it a movie where Jessica Alba beats up a bunch of chumps?” it is successful. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Net

Thursday, July 30th, 2015

tn_thenet

RELEASE DATE: July 28
RELEASE DATE: July 28

In THE NET, Sandra Bullock (DEMOLITION MAN) plays Angela Bennett, a loner computer expert who becomes The Beta Tester Who Knew Too Much when a colleague stumbles across a backdoor being used to enter major databases and sends her a disk to take a look at.

Bullock spends alot of the movie saying out loud what she’s pretending to type. Angela mostly stays indoors, and most of her friends are either software company people in other parts of the country that she talks to over the phone, or people in “Cyberchat.” This being 1995, with dial up modems and floppy disks, that was still a pretty new idea, as was her ordering a pizza online (which I would still never do myself in this futuristic age). Of course it’s a movie that plays up the exoticism of computers and the internet, and heavily bullshits it up. The backdoor creates a rapid burst of screens of information that computers back then couldn’t have handled and that have no possible use except movie flashiness. A virus is instantly identifiable because it turns what’s on the screen into little shapes as it quickly destroys the system. Call it the Photoshop Mosaic Filter Virus. So it’s a goofy mix of dated technology and not-feasible-at-that-time. (read the rest of this shit…)