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Posts Tagged ‘Josh Friedman’

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Friday, May 17th, 2024

I am a human, but I love those apes and that planet they got. I really have enjoyed the entire PLANET OF THE APES series except for the Tim Burton one. Even that has amazing Rick Baker makeup and a beautifully goofy ending (that everyone else hates). But the original and all its ‘70s sequels are fun in different ways, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES reinvented it surprisingly well, then DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES pushed this incarnation into full on greatness.

This new one KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES builds off of the previous trilogy, but somebody could start here if they wanted to. I was surprised by the prologue, showing the funeral for central character Caesar (with a cameo by Maurice!). But it tells you all you need to know: that a virus made apes smarter, killed most of the humans, and Caesar was the first leader of the apes, but now he’s dead. This story takes place “many generations later,” when apes have established different settlements with their own cultures and Caesar is revered as “the first elder.” (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Fantasy/Swords, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 36 Comments »

Terminator: Dark Fate

Monday, November 4th, 2019

I love THE TERMINATOR, but I love TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY. To me it’s one of the all time greats of sequels, summer event movies, action movies, movies in general. It came into the world at the right time to knock me on my ass, and has only grown with me. We’d never seen a movie like it; the technology had not existed for a character to do the things that the liquid metal T-1000 did, and no woman, not even Ripley in James Cameron’s own ALIENS, had returned to the screen as thoroughly transformed into an indelible badass as Sarah Connor.

At the time it seemed like the biggest, loudest, most over-the-top and technologically advanced action spectacle we’d ever seen. Now there’s a certain quaintness and groundedness to it. The then-show-stopping computer effects are only for a little bit of morphing – now we notice the huge amount of real stunts involving a semi-truck, motorcycles, a helicopter and various pyrotechnics that would never be so real in a modern movie. And the story is built on characters and emotions in a way that’s much more resonant to me than most subsequent movies of this type. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 118 Comments »

Summer Movie Flashback: War of the Worlds

Wednesday, August 28th, 2013

tn_waroftheworlds

2006
2005

Wow – WAR OF THE WORLDS holds up. I remember it being the most intense PG-13 movie ever, but I thought maybe with the escalation of that rating since the Joker stabbed a guy with a pencil in DARK KNIGHT maybe it wouldn’t seem as harsh by today’s standards.

Nope. This movie is a fuckin nightmare! It starts as an anxiety dream (oh shit, what if my kids come over and I show up late and forgot to clean up and my ex-wife and her husband see that I don’t have any food and…) then one of those ones where you see weird shit in the sky (a strange electrical storm) and in the distance (3-legged alien attack machines), and then it’s a disaster one (mobs attacking your car at night, thousands of people trying to climb onto the same ferry), then a war one (running into the hills at night as tanks roll in the other direction) and then a more intimate things-that-go-bump-in-the-night one (alien in the basement). All of this executed with the classic Steve Spielberg filmatistic chops.

(read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 135 Comments »

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