The Grand Budapest Hotel

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Grand Budapest Hotel
  • IMDB: link

The Grand Budapest HotelFor his latest film writer/director Wes Anderson takes his trademark style to the fictional Republic of Zubrowka and a once-proud mountainside resort known as The Grand Budapest Hotel with a rich history to share. Relying heavily on narration, the film struggles a bit to get going by beginning in the present and slowly peeling back layers (each jumping 20 years or so into the past) until we finally arrive in the pre-World War II 1930s and the story of fastidious old-school concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his the new lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori).

During the overly-elaborate and unnecessarily complicated (although certainly not boring) first 20-minutes or so as the movie introduces an elderly author (Tom Wilkinson) beginning his own flashbacks to his time at the hotel as a younger man (Jude Law) when he happened to meet the elderly version of Zero (F. Murray Abraham) and thus learned his story, Anderson relies on a variety of his usual bag of tricks involving beautiful cinematography and set design highlighted by the use of some marvelous miniatures.

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Person of Interest – Allegiance

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Person of Interest – Allegiance
  • wiki: link

Person of Interest - Allegiance

Shaw (Sarah Shahi) takes point on The Machine‘s latest number, an engineer (Nazneen Contractor) for an alternative energy company who spends most of her time on reconstruction projects in Third World countries and who is obsessed with convincing a U.N. diplomat (Michael Gill) to allow an Iranian refuge, and her former interpreter (Haaz Sleiman) and lover, entry into the country. Although the man is being held as a potential terrorist suspect, the real reason behind his imprisonment proves to be his knowledge of the failure of the generations powering the recently-constructed Hydroelectric plant in his country who the head of the company (Casey Biggs) will do anything to keep quiet.

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The Blacklist – Ivan

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: The Blacklist – Ivan
  • wiki: link

“The Federal Government has armed a cyber-terrorist with the digital equivalent
of a nuclear warhead. Another fabulous example of your tax dollars at work.”

The Blacklist - Ivan

While Reddington (James Spader) begins carefully deconstructing Tom‘s (Ryan Eggold) lies by exposing Lucy Brooks‘ (Rachel Brosnahan) disappearance and laying the breadcrumbs which will compel Lizzie (Megan Boone) to uncover the woman’s true identity, he also puts the FBI on the scent of a Russian cyber criminal known as Ivan (Mark Ivanir) who he believes is responsible for a murdered a NSA programmer in charge of the development of “Project Skeleton Key” (an electronic cyber-weapon created to completely cripple a country during wartime without ever firing a shot), the prototype which is now missing.

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Batman ’66 #9

/ / Comics

Batman '66 #9Along with a best-forgotten back-up story involving the world’s greatest detective and his protege being duped by Alfred‘s nefarious lookalike relative taking his place inside Wayne Manor, the latest issue of Batman ’66 pits the Dynamic Duo against Zelda the Great who Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson find masquerading as a stage magician in Gotham City while on a double-date.

Despite the fact that Zelda isn’t breaking any laws, Bruce and Dick ditch their dates (one of whom is Kathy Kane and the other who Zelda will later take on as a potential apprentice of her own) to don their tights and promptly be taken hostage by the villain and her minions.

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Intelligence – The Event Horizon

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Intelligence – The Event Horizon
  • wiki: link

Intelligence - The Event Horizon

While performing a cyber-render of the murder of the Deputy Director of FBI and a retired intelligence officer Gabriel (Josh Holloway) finds evidence that implicates him as the assassin. That along with Gabriel’s hazy recollections of the previous night and the fact that one of the men killed was responsible for letting the man who killed Gabriel’s wife go free and that’s more than enough for both Weatherly (Tomas Arana) and Tetazoo (Lance Reddick) to step-in, take control of CyberCom from Lillian (Marg Helgenberger), and put Gabriel in holding under suspicion that someone may have hacked the chip and forced Gabriel to commit murder.

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