Nerd in the 'Noke

Alien: Covenant (2017), R, 122 minutes - With Alien: Covenant, director Ridley Scott gives us the second prequel film to the horror franchise he launched nearly forty years ago.  Covenant takes place ten years after the events of 2012's Prometheus , a rapidly anticipated film, that didn't quite seem to live up to the public's lofty expectations. Covenant opens with a quiet scene that takes place long before the events of Prometheus between Peter Weyland (Guy Pierce) and his newly created synthetic David (Michael Fassbender).  The scene acts as a summary of that film's events (man's search for their creator) as well as a prologue for this film.  We then begin following the Covenant, a colonization vessel on course for Origae-6 carrying a crew of around fourteen members (all couples), two thousand would-be-colonists, over a thousand human embryos, and the latest model Weyland synthetic Walter (also Michael Fassbender).  Their mission is to colonize Origae-6 upon ...

Two weeks ago, the Roanoke area was pummeled by a straight-line windstorm known as a Derecho.  During that storm, a tree in my back yard split in two and took out the power and cable lines running from the mainline on the street to my house.  No one else in my neighborhood experienced anything more than a flicker of lights, but mine was completely wiped out.  12 days later (this past Wednesday), power was finally restored at the house.  And now, four days later, I am still waiting to get my cable/internet fixed (I am currently leeching off of a neighbor's connection).  Anyway, long story short, I wasn't able to post my already late Prometheus review, nor was I able to post reviews for the couple of movies that my fiancee and I saw while we were dealing with the power outage.  I don't like reducing movies to just a couple sentences worth of a review, but I don't have the time (or the memory) to go back and write up something proper for these.  Maybe in ...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), R, 158 minutes - About a year and a half ago, just after I had seen the Swedish adaptation of this best selling first installment to late author Stieg Larsson's  Millennium trilogy I read the news that an American adaptation was going to be made.  My first reaction was 'why bother?'.  The novel was excellent, was equaled by the Swedish film starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist, and at the time was only a year old (my original review can be found  here ).  I generally adhere to the belief that film remakes aren't necessary.  Every once in a while they can be worth it if they are far enough removed from the original (i.e. the Cohen brothers'  True Grit last year).  The key to remember in this case though is that David Fincher did not set out to remake the Swedish film but to provide an English language adaptation that would be more widely distributed here in the States.  The fact that Finc...

The first trailer for David Fincher's version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has been released, and while it is only a minutes and forty seconds long, I am both encouraged and discouraged by it. Anyone that has followed this blog over the past year knows how much I enjoyed the original Swedish versions of the movies based on the late author Stieg Larsson's 'Millennium' Trilogy. I won't re-hash my love for the films here, you can see my reviews for the Swedish films at these links: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , The Girl Who Played With Fire , The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest . I am encouraged by a couple things. Even though the trailer is a collection of many short clips, it appears as though Fincher has kept the most disturbing scenes which is really the foundation for the Lisbeth Salander character. What will be interesting to see will be how those scenes are shot and cut. They were pretty graphic in the Swedish film and I remember thi...

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009), R, 147 minutes - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the third and final installment in the Millennium trilogy based on the novels of the late Stieg Larsson. If you have not read the books or seen the previous two movies (my reviews can be found here and here ), you'll definitely want to before jumping into this one. There are a handful of flashback sequences that touch on major plot points, but they really don't cover all that you need to know to fully understand what is going on this far into the story. Hornet's Nest picks up immediately where The Girl Who Played With Fire ends - with Lisbeth being airlifted to the hospital after her confrontation with Zalachenko and Niedermann - and advances through Lisbeth's trial while Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and the staff at Millennium magazine try to expose the government conspiracy against her. Noomi Rapace continues her amazing portrayal of computer ha...

The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009), R, 129 minutes - It's been a while since my last post due to the chaos of trying to get moved into the house. It has been a slow process, but I'm making headway. So after too much of a delay, here's my latest review: I had been patiently waiting for The Girl Who Played With Fire to come to the Grandin Theatre back in Roanoke, but was pleasantly surprised this weekend in SC at my parent's house when I learned that it was playing at a theater about 30 minutes down the road. Not knowing when it will show up back home, I was able to sneak away this afternoon to check it out! The Girl Who Played With Fire is the second installment in the Swedish film trilogy based on the Millennium trilogy of books (the first of which was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). If you have not either seen the first film or read the books then don't bother taking two hours out of your day checking this out because you will be completely lost. I...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), NR, 152 minutes - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based on Swedish author Stieg Larsson's first novel in his Millenium Trilogy titled 'Men Who Hate Women' (we silly Americans found it necessary to change the title). Many good things have been said about this trilogy, but I have yet to read it myself. I found myself having to decide whether to watch the movie then go back and read the book(s), or add the book(s) to my growing list of things to read and then watch the film at a later date. Two things helped me make my decision: 1) an old college friend Kerri (check out her book blog here ) both highly recommended the book and thought I should go ahead and see the movie first (this was a good call, as I'm not the world's fastest reader). 2) the Grandin Theatre, which is about a mile down the road (and the only theater around that ever screens such foreign films) began showing it this weekend. Suffice to say, everything ...