Night at the Cinema

Altered Carbon Created by Richard K. Morgan If you like Blade Runner, you will like Altered Carbon. This is the thought that dominated my time with Altered Carbon, the latest Netflix Original Series. But now that I think about it, I don't think this show appeals to just fans of Blade Runner. To correct my previous statement; if you like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Deus Ex, Cyberpunk in general, film noir, Firefly, or just creative and interesting ideas and worldbuilding, then you will like this. This show is a combination of things that I like but didn't know how much I would like when put together. It's a cynical view of humanity in the far future, it's a cyberpunk dystopia, it asks deep and philosophical questions, it's very violent, and there's a lot of nudity. What's not to like? The show opens with Takeshi Kovacs, a terrorist and criminal, who is tracked down by a squad of Protectorate soldiers and killed. He wak...

Hostiles Written by Donald E. Stewart and Scott Cooper Directed by Scott Cooper "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer" -D.H. Lawrence Those words from the famous English novelist begin the film as the camera opens to a quiet, remote, almost idyllic farm somewhere in the American West in the late nineteenth-century. A man is hard at work tending to the farm while his wife is teaching her two daughters and caring for her baby. We see several Comanche raiders on horseback, their faces covered in war paint, descend upon the farm. The father rushes inside, instructs his family to run, and grabs a rifle to try and hold off the war party. In a hail of gunfire and war cries he is gunned down and scalped before the mother and her children become targets. To spare the gory details, she narrowly escapes the war party as the sole survivor. Cut to our reveal of Christian Bale, a Union officer who sits on his horse watching as a...

Lethal Weapon Written by Shane Black Directed by Richard Donner I have a long history with 80's action movies. In my opinion, the action movies made from the late 1970's the roughly the mid 90's represent the golden age of action cinema. During this time we saw countless universally praised flicks like the Dirty Harry series (The Dead Pool not withstanding), some of Sylvester Stallone's movies (a personal favorite is the ultra-cheesy and ultra over-the-top Cobra), absolutely anything starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (some standouts are Predator, Commando, Kindergarten Cop and Total Recall), the Die Hard Series, and even Steven Segall's earlier movies. Perhaps one of the best movies of this golden age is the fantastic Lethal Weapon. Lethal Weapon has a lot of star power behind it. Most visible are the two leads, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. But the director, Richard Donner, has a long history in film and television and has directed several cl...