My Old Man by I Am the Polish Army
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From the privacy of a dorm room in 2005 to the streets of Brooklyn in 2016, I Am The Polish Army has...
The 15:17 To Paris (2018)
6.2
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From Clint Eastwood comes “The 15:17 to Paris,” which tells the real-life story of three men...
Yacht Were You Thinking?: An A-Z of Boat Names Good and Bad
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Naming a boat is as personal as naming a baby (even if few male skippers would risk telling the wife...
Gareth von Kallenbach (980 KP) rated Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) in Movies
Jul 11, 2019
The director of The Fifth Element has been working on this film for about ten years. Besson has mentioned he had wanted to work on this project for years and it would not have been made before the technology used in James Cameron’s Avatar. The film is a eye-gasming smorgasbord of star systems, planets and five hundred different alien species. The story itself does not hold many surprises. Heroes looking for villains, lasers pew-pewing across time and space. Goal to save the world as they know.
Valerian (Dane DeHann) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) have a cool/electric repartee of partners who know each other well and are working to combat the underlying…tensions. We learn that Valerian, quite confident in his abilities does not work as well without Laureline by him. Not as the sidekick, but equal. Throughout the film, we see the humor in their relationship with the push and push of their personalities trying to gain the upper hand. The film has some visual and physical comedic moments that tip the hat to screwball, buddy comedies.
The movie is such an incredible visually dazzling event throughout, there’s so much going on that at times I wondered what I could have been missing . The characters are striking: Rhianna’s performance as Bubble was an ocular delight. The costuming and makeup were fanciful, artistic and offbeat. All the CG work in this movie truly makes me wonder what it is like to live in Luc Besson’s mind. I can see the inspiration taken from the comic books which give us the characters and storyline, but the imagination that illustrates Valerian and Laureline’s universe on the big screen is absolutely mind-blowing.
If you are a fan of the Fifth Element, you will enjoy this film. However, you don’t need to be a fan to enjoy this adventure. I highly recommend that you view this in 3D, it enhances the vision created by Besson.
Ross (3284 KP) rated A Little Hatred in Books
Oct 1, 2019
The rest of the story takes place in the North, where those Northmen are, once more, kicking up a fuss and trying to reclaim their land from the Union. These chapters focus on Rikke, the dogman's daughter, and Leo dan Brock, the Young Lion, as they fight against Black Calder and his crew.
Yes, this really is "First Law: The Next Generation". With very few exceptions, the main characters here are all the descendants of characters from the previous trilogy. What I couldn't quite come to terms with was the fact that Caul Shivers and Bremer dan Gorst seemed to have aged significantly less than I might have expected (based purely on my impression of their ages in the earlier books and other characters now).
The battle with the Northmen was pretty much a boiled-down version of the Heroes, and not all that enjoyable. Rikke was a new feature which just about saved this from utter tedium.
There was one exceptional scene revolving around the riot that Savine found herself in. This scene changed from one perspective to another seamlessly, truly like a scene from a film. This long chapter was so engaging and immersive I couldn't leave it unfinished.
Abercrombie's writing and dialogue once again shine through as top of the class.
However, what held the book back for me were the pace of the opening third (so much character introduction and yet so much of it is left to the reader based on the previous books), and the bulk of the chapters in the North. The rest of the book really felt new and exciting and thrilling, those sections really just felt like old hat.
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