PCP on DVD - 4 2011 Thrillers Reviewed

Time for your next hit of PCP.  Today I’ll be talking about 4 films from 2011 that attempt to give us some suspense.  Some succeeded and some failed miserably at building any sort of tension.  These 4 films are now available on DVD and I recently caught them on Netflix:  Limitless, The Adjustment Bureau, Unknown, & The Roommate. 

Limitless – 2011; PG-13.  105 minutes.  Starring:  Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, & Abbie Cornish.  My rating:  6 out of 10.

Limitless has an interesting premise:  what would you become if you could suddenly access all 100% of your brain function and turn your mind into a super computer far more powerful than anything you could imagine.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t quite live up to its possibilities.  Bradley Cooper stars as Eddie Mora, a writer with terminal writers block and a personal life that is falling apart.  His longtime girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish) has just dumped him because she can clearly see that he isn’t going anywhere.  And he isn’t, his life is a waste of time and space.  Everything changes when he runs into an old acquaintance, Vernon, a drug dealer that has a stash of a super-drug called NZT that unlocks the potential trapped within the rest of his brain.  Suddenly after taking the drug Mora is able to turn his life around, making a fortune in the stock market, but also attracting the attention of some people that want to do him major bodily harm.

The film is okay but not great.  From a visual standpoint, the shots of the camera rapidly sweeping through New York City down block after block, to demonstrate the enhanced senses that Mora has after taking the drug, are a rather nifty trick that would probably make you nauseous if you watched it in 3D.  Those shots though, showing Mora’s high, are about the only cool camera trick in the film.  There are not particularly any other shots that stand out.  The dialogue isn’t particularly good either.  The thrills are okay, but nothing to write home about.  Probably the most suspsenseful scene in the film is when Lindy is being chased by a bad guy that wants Mora’s stash for himself.  Since she’s not a total major character, there was some real tension wondering whether or not she’d bite the dust.  Between the lack of suspense and some of the plot holes in the film that you could drive a semi through, this film gets downgraded to only average.  Watch it if you like Bradley Cooper, but pass otherwise.

 Read the other 3 reviews after the jump!

PCP on TV - Lost Season 5 better late than never!

Welcome back to Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I’ll be talking about the TV show Lost.  If you’ve been reading my blog all summer, you know that I’m working my way through the entire run of the show before the regular fall TV shows come back on, as I had never watched it when it was originally on the air.  I’ve now completed the 5^th season and these are my thoughts and observations about this show. (WARNING:  mild spoilers ahead if you’re like me and never saw the show before).

• Interesting coincidence when time traveling?  When Locke gets shot in the leg by Ethan, he’s standing more or less in the same area where his legs gave out on him back in the first season, underneath the crashed drug smuggling plane.  Was that why his legs gave out back in season 1?
• Also, how many times has Locke been hurt in the legs now?  He had the blast doors come down on it, gotten shot in the leg, and he even gets a compound fracture this season when the time jumping causes him to fall down the well.  Poor guy finally gets the use of his legs back and they keep failing him anyways.
• Understatement of the season:  after Locke shows up and saves Juliet and Sawyer from the Others, all he says is their names and “Good to see you.” – cut to commercial.  No long exposition, just a nice understatement before the break.
• Man, Widmore was a jerk in the past, quick to kill first and ask questions later.  I suppose that hasn’t changed much over the years.

Read the rest of the post after the jump:

PCP in Theaters - Fright Night

Ok so for only the 2^nd time this summer, I finally had a chance to actually go and see a movie in theaters.  So, here is my review of the latest movie I’ve seen, Fright Night, with a bonus short review of an older film at the end of the post, as well as my thoughts on the trailers featured on Fright Night.  Thanks for dropping by for another hit of PCP!

Fright Night.  2011, Rated R.  106 minutes.  Starring Colin Farrell, Anton Yelchin, Toni Collette, David Tennant, Imogen Poots, & Christopher Mintz-Plasse.  My rating:  8 out of 10.  Note – I saw this in 2D not 3D.

Going into this film, I didn’t know what to expect.  The ad campaign left me feeling a little underwhelmed, and with all the vampire stuff everywhere else in pop culture lately, I was staring to feel a little burnt out on vampires.  Even my wife, who got me hooked on Buffy, Angel, & the Vampire Diaries and is a Twilight fan, wasn’t particularly in the mood to see this.  However, it was the only movie that fit into our time slot of when we could go see a film that the friends we were seeing it with hadn’t already seen, so that sort of made the choice for us.  I was a cautiously optimistic after reading some reviews of the film on Friday, but I still wasn’t sure if it would be good or if it would suck.  Thankfully, I did not come away disappointed at all.

Read the rest after the jump!