Last Movie/TV Show Watched and/or Movie/Show Picks/Reviews.

[NightWolve]

Gotta give an enthusiastic thumbs up to "Mad Max: Road Fury!" It stars Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy as Mad Max. You might not realize it, but Tom Hardy also played the villain "Bane" in "The Dark Knight Rises (2012)," the final Batman movie in Christoper Nolan's rebooted and respectable trilogy.

rottentomatoes.com/m/mad_max_fury_road/

Now, you know if Rotten Tomatoes gives a friggin' action movie a 98%, chances are it's worth watching!!! That immediately got my attention about this one! I'm quite skeptical of movie critics - I take their opinion with careful review. I've gotten a sense that they develop grudges at certain directors, producers and/or actors, and so they'll shit on something if said person was involved in the movie because of it... So there's a politics at work there. It could be a great popcorn movie on the merits, but one issue here or there, and they'll poop all over it! I also find that they're usually the hardest on the action movie genre where the theme is primarily shit blowing up and what not, so when I saw a 98% review score on there, I couldn't friggin' believe it... Did hell freeze over I thought ? So I knew this one was on my to-watch list for sure and it DOES indeed deliver!! Another aspect that is really interesting to me is that George Miller/Miliotis, the original director of all the Mad Max movies, actually got to direct this one too!!! I would not have expected that the original guy from 1979 had something to do with this, and heck, he hit it out of the ballpark, it did well, and recovered its production budget by the US sales alone, $373,374,961 worldwide! And since it succeeded, he got the greenlight for another one, so good for him on that too! See it! Now! The End.

[NightWolve]

Pan, another Peter Pan remake.

So I wondered about this given the bad reviews and I understand partly why... Early in the movie after pirate Captain Blackbeard captures Peter Pan from his WWII era orphanage, all of Blackbeard's pirates, slave miners, he himself, (thousands of people), break out into a...Nirvana song of all things...

Yes, Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" serves as the pirates' anthem believe it or not...  And they sing the lyrics very clearly making it the first time I ever made sense of the song... This out of place song sort of reminded me of Christian Slater saying "F--k me..." in Kevin Costner's Robinhood when he's sprung over the castle wall. It was funny but technically out of place for the time period.

Ultimately I did like the movie despite the weirdness of finding a Nirvana song in it. It's a very interesting back story exploring Peter Pan and Captain Hook starting out as friends/allies against Blackbeard, so it did do other things right and I don't think it deserved to be the major flop disaster that it was...

Hook was played by Garrett Hedlund who also played Sam Flynn in Tron Legacy. I like him but I think he had a so so performance in this, his acting was passable though a bit stiff...

Anyway, I would recommend the movie despite the negative reviews and issues. It does have some level of movie magic and is respectable.

[JoeQuaker]

My only complaint with new Mad Max was that unlike the original movie, the story wasn't centered around Max himself so much. A more fitting title might have been "Mad Max & Friends".

[NightWolve]

https://www.netflix.com/title/80097140
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon
http://www.metacritic.com/tv/altered-carbon

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/altered_carbon/s01/

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/altered-carbon-review-netflix-spins-up-a-new-cyber/1100-6456241/

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/2/12/17004210/altered-carbon-netflix-blade-runner-aesthetic-cyberpunk-retro-futurismWatched season one of a new NetFlix show, Altered Carbon, which may or may not be renewed. It has SciFi elements of Blade Runner, Matrix, Fifth Element, and some Zardoz given it explores quasi immortality if you're rich enough to keep clones around, periodically "back up" your brain contents to an implanted storage device, etc.

Season one is only 10 episodes so you can watch the whole thing over the weekend. I enjoyed it well enough although the plot could've used some more work. It's mostly a hardboiled detective/cop kind of show.

There are some SciFi cameos like the Max Headroom actor who plays a weird host of an underground fightclub ring, and Daniel Bernhardt who plays a type of relentless space cop/soldier - he's the cheap Jean Claude Van Damme knockoff who did "Bloodsport 2," and the main sunglass-wearing Matrix agent in "Matrix: Reloaded" since "Mr. Smith" went rogue.

Anyway, you won't be blown away or anything, I don't think, but it kept me very interested all the way through so definitely worth checking out for the casual SciFi movie fan. I give it a thumbs up!