3 Razors

Continuum – Power Hour

  • Title: Continuum – Power Hour
  • wiki: link

Continuum - Power Hour

Kiera (Rachel Nichols) continues to struggle to deal with the future soldiers by continuing her shaky alliance with Garza (Luvia Petersen) on an information-gathering mission about their adversaries motivations that will leave another former Liber8 member dead. Meanwhile both Alec (Erik Knudsen) and Julian (Richard Harmon) take steps to change their futures as “Power Hour” continues to move Continuum one step closer to the series finale.

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Everest

  • Title: Everest
  • IMDb: link

Everest

Based on a true story, Everest recounts the events of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. There have been plenty of mountain climbing movies over the years and Everest does little to break from the pack. Working against the movie is the extended opening which plays like a Travel Channel infomercial attempting to sell the audience on traveling to Nepal to climb the world’s biggest mountain with the help of experts like Rob Hall‘s (Jason Clarke) Adventure Consultants.

The climbers themselves are the typical hodgepodge of one-note characters you always expect to see in movies like this with a couple of stand-outs (Clarke, John Hawkes, and Josh Brolin) while the rest (Martin Henderson, Tom Goodman-Hill, Naoko Mori, Michael Kelly, among others) quickly fade into the background. The movie picks up a bit once the climbers begin their ascent of the mountain in earnest and the disaster porn part of the plot kicks in.

The film, and the scale of the undertaking, is certainly helped in IMAX 3D. As a theatrical experience Everest does have something to offer (even if the story feels more straight-to-DVD). It’s certainly not a must-see, but it works as escapist entertainment.

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Black Mass

  • Title: Black Mass
  • IMDb: link

Black MassBlack Mass is a semi-successful film highlighting the amazing story of Irish-American mobster Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp) and his rise to prominence in South Boston in the 70s and 80s as the head of the Winter Hill Gang in large part thanks to his role as an FBI informant for Agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). What should be a thoroughly engrossing character study becomes a by-the-book gangster movie that entertains but doesn’t due justice to the source material.

Screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth adapt the non-fictional account of events from Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill’s book that is highlighted by Depp’s performance under heavy make-up as the charismatic violent sociopath. There’s certainly more to the story than we get here, and I do have to wonder how much director Scott Cooper left on the cutting room floor. I expected far more about Bulger’s rise to power, which we hear the FBI talk about constantly but we don’t see evidence of over the course of the film. The filmmakers’ focus on the lives of Whitey Bulger and his closest associates leaves the larger canvas left half finished.

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Malice

  • Title: Malice
  • IMDb: link

Malice

1993’s Malice is your typical thriller, except for the fact that everyone involved isn’t typical at all. Written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Newsroom, and Sports Night) and Scott Frank (Out of Sight, the underrated Heaven’s Prisoners, and The Lookout) and starring Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, and Bill Pullman, the story takes an expected number of twists and turns down a dark road until the truth is fully revealed. And you also may have heard of its cinematographer Gordon Willis who shot a little series known as The Godfather Trilogy.

The story centers around a young couple (Pullman and Kidman) whose lives are shattered when their friend (Baldwin) operates on her making a mistake in surgery that costs her the ability to have children. The fallout for the couple and the doctor leads to grief, a lawsuit, and the husband to begin looking into a situation that he discovers is far more complicated than he ever imagined.

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Bat-Mite #4

Bat-Mite #4Bat-Mite teams-up the Batman-obsessed imp with the greatest hero you’ve never heard of: Booster Gold! Booster’s timely arrival helps Bat-Mite extracate himself from an embarrassing situation involving his new roommates. And after realizing Booster isn’t a super-villain, and his failed attempt to give Booster a grim makeover that’s no worse than what the New 52 did to the hero, Bat-Mite finally agrees to help Booster hunt down a villain (Gridlock) who is obsessed with reversing time back to when he was younger. (Hey, after reading all the mediocre New 52 comics I’ve put up with I’m on your side Gridlock!)

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