The best Resident Evil movie in my opinion! Quiet enjoyable, fast-paced and a lot of action. I would recommend this flick although the plot still has not very much depth...
Good start. Gonna be a hit
Buddy Cop genre at it's finest.
Marco seems like a much more interesting character in this season then in the last one
Oscar Isaac. WOW! The man deserves some kind of award.
James Bond number 5! No one can stop us now!
An American space shuttle gets swallowed by a mysterious other space thing. Tensions rise between the US and the USSR. Bond is sent to Japan to follow a lead and investigate further.
Oddly enough I reviewed this just over a year ago. It’s worth a read since I will be trying not to repeat myself here.
This was supposed to be Connery’s last film as Bond. He was allegedly tiring of the role and it shows. Not a surprise that he didn’t return for the next film.
In fact, everything about You Only Live Twice indicates that the franchise is beginning to show signs of fatigue. Yes, it’s a ‘bigger’ film but it pushes the boundaries of plausibility too far. There are so many gadgets and crazy things happening. It feels stupid rather than cool or entertaining.
Roald Dahl penned the script and was unable to base it on the book, because the book doesn’t actually contain much material! Instead, panicking about what to do, he wrote what can only be described as a Dr. No remake. The problem is, Dr. No wasn’t that long ago.
Ironically enough the film starts with MI6 faking Bond’s death so that he can fool SPECTRE, yet this doesn’t affect the plot at all. The worst we get is mild surprise from SPECTRE; hardly enough to warrant naming the whole thing You Only Live Twice.
There are a few memorable elements to the film though, notably the appearance of ‘Little Nellie’, Bond’s tiny gyrocopter he uses to recon the volcano. It’s also the first time we see SPECTRE-chief Blofeld, but this is a bit of a wasted opportunity as it turns out to be an anti-climax. I’m not sure it was a good idea ever showing his face.
The set design, although again reminiscent of Dr. No, is big and brash. Apparently the hollowed out volcano set at Pinewood could be seen for miles around. It’s also a little flimsy and lacking in depth. Looks great from afar, but when we get closer things are wobbly and bit rough around the edges. Some of the vehicles are clearly just painted tractors.
You Only Live Twice shows us that Bond films require a surprising amount of talent and care to do well. It tries to fly on a big budget and lots of explosions, yet ultimately fails to make an impact.
From my site http://benoliver999.com/film/2015/05/16/youonlylivetwice.html
The movie is pretty much a satire about Hollywood world but is also about the rise and fall of a star. Times change, so movies change too. And the ones that in one day are the better the prettiest and the most famous in the other day could be forgotten.
The screenplay is very well written and the acting by everyone was very good. But Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond steals the show! She portrays the forgotten star from silent films, all she wants is to be famous again and that desire drove her to madness. We can really believe in her madness and she is pretty scary! A great performance from her.
Great classics like this will never get old. Need to see more from Billy Wilder.
Is it just me or is the plot hard to follow? Maybe I haven't paid enough attention...
I was really enjoying this movie but I gotta say that I found the final minutes, when Tom starts reading the names and the piano notes start playing and then the orchestral music swells up while the people stand up, to be on the cheesy side, to be honest.
Despite loving Matt Berry to death I found this to be a rather weak episode, that just goes to show how well the gang usually works together.
I just hope Mark Hamill's involvement isn't limited to this episode.
[8.5/10] I’ve said it before, and I imagine I’ll say it again -- Star Trek is a surprisingly luddite show for a series so steeped in the potential and possibility of the technology of the future. Every time the Enterprise crew runs into some sort of artificial intelligence (which is roughly once every five episodes) there’s endless meditations on how all the ones and zeroes in the world just cannot capture the soul of man, and how well-meaning A.I. invariably goes wrong.
But what sets “The Ultimate Computer” apart -- and what sets virtuoso Trek scribe D.C. Fontana’s scripts apart as a general rule -- is that it focuses on the effect the M5, a computer that can potentially guide an entire ship all by itself, has on the people who made it, who service it, and who will possibly be replaced by it. The episode is not simply founded on ideas of “robots = bad” (though there’s some of that too, certainly) -- it’s rooted in how everyone involved is affected by the prospect of computers rising to the level of humans in their capabilities, or perhaps even surpassing it.
That makes “The Ultimate Computer,” with the attendant fears of automation that are baked into its premise, still very relevant fifty years later. There were understandable insecurities at the time the episode was made that the rise of these new machines would put the old flesh and blood workers out of a job. (There’s a funny All in the Family episode about this same fear.) To some degree, those fears were warranted, with automation in factories and other parts of the manufacturing sector.
But here in 2017, the world is being Moneyball’d; big data is providing the next big breakthroughs; A.I.s are beating our champions in jeopardy and driving cars on their own and even raining death down from above with drone strikes. The same insecurities that fuel “The Ultimate Computer” are very much present today, and that fact makes the episode seem both prescient in how the concerns it identifies are still relevant, but also a bit overblown considering we’ve had these same conversations for fifty years and seen the world tick up for the better.
Still, apart from the fascinating (a word I hesitate to use given McCoy’s playfully meta-prohibition on Spock saying it) social commentary aspect of the episode, what really struck about “The Ultimate Computer” is its focus on character motivations.
That starts with Kirk. He’s the fulcrum for those automation anxieties, thinking out loud with McCoy about whether he’s resistant to the M5 because of concerns about its abilities to function or whether he’s instead sublimating his own fears about being replaced, whether he’s taking natural precautions on new technology or being unduly reluctant given all that the duotronic computer has allowed the Federation to do. It creates layers in Kirk’s reactions when things inevitably start out right and then go wrong, and Shatner actually plays those shades pretty well, whether it’s his self-questioning with Bones or his almost cheerful resignation to being called a dunsil and seemingly consigned to the scrap heap.
But it ends with Daystrom. To the extent “The Ultimate Computer” has one, he’s the villain of the episode (and as it’s neat to meet the namesake of The Daystrom Institute) but he’s not treated as a mustache-twirling baddie or even the usual incompetent Starfleet potentate. Instead, he’s depicted is a man with a dream, someone who had a breakthrough in his twenties and has been struggling in vain to match it the rest of his life.
He wants to deliver the benefits of space travel and exploration without the risks posed by sending people hurtling through space and confronting hostile creatures. That’s not crazy, given the number of scrapes the Enterprise alone has had to make it through. But he also treats M5 as his child, something accentuated by impressing his own n-grams into its circuits. Daystrom isn’t just hopeful and a true believer about the benefits that this technology will bring to humanity -- he is invested in it as his creation, as an offspring of sorts, excusing its behavior until it becomes too much for him to bear. He is a proud papa when the M5 is succeeding, mastering transportation, away team rosters, and even war games.
Of course, that spirals out into the usual Asimov-like business of taking the well-meaning directive -- “preserve yourself” -- and turning that into an overzealous license to kill and destroy starships it misperceives at threats. But what works about the way that Kirk disables the M5 after it proves dangerous, and what distinguishes it from all the other times that Kirk has felled some evil robot with an oversimplified paradox, is that it’s rooted in something ironically very human.
He relies on the parts of Daystrom’s ethical code molded into the M5 and disarms his mechanical foe not by using logic, but by presenting him with a moral quandary. There is irony and poetry in defeating a robot who seems inhuman in its disregard for the value of life (or at least a very generous definition of self-defense) by teaching it the horror of what it’s done and having it effective give its own life as penance. It’s sort of deeply thought, affecting take on this whizbang world of lasers and spacemen that makes Star Trek more than just a rollicking adventure in the cosmos.
Of course, the episode ends with Kirk reaffirming the value of human beings in the usual, trite manner, in this case talking about how he banked on the commodore’s compassion in a way a computer would not, and reiterating the “computers can’t feel, man” tack that the show’s taken before. But it also ends with the show finding its balance, as it often does, in Spock.
One of the most touching moments in the episode (and one that frankly feels a little out of character), is Spock reassuring Kirk that whatever his fascination with computers, he’ll always be loyal to and appreciative of his captain and the ship couldn’t run without him. He doesn’t say it in so many words, but in his own Spockian way, it offers Kirk exactly what he needs to know and hear right then. And in the episode’s final moments, Spock explains that even he, much more embracing of the possibilities of artificial intelligence and embracing of efficiency, does not think they’re better than humans.
That’s the cinch. As much as “The Ultimate Computer* goes Frankenstein’s Monster with the M5 here, there is an affirmation, that the balance between technology and human labor is an important one -- than man needs the tools to allow him to fly, as Kirk himself once put it, to improve his lives and create greater possibilities, but that even the most stoic and open-minded person on the Enterprise isn’t ready to trade in his friends for those tools. The fears of being replaced are natural, as are the worries that technology gone wrong could prove a catastrophe, but in suggesting some manner of symbiosis, the idea that technology and humanity can grow together (and I don’t mean you, Borg Collective), there is still the sense of optimism and measured potential that undergirds the everlasting ethos of Star Trek, and all that followed from it.
[5.4/10] “Hey viewers, did you know that the Vietnam War is bad? Or wait, maybe it’s a necessary evil? Actually...uh...we’re not sure, but we’re hoping you’ll be distracting by this evil witch lady slinking around enough that you won’t actually think about it too hard and notice that this episode is kind of incoherent.”
Look, I can’t start every damn Star Trek write-up with an acknowledgment that times have changed since 1967 and social and political norms will read very differently someone watching this show in 2017 that they did fifty years ago. But still, the obvious allegory for Vietnam, and (sigh) once again the gender politics of the episode, play much different now and it makes “A Private Little War” come off as very dated and even backward.
Let’s start with the problems inherent to the episode regardless of the times, though. It is a very loud and blunt episode about what it’s referencing. If it wasn’t already clear that the Federation and the Klingons giving the locals weapons and setting them against one another was an allegory for Vietnam, Kirk and Bones have a conversation specifically discussing it to make sure you get it. I try not to be all-in on subtlety -- there’s soom for directness in art -- but if the show were being anymore hamfisted about what it was commenting on it would have just been forty-four minutes of Gene Roddenbery reading an essay entitled “Vietnam: My Thoughts.”
The other big problem with that is that the episode was nigh-incoherent, or at least a little contradictory about the point it wanted the audience to take from this. On the one hand, there’s a “war is a terrible terrible thing” message to the episode that is pretty loud and clear, with Kirk wanting to do everything possible to instill the importance of peace. But then he’s just as gung ho that balance of power is the only way to preserve these things and totally willing to give his favored locals guns to fight the Klingons (rather than, I don’t know, taking away all the modern, or at least more modern, technology from the opposing locals?). The show seemed to be at odds with itself -- damning war on one side and claiming that arming our Vietnamese allies was a necessary evil on the other.
Those two thoughts aren’t incompatible, but it does seem like a weird peacenik-meets-”war is inevitable” perspective for the show to take. If anything, it makes me wonder if there wasn’t some network censorship or arm wrestling matches in the writers’ room that led to some degree of hedging. The one point the episode harps on to an embarrassing degree is how this sort of conflict spoils an otherwise idyllic paradise. Again, if you weren’t sure that Star Trek wanted you to understand that the escalating conflict between the locals was regrettable, Kirks facepalm-worthy line about needing “twenty snakes for the Garden of Eden” lays it on thicker than an offensive lineman at an all you can eat buffet.
Speaking of Kirk, this is a notably poor outing for William Shatner, which, man is saying something. The acting, if you can call it that, that he delivers when he’s supposed to be in shock from the unicorn yeti attack, is just third grade play-level bad. Speaking of which, I realize a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief is necessary with this show, but the alien sasquatch looked more like a community college mascot than a fearsome presence, which really weakened any supposed tension in these scenes.
And then there’s Nona...
Let’s get this out there. Nancy Kovack does a great job as a guest actress here. She commands the screen, gives you different shades of what could easily be a flat character, and chews the scenery a bit but makes it work as an outsized character in a ham-fisted episode. She does everything that’s asked of her and does it well and, in principle, Nona should be one of the most redeeming aspect of this one.
But man, the femme fatale/manipulative witch routine is really uncomfortable. To some degree, this is just Star Trek tapping into the Lady MacBeth vibe it’s employed from time to time, but it feels off here, like Nona is written as little more than a conniving temptress who will do anything for power. She’s like a non-comedic Tammy 2 from Parks and Recreation.
Then there’s the scene where a bunch of locals try to rape her and it’s played for cheap drama, with her being killed in what plays like it’s supposed to seem karmic rather than something horrible. As I’ve said before, this show just isn’t equipped to handle anything approaching sexual assault in a fashion that won’t make a modern viewer cringe, and this is no exception.
The big shame about “A Private Little War” is that it’s a great premise for an episode with an execution that is botched pretty badly. The notion of a primitive (or at least developing) culture on a planet being stoked and armed by two warring factions is a compelling story -- Vietnam allegory or no. But this episode just can’t get out of its own way in hammering home messages about the real life conflict or doing weird slinky temptress stuff to actually tell that story. I spent a good chunk of the episode wondering when things were going to progress in the escalation between the locals or come to a head. Instead, it’s a lot of pontificating and weird witch doctor stuff.
It’s fine to have a different focus or want to make sure your message gets across, but it immediately makes “A Private Little War” feel like a product of its time and not a compelling episode in its own right. The premise is a solid one, and as problematic a character as Nona is, Kovacks’s performance is quite good, but there’s so much other didactic and contradictory dialogue and story beats weighing the rest of this one down that it never rises above serviceable. “War is bad, but you have to do it anyway” seems to the point, and that’s an odd thing for the optimistic Star Trek to suggest, even in the tumultuous sixties.
[8.6/10] It’s amazing what a difference one actor can make in an episode of Star Trek. Matt Decker is a brief but potent shot in the arm for “The Doomsday Machine,” one whose appearance in the first act immediately sells everything else he does that helps spur the plot for the rest of the episode.
Much of that owes to the actor, William Windom, who breathes life into decker. The scene where Kirk and company rouse him, and relays the terrible events that befell him and his crew is arresting from the word go. The disorientation, the distress, the regret in his voice, quickly tell the audience how harrowing what Decker experienced was, without needing to see the scope of the battle. It sells the terror of “that thing” out there better than all the dry “but there used to be three planets in this system” remarks from stoic crewmen and shots of rubble ever could.
It also sells the sense of survivor’s guilt that motivates Decker. It’s hard to make a character both terribly misguided – to the point that he makes foolish decisions that put hundreds of other lives at risk – but also sympathetic. “The Doomsday Machine” pulls that trick off by showing Decker as clearly rattled and a little unhinged, throwing the weight of his rank around and sending the crew on dumb maneuvers, but by having the reason for that be that he’s haunted by the mistakes he made that got his entire crew killed.
That fact clearly weighs on Decker at every moment. Windom plays his single-minded obsession – to either avenge his fallen crewmates or assuage his guilt by joining them – with just the right combination of insanity and capability. He’s not thinking clearly, and he’s disturbed, but he knows enough to take command and order sweeps and attacks. It creates a magnetic, unpredictable presence at the center of the episode that spurs more than a little of “Doomsday Machine”’s action, both inside and outside the Enterprise.
It also pays dividends for the main cast. For one thing, it helps Kirk, who often works best as a side dish rather than a main course. He’s definitely at his peak here – encouraging of his subordinates, but particularly with Scotty, maintaining that wry edge that makes him more than just another stuffed shirt. Too many of his sarcastic asides or too much of his too-cool-for-school wit and he starts to come off as smug and self-satisfied, but when those moments are sprinkled in like this, it presents Kirk as someone who tries to take the edge off of the severity of the situation everyone’s facing with humor rather than someone who doesn’t take those situations seriously.
It also gives him the chance to provide a nice counterpoint to Decker. Kirk is willing to sacrifice himself to save the galaxy as well, but he’s unwilling to endanger his whole crew to do so when it’s unnecessary. The use of the jerry-rigged U.S.S. Constellation to blow up the Doomsday device lacks a bit of intrigue given that, once you realize how far into the episode we are, it’s pretty much a fait accompli that it will work.
Still, the countdown to beam Kirk off of the ship before it explodes actually caught my attention despite the fact that Kirk obviously doesn’t die here. Credit where it’s due, much of that belongs to Shatner, who plays Kirk as remaining stoic with just enough concern in his voice to sell the moment when telling his crewmen to beam him over. Much of it is the score and the editing, which cuts nicely between the various panic points of the effort, but Shatner does his part and it’s worth lauding.
It is also, as usual, worth lauding Leonard Nimoy and Spock. For all the epic white whale-chasing drama going on with the titular Doomsday Machine outside the ships, one of the most compelling parts of the episode is the struggle for command within the Enterprise. Episode writer Norman Spinrad writes Spock particularly well as someone who is by the book, but willing to use every page of that book against Decker when he thinks it’s putting the crew at risk.
Nimoy, understated as usual, communicates Spock’s conflicting desires to follow the regulations he agreed to by becoming a Starfleet officer, and also working within those regulations and that system to protect his crew and his ship. One of the best scenes in the hot-tempered Bones imploring his frenemy Spock to “do something” and Spock grinning and bearing it (so to speak). A by-the-book guy like Spock is unwilling to break the rules, but also is looking out for the best interests of The Enterprise, and that creates both an interesting internal conflict for him and an interesting tet-a-tet between him and Decker for much of the episode. (Decker, meanwhile, continues the proud Star Trek tradition of every officer above the rank of captain being evil, insane, incompetent, or all three.)
But that power struggle is still in service of how to address the giant, Eye of Sauron-containing cornucopia that is attacking the two Federation ships and chewing through planets. It may simple stem from the fact that this is one of those episode where the “remastering” of the old footage is most evident, but “Doomsday Machine” has more of an epic, even cinematic feel than many episodes of The Original Series. The shots of the Enterprise and the Constellation firing on the machine, or careening into its fiery maw, offer the sort of thrilling space battle that are understandably few and far between in the Star Trek of the sixties.
The machine itself provides a great deal of the tension, even apart from the good character work being done all around. This massive, destructive device, that cannot be reasoned with, that prevents warning, and that is difficult to escape presents a real challenge to our heroes that mandates some creative thinking and desperation maneuvers. Sure, the thematic elements are laid on a little thick – “Can you tell we’re offering a cautionary tale about nuclear weapons?! Can ya!?” – but the titular machine serves its narrative purposes as well or better as it serves its thematic one.
That machine is the object of Decker’s Ahab-like fixation in this Moby Dick-esque tale. “The Doomsday Machine” is an episode centered around individuals who are devoted to their crew, and wondering which rules they can break, what principles are inviolable, and what parts of themselves they’re willing to sacrifice in order to save their ships or avenge their people. That’s the sort of character and narrative stakes that produces many of Star Trek’s best episodes, and “The Doomsday Machine” is no exception.
I love A24 and campy horror comedy but yikes. This is just plain bad.
It's unfunny, cheap-looking and shoddily put together. Almost nothing in Slice works. Even Zazie Beetz looked bored. The only positive I can think about is the mercifully short runtime that makes this bearable.
A good way to give some catharsis to our characters following the Beth/Jerry split, but an unfortunate lack of laughs. Quite a disappointment after the great season opener.
The primary attribute that draws me to this show is that It. Is. Insane.
An important story to tell, even if it was a bit like watching paint dry. Lots of protracted scenes without dialog against a lullaby soundtrack.
MORTAL KOMBAT!
This keeps getting worse and worse every week. So many plot holes, bad acting, unnecessary romance and low budget make it harder for me to watch.
This show will probably never reach extraordinary levels, but it's still capable of gaining the watcher's loyalty. Hope it sticks around for a while, it's kind of a weekly cheesy safe place.
While I actually thought the episode itself was pretty solid, I will admit that the animation was god awful. It'll be improved on the BDs (at least I hope so) but man, some of those scenes were quite brutal. Nevertheless, I'm actually looking forward to next week's episode quite a bit. It looks like it's going to be hilarious with the Z crew not knowing who Beerus is except for Vegeta.
Abe and gingsberg look the same. confusing
The timing wasn’t great. There wasn’t enough time in the episode if they had to play another game.
Another fun episode but Matthew Broderick gave an oddly wooden performance imo
They really tried pulling a rabbit out the hat with the meth addict storyline on Beard.
Whoever is putting that cheesy a$$ music on all these "emotional" scenes is the worst.
Football scenes are also SO awkward wtf was that Tartt shuffle goal?
Urgh... this was 22 minutes but felt like an hour. I think I'm done with this show, haven't enjoyed it for a while.
I'm fuming. JD didn't do that for Elliott. He did it coz he has no life and was bored hanging round the hospital. Also taking the advice of a woman with a man waaaay below her level coz he was there when she needed him? Yeah I had a friend like that. Always looking for his angle to date me. Just like JD does with Elliott. Not good people.
It wasn't bad, but it was the weakest episode, so far. For a comedy-based show, this episode hardly had any of it, and of what they did have, just wasn't funny, IMO. If you found it to be hilarious, that's fine. Good for you. Our preferences and perspectives must be quite different. And while I rated this episode the same as every previous episode in this season, the previous three were a lot further into that rating than this one was. But even in that case, for this show, that doesn't mean much, except that I liked them a whole lot more. This episode was still pretty decent. If anything, it probably wasn't meant to be comedic, but the writers put in the situation with the obvious email spam that was misunderstood to be an actual curse as a means for just that. It just fell short. Also, while the vampire hunting part of the episode was interesting and darker, it didn't appeal that much to me. But, again, I didn't hate this episode. It just wasn't my cup of tea.
Always interesting and visually pleasing, with some great effects, yet even at only 100 minutes it overstayed its welcome for me. It felt much longer that it actually was.
Also, I was constantly distracted by how much Patrick Schwarzenegger looks like his father.
Overall a pleasing watch, but not one that will stick with me aside from a few visuals.
Not much to enjoy here. The most typical of Star Trek ingredients mixed together: primitive culture representing one from our past, human interference, pro-Americanism and a fight to the death. In this case it's all quite boring and mildly offensive.
