About Time

About time is a fantastic film.  Make no bones about it, it’s a time travel movie, but not your typical one.  The movie is quite cut and dry about the fact that “The men in the family can travel through time” and while it seems a little awkward at first, it’s accepted and we move on.  Some nice moral lessons and a great cast.  I was cautioned this film may make me cry, and while I may have felt some welling of tears, none of them dropped.  Man card still intact.  Watch this.   

Edit: What marvels me is the fact that I'd never heard of this movie, yet there it was on Netflix all along.  Makes me wonder how many other gems I miss.

Knuckleball

With baseball season approaching I watched this documentary which had been on my Netflix list for years.  It’s an interesting documentary which I hoped would be more about the physics of the pitch and why it behaves the way it does, but turned out to be more about the people who throw them.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, and the movie does explain fairly early on that once the ball leaves the hand, there’s no telling what it’s going to do.  If you’re a fan of Tim Wakefield or R.A. Dickey you’ll get some extra innings out this movie, a baseball fan will appreciate some of the behind the scenes looks at the game.  It’s a good film for baseball fans.  Recommend.

Wild

Wild is appropriately titled as it features a gal “gone wild” and her going “into the wild” to find/redeem herself.  I say this a lot about movies I watch and games I play, but if I can’t relate to, or don’t care for the central characters, I find the movie hard to give praise.  I didn’t really care for anyone in this film.  That being said, it was fairly entertaining, it was just missing a little “something”, perhaps sentiment, perhaps care, I can't quite say.  I understand what the film is going for, I’m just not sure it made it.  The “journey” is/was long, but I felt the movie failed to portray it properly.  The real life events fully warrant a movie, I just feel it could have been done better.  Pass.

Her

Her has been on my Netflix list for some time.  It's now off my list but in my head.  I can't stop thinking about it.  I felt my own connections to the characters and even to the OS Samantha, which was probably the point of the whole thing anyways.  The movie takes place in the near future, and it was nice to see a future concept that seemed believable, and livable despite it's creepiness.  This movie will make you feel uncomfortable at times, but will also make you feel happy, sad, and it will question what's you believe to be real and what isn't.  As a Christian it raises questions about what makes us human (or made in God's image) and while the ending didn't quite deliver how I'd hoped it would, I still really enjoyed it for it's thought provoking themes.  There are a couple really uncomfortable moments which would prevent me from recommending Her to anyone, but for someone open to technology and with a firm grasp on reality, I recommend it.

Spy Kids 4D

Watched this one with the kids.  If not for Ricky Gervais voicing the dog, I wouldn’t have liked much about it, but they LOVE IT.  It has a nice central message about spending time with loved ones, but I don’t think the kids understood that.  They liked the barf jokes and diaper bombs.  A kids movie that kids enjoy, that is the point after all, unlike Inside Out, I recommend for kids.

Inside Out

Family movie night.  It’s nice that Netflix now has (some) Disney/Pixar movies, unfortunately this one wasn’t high on our “to see” list, but hey, it saved us spending $5 on some other crappy animated movie.  Inside Out has some really neat concepts, I think they flew right over my 7 year olds head however.  It’s smart, intelligent and witty, but perhaps too much so for it’s own good.  About half way through my son says “Does this movie have a bad guy?” … you see to young 7 year old kids, movies are about good guys catching bad guys, not necessarily about thought patterns, emotional connections and cognitive thinking.  So, for an adult, it was a pretty cool movie made for kids.  For a kid, it’s a movie about thinking?  I don’t think he got it.  Tough to say you should pass on this one, but when it all comes down, your kid may just want to.

Atari: Game Over

With an hour to kill, I fired up this documentary on Netflix.  I really didn’t care if the cartridges were found, I was more interested in the details of the “crash of the game industry”.  The documentary does a decent job at explaining what happened, but looks more to redeem Howard Warshaw, the creator of the ET Atari game which is often criticized as “The worst videogame ever”.   Warshaw does come out of the film vindicated, albeit annoyingly so as he seems a little tough to root for, and is clearly scarred by the whole ordeal and is very insecure.  The insecurities are covered by an ego akin to Billy Mitchell in a much better documentary “The King of Kong”.  If you’re interested in the subject matter, this film comes recommended given it’s short runtime and production value.

Homeland: Season 3

I adored the first season of Homeland.  I borrowed the DVD's from a friend and was captivated from the start.  I enjoyed it so much, in desperation I watched season 2 via some not so legal streaming sites, where they varied in quality, and "speed", buffering really kills any momentum in any television show, let alone one where you hang on every word like Homeland.  Refusing to watch another season in such low grade quality I decided to wait for it to be on Netflix.  By the time the third season arrived, I was kind of "over it" but recently decided to give it a spin and see if I could recapture some of that magic.


I had to do some reading to put all the pieces together, I was just about 4 years removed from the previous season.  Season 3 was relatively self contained once I was reacquainted with the cliffhanger from last year, so I didn't necessarily require vast knowledge of intricate details in order to get through.  I'd have to say this was the weakest of my 3 seasons of Homeland.  The Dana storyline was so mundane, every time it cut to her I rolled my eyes.  Thankfully half way through the show writers wised up and pretty much wrote her out of the script.  The 2nd half was much more satisfying to the point where I wanted to watch back to back episodes, rather than constantly pressing X on my PS4 to see how much longer some of those earlier episodes were going to drag on.


The season ends nicely, peacefully, and really could have been a series finale.  The show returns for season 4, but I'm not sure I will.  I recommend Season 1 and 2 absolutely, and if you've gone that far, season 3 is not a complete waste of time.