Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips, Selected Reviews 2014, Volume One

By Stephen Bourne

Funny. Smart. Entertaining. Your best new ebook for movie lovers, from the website of hundreds of reviews enjoyed worldwide since 2002. Find Hollywood blockbusters, Canadian independents and a few surprises well worth checking out. Do yourself a favour and grab your copy today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Bourne
• Release date: Dec 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780969984337

Stephen Bourne

From moviequips.ca: "Stephen Bourne is just a guy who loves screening movies and writing about them. He has appeared on TV, radio and in print, and is one of Canada's first web-based unaccredited movie reviewers to have simultaneously been a member of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Online Film Critics Society and Rotten Tomatoes, as well as listed on the Internet Movie Database. Weird. Stephen lives in Ottawa, Canada with his wife."

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Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips

Selected Reviews 2014

Volume One

Copyright Stephen Bourne

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Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips, Selected Reviews 2014, Volume One, is written, edited, published and copyrighted by Stephen Bourne. All graphics and content of this publication are the property of Stephen Bourne, unless obviously not and/or attributed otherwise. World rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit the author’s Smashwords page and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

First edition ebook. Published December 2013.

ISBN 978-0-9699843-3-7

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Dark Skies

Dead Man Down

Despicable Me 2

Epic

Escape From Planet Earth

The Family

The Great Gatsby

Home Again

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Iron Man 3

Jack the Giant Slayer

Knife Fight

The Lesser Blessed

Machete Kills

Mama

Man of Steel

Monsters University

Not Fade Away

Now You See Me

Oblivion

Pacific Rim

Pain & Gain

Parker

Special 26

Stand Up Guys

Star Trek Into Darkness

Temptation

Trance

World War Z

Zero Dark Thirty

12 Years A Slave

About the author

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Dark Skies (2013)

USA, 95 min

Keri Russell stars as struggling California realtor Lacy Barrett who quickly discovers her quiet Franklin County suburban home and family have become the target of inexplicably bizarre occurrences that her youngest son Sam (played by Kadan Rockett) blames on a night visitor he calls The Sandman - one of three shadowy extraterrestrials haunting them - in this poorly written and easily forgettable alien abduction stinker from writer/director Scott Stewart. It co-stars Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo, and L.J. Benet, as Lacy's laid off architect husband Dan, their 13 year-old eldest boy Jesse, and Jesse's delinquent bud Kevin respectively.

Despite what moviegoers might hope for going in, Dark Skies isn't a particularly good ghost story where Stewart's paper-thin screenplay replaces ghosts with extraterrestrials. Clever idea. Badly realized. All you see for the most part is the psychological unraveling of this dull family as their awareness of what's happening to them clarifies with (for them) terrifying results. Remember M. Night Shyamalan's tragically lame 2002 alien invasion movie Signs? Yeah, this one's an even weaker cousin of that one: All suspense, no scares. None. Even the few glimpses of the film's tall and skinny, sausage-headed aliens feel anti-climactic. Just like the cliché ending. Awful.

J.K. Simmons is the only highlight here, making a couple of brief, stoic appearances as a kind of David Jacobs/Budd Hopkins-like alien abduction expert named Edwin Pollard, lending explanations and warnings to the Barretts later on. When Dan finally starts to believe and asks, What's so special about us? Pollard replies, Nothing, telling Dan and Lacy they're little more than lab rats to those malevolent E.T.s. However, unlike Communion (1989) or Fire In The Sky (1993), this feature neither claims nor attempts to specifically reenact what self-professed alien abductees have insisted actually happened to them. I can't imagine anyone who takes ufology or any aspect of it seriously being particularly satisfied with this movie.

Along with being a boring and utterly pointless flick from beginning to closing credits, the most aggravating aspect of Dark Skies is how often what's presented makes no real sense. For instance, after being told of physical evidence resembling abuse experienced by their sons, Lacy and Dan being the desperately concerned parents they are react by worrying about what friends and the authorities think. We never see them tend to Sam's and Jesse's injuries. This kind of ridiculousness happens time and again, mainly during the times when the Barretts aren't summarily reduced to twitching, slack-jawed meat puppets momentarily tormented by alien mind control. At least some of those scenes are so cheesy they're funny.

The premise is promising, but Dark Skies is so forgettably disappointing that it's hardly worth the price of admission for fans of alien invasion movies or of flicks that go bump in the night. Reviewed 02/13, copyright Stephen Bourne.

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Dead Man Down (2013)

USA, 117 min

Colin Farrell stars in this hopelessly cobbled crime-drama-romance-blackmail-revenge- snoozefest from acclaimed Danish director Niels Arden Oplev. Oplev is acclaimed because he last directed the acclaimed Swedish blockbuster Män som hatar kvinnor, also acclaimed as the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009). Hollywood acclaimed the mountain of money that one made so much, it was remade in English a couple of years later starring James Bond, Mark Zuckerberg's movie ex-girlfriend, Bootstrap Bill and old Captain Von Trapp. It won an Oscar out of its five Academy Award nominations. Impressed yet? You shouldn't be. Oplev didn't direct the remake; he instead directed this waste of time and talent.

Dead Man Dumb, uh, Down, tries desperately to be too many things from beginning to closing credits. It starts off as an entertaining, high octane hornets’ nest of hate and bullets ripping across the screen, but then quickly fizzles into being little more than a goofy, cripplingly dull tete-a-tete of enigmatic body language, awkward silence and ridiculous twists from left field that all attempt to resemble a psychological thriller. It fails. Miserably. Numbingly. Dead Man Lame, uh, Down, is cinematic brain freeze for action film fans. It's not much better as film noir, either. That's due in large part to Oplev ineptly handling the ambitious subtleties of unspoken dialogue clearly coming from J.H. Wyman's amateurishly wobbly screenplay in scene after scene.

Sure, the basic premise has potential: Farrell's otherwise