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SkyLab Photo Editor

Photo & Video and Entertainment

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App

SkyLab is the one and only sky-replacement app. Imagine dropping stunning skies on your photos with...

Themes for Keynote - Templates for iPad and iPhone

Productivity and Business

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App

Templates for Keynote contains 104 Keynote designs for your presentations. They can be used for...

Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows 1000 Words

John W. Pilley and Hilary Hinzmann

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Book

Chaser has a way with words. She knows over a thousand of them - more than any other animal of any...

Optical Inquisitor 17+

Games and Entertainment

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App

Its the year 1988. Acid wash jeans are in. Our hero, Tommy Rissken has been betrayed by his friends...

Bostonian916 (449 KP) rated Project Power (2020) in Movies

Aug 18, 2020

Project Power (2020)

2020 | Action, Crime, Sci-Fi

6.8

(22 Ratings)

Movie Rating

Full disclosure: I'm a fan of both Jamie Foxx and JGL. I was very happy to hear that he was ending his hiatus to return for this film.

Netflix has released a couple of good things in recent memory, but they have also churned out some turds. I had great fears when I heard the synopsis to Project Power because I felt that if they didn't do it right that they would stop investing in the genre, or at least limit their investment.

I had read some pretty lackluster reviews before having a chance to see this for myself, and I'm thrilled that I didn't take those as a reason not to watch it myself. There are definitely some flaws in several different elements of the film, but overall I feel that they did a good job with the premise. Besides, nobody else was beating the door down to make something similar (a la White House Down/Olympus Has Fallen).

Definitely worth having a look for yourself. Interesting concept with some scathing undertones.

Kudos

Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2379 KP) rated What Happened at Midnight in Books

Aug 27, 2020

Nighttime Crime

Frank and Joe Hardy are shocked when they get the new request from their father, famed detective Fenton Hardy. He wants them to break into a house and steal something. Of course, it is to keep an invention for his client safe. However, doing that puts the boys on the radar of a gang of smugglers. Will they be able to protect the invention and round up the smugglers?

I remember as a kid the title really intriguing me. Yes, several scenes take place at midnight, but the title isn’t as relevant to the story as it might be. That hardly matters since the story is so action packed that it is hard to put it down. Coincidence rules quite a bit, and the characters are thin. Elements are also very dated today. So in other words, it’s a typical Hardy Boys book. Still, I take that into account when I pick up one of these books, and I enjoy the nostalgia I get from revisiting these old friends.

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated Warcraft (2016) in Movies

Jun 3, 2020

Warcraft (2016)

2016 | Action, Fantasy

6.3

(42 Ratings)

Movie Rating

Joyless and gruelling fantasy action movie, made in the bad old style. Orcs from another dimension invade Generic Fantasyland; people ride about, waving swords and hammers, spectacular mystical events occur, the CGI bill rockets upward at supersonic speed, and - I suspect - two days later you won't remember more than the most basic elements of the plot. (Most of the Orc characters are played by human actors in greenface makeup; I can't understand why there hasn't been more fuss about this.)

Half-decent score and I suppose the art direction is okay, if not exactly subtle, but this is the worst kind of fantasy film, as characters, places and concepts feel like they've been arbitrarily created to suit the story - 'cheating at cards to win paper money', as one novelist once described this kind of narrative. No depth, no resonance, no involvement - but then I've never played the game and have no awarenes of the Warcraft franchise beyond this film. (No doubt if they ever get around to doing a Euro Trucker 2 movie the boot will be on the other foot.)

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated Edge of Darkness (2010) in Movies

May 5, 2020 (Updated May 6, 2020)

Edge of Darkness (2010)

2010 | Drama, Mystery, Thriller

6.0

(11 Ratings)

Movie Rating

The legendary TV mini-series is retooled for the big screen as a bog-standard Mel Gibson revenge thriller. A detective's daughter is killed, and his investigations lead him to discover she was a target of forces within the military-industrial complex operating above the law.

As well as two-thirds of the running time and most of the plot, the movie version of Edge of Darkness also cheerfully dispenses with virtually everything that made the TV show so memorable: theoretically a fiendishly convoluted thriller, it also contained an environmentalist subtext, an incest subtext, a subtext about Anglo-US relations, even some borderline SF & fantasy elements. All of this is gone and just replaced with Mel Gibson looking intense and beating people up. As a result it is very hard to care about what's happening, although the illogicality of much of it does manage to cut through (someone poisoning someone else and then deciding to shoot them as well is practically a motif). Ray Winstone is not bad as Jedburgh, but given the source material the rest of it is unforgivably lousy.