Mini Movie Reviews 12/15/19

Morning!

This time of year is always bonkers for me. The weather, too, especially as it swings from cold to warm and back again. Then there's squeezing in the holidays while trying to juggle all the year-end accounting projects before the close in January. Since the company is now public again, the amount of requirements for auditors and reporting goes way up!

I hope you guys are having a better time of it! :P

Mini Movie Reviews

Knives Out - This film was a lot more fun than I expected. It's a classic Agatha Christie setup, but then it takes a left turn in an unexpected direction. Secrets, machinations, lies, a ton of details pulling every which way. Even when you think you know what happened, it turns out it wasn't that way at all. Great performances, good twists and turns. There was something odd on the way close-ups were filmed, which made the actors and actresses look off, but this could have been intentional.

Rating: 3.75 out of 4 (Hubby's Rating: Worth Full Price to See Again!)



Jumanji: The Next Level - Hubby had been chomping at the bit to see this one. :P They did a great job showing some of the reasons Spencer chose to try to fix the game and going back inside. Some new people and characters get introduced as Jumanji gets thrown into a bigger crisis than before. The actors doing the avatars get to reinvent themselves as the people behind them have changed. They did such a great job! Awkwafina did a great Granpa Eddie. ROFL.

Some new skills and new weaknesses. The prehistoric ostriches were super cool and scary. Lol.  One extra bit ties the end of the film back to giving homage to the original Jumanji as well as a possible leading to another film! Favorite quote: "You are the worst Bravestone ever!" :P 

Rating: 3.5 out of 4 (Hubby's Rating: Worth Full Price to See Again.)



Have a great week!

Virtual Tourist - Yakuza 0 12/1/19

Mini Movie Reviews

Frozen 2 - there was a lot to love about this sequel. I adored that we got to see how the family was before the scare, which made the parents separate the two girls. They also worked in the lesson from the first film into the second one, which made for a nice progression. The animation was great, and we have new songs to sing. Lol. I enjoyed it a lot! Rating: 3.75 out of 4 (Hubby's Rating: Worth Full Price to See Again!)



Ford vs. Ferrari - Matt Damon and Christian Bale are fab in this film. The rapport between the two men and the difficulties they face came across as natural and with depth. From the quick research I did, this is mostly accurate, with the usual license taken by Hollywood to ramp up the excitement and drama. The one bit I do wish they'd pointed out better is how Ken Miles would have won the European trifecta of racing if he'd not been shafted at Le Mans. He would have been the first man to ever win all three. So sad. Good story, great cinematography, excellent acting, cool racing stunts. Rating: 3.75 out of 4 (Hubby's Rating: Worth Full Price to See Again)

Yakuza 0

The game switches characters and cities. 1980's fictional Okinawa!

See that giant crab sign? They have those for real! The details are amazing.

Side street view of the cabaret club called The Grand. This is where we will meet Majima.

The front entrance to The Grand. Super glitzy!

They have a full-on band! Though it is the '80s, this does take you back to the big clubs from the '40s.

A shot of the clientele at The Grand.

Spotted some nice decorations for Christmas! That's Majima. Did I not take a pic of him? Eek!

Your super general type store - Don Quixote! They have all sorts of stuff for sale. :P

This is shrine tucked away in some narrow streets close to Club Sunshine. The same weird priest with the clown face is here. A place to trade your CP points for goodies and advantages.

This town is chuck full of ritzy clubs. Everyone has money to burn! :P


I keep trying to get myself back on to a regular schedule with posts, but life is all over the place. I hope you and yours had a great Thanksgiving!

Virtual Tourist - Seasons After Fall 11/3/19

Morning all!

Fall is definitely in the air. Temperatures have been chilly all week. It might actually be here to stay!
Due to unforeseen issues at the publisher, Alien Redemption will probably not be available in 2019 but be pushed to early 2020. :(  Editing is progressing. I don't think they've assigned a cover artist yet.

Movie Reviews

Terminator: Dark Fate - A lot of James Cameron's films of late have been not so great, so I went to see this with low expectations. I was very pleasantly surprised - the movie was good!

It picks up after events in Terminator 2 Judgement Day and then leaps forward twenty years or so. Skynet is no more. Now they have to worry about Legion. (Time does not like being messed with.)
Great action, special effects, and acting. There are lots of small surprises. I was impressed with the physical details concerning Grace being a cyborg. You can see the scars around her eyes, her arms, chest, and stomach where they did work on her. There are also divets, small screws, and more. And there is a price to be paid for the enhancements.

The new terminator type sent after Dani was super tough and absorbed information at an alarming rate. I love that they made him a small man, someone who you'd never expect to be able to do what he does. Both a liquid and solid terminator, he makes for a super challenging and scary combo. There were some attacks he could have done that he didn't, but then a future flashback shows his compatriots doing precisely what I thought he should have done. LOL. Guess it would have made his mission too easy then.

Overall, I enjoyed the film a lot. Seeing Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwatzeneger together again was a treat. Bitter old Sarah Conner was a hoot. The film definitely deserves to do better at the box office than it has so far. Rating: 3.5 out of 4. (Hubby's Rating: Worth Full Price to See Again!)

Virtual Tourist

Seasons After Fall

Our true form. This is the Sanctuary.

We are back inside the fox and heading off to the second guardian.

You'll learn that in any of the areas with water, winter is your friend. It is the only way to get across and leap out.

Walking through a hollow log.

The route here is obstructed. There are little creatures you can get to spawn who, depending on the seasons, can be activated to blow them up. :)

Another obstruction. Though later, you learn to play with the steam and ice.

There's a giant feather on the outcropping. Something that will be useful after we meet the second guardian.

The second guardian! Now things are about to get super interesting!

Now we can summon summer by barking twice near the energy ball. The new season affects the little guys, and thus we can make them leave their nest which you can see in the branch to the left.

The tree now has a carving for the second guardian as we make our way back to the Sanctuary.

Stay warm out there!

Virtual Tourist - ABZU 10/27/19

Morning!

October has turned out to be a very chaotic and tiring month. Loads of crazy stuff at work. The weather also just turned, so we've had lower temperatures and rain this week. But is the heat really done with us yet? We shall see!

Mini Movie Reviews

Gemini Man - Hubby and I had thought this would be Will Smith and his son, but it was all Will Smith. The film was great fun. Impressive stunts and fight scenes with some surprising moves. Gorgeous locals and cinematography. They even play with camera perspectives - enough to make it interesting, but not so much it disturbs the viewer. Rating: 3.5 out of 4 (Hubby's Rating: Pay Full Price to See Again!)



The Current War: Director's Cut - I'd never heard of the film until about a week ago. Per IMDB it was initially released in 2017. The title is horrible (If you don't know what it is, you'd think it was an actual war movie.) The film is about Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse and the fight/race to light up the US with either DC or Alternating Current. A lot of history gets sanitized for the history books. Here's a chance to get a taste of what they don't tell you. Great acting, fascinating history, and you get a feel for how truly revolutionary the concepts being thrown about are to the people of that ear. Rating: 3.75 out of 4 (Hubby's Rating: Worth Full Price.)

Virtual Tourist

ABZU

ABZU is a visually stunning puzzle game. The music and art are great, but I will say it was really short (only a little over 3 hrs of gameplay), and the character movement underwater is so awkward that it proved frustrating and horribly distracting from the beauty around you. Just about the time I finally felt I got the hang of it, the game was over. o.O

A fast-moving current underwater.

The awakening.

That's us. You become aware floating facedown in the water.

The first area - there are several species of fish to meet. :)

Each area is different, and through your explorations and solving of puzzles, the area themselves can change. You start getting the feeling something terrible happened here, and you're trying to fix it.

You will find a statue like this in each new area. You can sit on it and meditate. In meditation, the camera will attach to a nearby fish and follow it around, showing you the name on the bottom right.

As you complete the puzzles, you will enter this energy temple area and give energy to it.

The central area of the energy temple.

Once you give the energy for the area you completed, the energy temple will go through a growth sequence.

This occurs after the change at the temple, transforming the garden and releasing new creatures into the sea.


Have a great week!

Virtual Tourist - Seasons After Fall 10/13/19

Morning, all!

Fall seems to have officially arrived here in Texas. Weather flip-flopped, and we went from 100 down to the 70's with one morning being a super chilly 54. But will it stay? :P

Mini Movie Review

The Addams Family - Super adorable and nostalgic film. Even better, they actually show when Morticia and Gomez got married and how Lurch became part of the family. Also, how they found their home. This helps build the neat two-mirror-sided plot of the film when, after 13 years of cutting themselves off from the world, the world pushes back in. The movie was a lot of fun. Rating: 3.5 out of 4 (Hubby's Rating: Worth Full Price to See Again!) (No additional bits in the credits though.)

Virtual Tourist

Season After Fall

This is a super cute 2D game. Short duration (though I've not finished it yet), but super cute and something of a mystery.

I forgot to take any pictures of the energy seed into. DOH. This is where the energy seed (the player) gets integrated into a nearby fox. A young, mysterious voice is asking us to help it with a project.

The integrated fox and seed. If you home in, you can see the fox's eyes now glow. The area on the photo is where the energy seed came out. The four stones and the floor area seem to be all that remains of the ruins of the place.

We're heading off to the first guardian. I am to retrieve a piece from each one.

A beautiful sea to look at on the way.

There ate items to interact with to let you progress in certain areas. For this, you bark. This limb was coiled until you do so. Now I can make the jump! (Some things you run across look like something to use, but you can't yet. There's a reason for that. :P)

Stone totems made by the first guardian. As you come near, their eyes light up.

The first guardian. It seems he sleeps a lot of the time. :P

When you get the shard and try to go back, you find you can't get past a particular area. Something was said to you as a hint, and I was able to work it out. If you bark twice near the shard (it is an energy ball and floats - see the floating blue ball on the left?), the whole weather of the area changes to something else.  So we went from spring to winter! So you change the weather to affect things. A rather ingenious idea for a puzzle game. (The weird thing on the right previously looked like an empty, dead flower pod. Now it will gather and throw out a giant snowball, allowing me to reach the tree limb on the left!)

When I get close to our starting point, the way back towards the just visited guardian is closed.

Once we return to the temple ruins, the young voice has the seed assimilate the energy shard. Then we merge once more with the fox.


Have a great week!

Mini Movie Review 9/29/19

Greetings!

Looks like fall is on its way. But before it gets here, it's been hotter than a griddle around here. Texas is at a boil. :P

Mini Movie Reviews

Ad Astra - a cerebral yet also super action-packed film. It is an external and internal journey for astronaut Roy McBride. Ad Astra is Latin for "to the stars" - around which every facet of Roy's life has revolved. The cinematography is outstanding. The special effects are fantastic. This film has a ton of layers, from the personal to the weird directions society has decided to follow. Several twists and surprising bits. Rating: 3.75 out of 4. (Hubby's Rating: Worth Full Price to See Again.)




Abominable - This film was super adorable! A gorgeous movie, full of amazing panoramic shots. Like "Ad Astra" this one is also an emotional journey as well as physical one for Yi. They too do a couple of unexpected twists, just to keep things interesting. :P The Whoop snake is a hoot. (So is Dave. Lol.) Tons of adorable and cute moments. Some tear generating ones as well. You must sit through the credits as they are full of snapshots of things that happen after the adventure is over. The last one definitely tried to open the waterworks. :P Rating: 3.5 out of 4 (Hubby's Rating: Worth Full Price of Admission.)

We frequent AMC Theaters (if you see a lot of movies, their Stubs Program is for you!) IMAX used to be their top screen experience, but it looks like Dolby has now taken that over. What confused us when we first saw Dolby as one of their new movie experience was that back in the day Dolby referred to an enhanced sound system. But now it's returned as both super-enhanced sound (with some shaking the very air around you) and superior colors and visuals. It just seemed off they'd pick a name from something old for something new. Weird!


Have an awesome week!