Posts Tagged movie reviews

4 results.

Friends of 9to5 – Jimmy Returns!

by on February 2, 2017 at 8:29 am
Posted In: Other podcasts, Podcast, Podcasting

Jimmy (a Jason by any other name) returns to the podcast and he has a major announcement/reveal. The absolute mad man has watched every single film on “The List” and he’s got a few ideas to share with Scott and I. He also talks about his new and fresh project with Scott that kicked off this week “Know More Than You” where he and Scott have seeded 96 cartoons and will be slowly weeding through them to determine what is the best cartoon of all time. Fun times! Enjoy the show kids!9es jan 2017 friends

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

The bed music during our advertising is an old loop by Dan of Steel!

The bed music while we explain what the episode is about is Son of a Bit “Chased by a Running Chupacabra” used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Finally, the song we use in the intro is “Shiny Spaceship” by the 8-bit Ninjas.  Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek.

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Comments Off on Friends of 9to5 – Jimmy Returns!

Fantasia Movie Review: Vessel

by on July 19, 2013 at 7:26 pm
Posted In: Fantasia, Movies, Scott, Summer Festivals

“Vessel” is playing July 28, 5:35 PM at the J.A. De Seve Theatre.

poster3Directed by Adam Ciancio, who also wrote the screenplay, Vessel is a science fiction movie that examines the human cost of being the protagonist in a shared universe.

Okay, the plot. Ash (played by Marc Diaco) has been receiving messages from aliens, directly into his mind, since he was a young child. He has been mandated to pass on the messages he receives to a government handler, in secret, and then go on with his life. But the years of this otherworldly task have taken their toll on Ash, and he’s beginning to feel himself slip away. He’s blacking out, he’s lost his sense of taste, and now he’s losing his ability to feel emotions. At what point does does his life outweigh his humanity? Ash now has to decide what to do, and try and chase down the last hope of saving himself before it’s too late.

That’s the short of it, without getting to spoiler-y.

Okay, a few things about this movie before getting you too excited about it. It is a character study. Ash is in every scene of the movie, and you’re going to watch him wrestle with his issues for the whole of the movie. The movie is very deliberately paced, and it takes all the time it needs to get where it’s going. The acting in the movie is dramatic, serious, and grabs that one emotional chord and hits it again and again in a driving dirge of angst and worry.

Despite all of this, and because of all this, it was a great film.

Ash comes across perfectly as a man who may be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, or may have just lost his mind. The acting by Diaco is so pitch-perfect that he keeps the viewer walking that line with him from start to finish. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

Netflix Movie Review – 2012: Ice Age

by on July 16, 2013 at 10:35 pm
Posted In: Movies, Scott

I’m continuing my series of film reviews for movies that are available on Netflix Canada. I watch a lot of it since I’ve signed up, and I’ll share my thoughts here.

2012: Ice Age, directed by Travis Fort continues the long line of movies that are made to capitalize on another movies marketing expenditures by making a similar film, but with a fraction of the budget. Much like Asteroid, which was released following Armageddon and Deep Impact, 2012: Ice Age tries to cozy itself up to 2012 (the one with John Cusack) and The Day After Tomorrow (the one with Jake Gyllenhaal). It’s main failing, I suppose, is that it didn’t cast a lead actor with an equally famous sister.

I’m kidding. It’s main failing was it’s plot, casting, acting, budget, and special effects.

Seriously gang, this movie is bad. I watching from end to end, and it never paid off. I mean, this movie is in the same category as The Beast (William Peterson vs a giant squid, by the way, is only a little bit better because of his stint on CSI).

2012: Ice Age’s plot is that a series of volcanoes in the north Atlantic dislodge a giant glacier from, I dunno, Greenland I guess, and send it racing down the eastern seaboard at two-hundred miles an hour, destroying everything in it’s path. A scientist (is he a geologist? A meteorologist? It’s never clearly explained…) races to save his family by taking them from Maine to New York and ultimately… New Jersey.

As he’s driving, Boston is destroyed. The United States tries to obliterate the glacier with nuclear weapons, they fail, and millions more die. Off camera, of course.

It also snows a lot because glaciers are made of ice, so a glacier racing around in the summer would make it snow. Bill Nye’s tears made up a large percentage of the ice in this giant evil glacier. A good 75% of this film is obscured by computer generated snow falling in front of the screen, and the film demonstrates how impossibly cold it is outside by having one actor wear a toque. The rest of them don’t even do up their coats. 

Ugh, I can’t even go on. Here’s the trailer:

Do not be fooled, the trailer is exciting and campy. This movie is neither. It is ripe for riff-trax/mst3k. I give it 0.5 Robot Jox’s out of 5.

└ Tags: , , , , , ,
Comments Off on Netflix Movie Review – 2012: Ice Age

Netflix Movie Review: The River Murders

by on July 14, 2013 at 10:12 am
Posted In: Movies, Scott

I watched “The River Murders” directed by Rich Cowan and starring Ray Liotta, Ving Rhames and Christian Slater. It’s a 2011 crime thriller that I guess went straight to DVD before ending up on Netflix Canada. There is no image of a movie poster on the internet, just of a DVD cover. Figuring this out makes me kind of like a detective, and puts me head and shoulders above the detectives in this film.

Look, I knew I wasn’t getting into the greatest of movies here. My hopes were that Liotta could carry one or two scenes, Slater would ham it up a bit, and Rhames could sort of tie it together with some intensity, but none of that happened. Ray Liotta plays his role as a detective with all the drive of a substitute teacher, Christian Slater’s FBI agent should is more Hollywood celebrity roast guest that a fed, and Ving Rhames plays one note in every scene he’s in. The supporting cast is as bland and formless as the headliners, so the acting and complete lack of direction drags this move to hell.

The worst part of it all is that the script isn’t half-bad. There is a real mystery here, one that does have a few twists and turns, and when the killer is revealed, it makes sense. He’s got motivations, a real reason to desire revenge and it leads nicely to a conflict with the protagonists of the story.

Looking at the DVD cover, the quote “Not since Seven has a deadly sin been this terrifying.” by Nathan Swank of flix66.com really grabbed me. So I went to flix66 and looked up Nathan Swank’s profile. Sadly, the review for The River Murders isn’t even up on the site, so I can’t see what led Swank to call this movie terrifying. Because it’s not. It’s slow. It’s plodding. It occasionally stages grizzly murder scenes, but those pale in comparison to any scene shown on CSI, CSI: Miami, or CSI:NY. It’s not even disturbing, and I have a low tolerance for gore and torture-porn. Nathan Swank can’t be trusted here.

I watched this movie from beginning to end so you don’t have to.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

└ Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Comments Off on Netflix Movie Review: The River Murders