Yes/No Detroit

I saw Oblivion on a Tuesday night, and by Wednesday afternoon I was still mulling it over in my head, trying to put together some of the pieces. It's a sci-fi movie with a bit of action thrown in, and there's a major plot twist that complicates the entire movie. After talking the film over with some friends, I understand it enough now to write this review (hopefully!) and to also give my opinion on the movie - I got the gist of the film, but there's some details that are hard to figure out throughout it.

Earth, 2077. After a long war with the "scavs" (scavengers), the humans won, but destroyed Earth in the process - it is a shell of what it used to be. All of the humans now live on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, except for Jack (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, also in Disconnect), who monitor the drones that patrol the Earth looking for scavs. Jack is in charge of fixing these drones, and Victoria speaks with Sally (Melissa Leo) while he is out…

I had a feeling that Disconnect was going to be similar to 2010's Trust, a movie about online predators that was partially filmed in Michigan, and it is, although the type of predators is different in each - the one bad guy in Trust is a sexual predator preying on young girls online, and in Disconnect, we get a variety of predators. The movie follows three stories that interconnect, and although each one is different, any of them could happen in real life.

Story #1, the main story of the film, follows two teenage punks as they pull tricks on people. They go to a mall and urinate in a used sports drink bottle, and then go to a gym and put the bottle in the fridge where drinks are sold, and watch to see who falls victim to their malicious prank. Ben Boyd (Jonah Bobo, the kid from Crazy Stupid Love) sees them do this and the boys don't like that; they look Ben up on Facebook and find that he goes to their school, and is a bit of a loner, so they decide to make up a female Faceb…

So now that we know what Sweet Relish is, and what you can use it for, let's jump in to week two of four of
this series.

As you may or may not know, I am not a fan of scary movies. Suspenseful movies, I can handle - movies like The Shining, which brings the crazy but doesn't have as much gore - but "slice and dice" movies are not my thing.

Using Sweet Relish, I made a list called "Scary movies for people afraid of scary movies," and I chose six movies that popped into my mind for the list. They are:
The Shining. Both the book and movie were fantastic, and Jack Nicholson is utterly creepy as a writer who goes insane while living as a hotel caretaker with his family in a remote location. I first watched it when I was 16, at a birthday party, and may have had few nightmares; however, I return back to the movie because it's so good.The Sixth Sense. Maybe you got the twist ending, but I didn't, until the very end. And the girl ghost hiding under the bed…

I didn't know much about Jackie Robinson before viewing 42, other than that he was the first African-American to play in major league baseball. Although the movie chooses to focus only on the beginning of his baseball career, and fills in a bit about the time period immediately before that, you still learn quite a bit about his career, even though I would not have minded learning more about his post-baseball life as well.

Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) is a baseball player who is trying to make the Montreal Royals team, managed by Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), who is also the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Branch has been thinking about adding an African-American player to the Dodgers, and once Jackie makes the Montreal team, he is soon after offered a spot on the Dodgers. Rickey warns Jackie that there will be a lot of backlash, and he's right; in one particularly hard to watch scene, Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk), with the Phillies, calls him the n-word over and …

The director of Starbuck, Ken Scott, is remaking the film in English with an American cast, which I found to be interesting because I had never heard of a director remaking his own film before. That movie, called The Delivery Man, will be out this October and stars Vince Vaughn as the main character, with Chris Pratt and Cobie Smulders in supporting roles. This version, however, is French with English subtitles, although the characters live in Montreal (not France), and was actually very funny; the American version has big shoes to fill if it is to be as good as this version.

David Wozniak (Patrick Huard) works as a meat delivery man, and has a kinda/sorta girlfriend - they date, but he hasn't seen her in a while. One day, when he shows up at her doorstep with flowers at 3 AM (his idea of a romantic gesture), she tells him that she's pregnant, but that she will raise the baby herself. He decides to change his bachelor ways so that he will be a good father, but soon he finds …

Sweet Relish is a website where you can keep a list of things you "relish" - aka, things you like - and make lists based on any categories or themes that you like. Imagine that every time you clicked the "like" button on Facebook, you could categorize whatever you "liked" into a list with a name of your choosing - that's what Sweet Relish is, in a nutshell. For the purposes of these posts, I made my lists movie and entertainment-oriented, but I could also see Sweet Relish being used for clothing or event ideas.

The site seems similar to Pinterest to me (although Pinterest is pretty much the one social media site I haven't signed up for), but it's rather fun "relishing" items and then seeing your completed list after. The BIG difference is that anything you see on the site that people have "relished" comes from another site - i.e., I mostly used Amazon for these lists - so you can click and buy that item if you so choose, wh…

Is it bad when a 20-year-old movie manages to entertain you more than most of the films you've seen in the theater in the past five to ten years? That's what I was wondering as I left the screening of Jurassic Park 3D. The movie is celebrating its twenty-year anniversary, and I was six when it was in theaters - needless to say, I didn't see it on the big screen. I think at one point I saw it on VHS, and also its sequel, but I'm not sure if I saw JP III; also, there will be a JP IV released in theaters next year. So we know the movie is worth seeing again, and definitely in theaters - but what about its 3D?

For the uninitiated: according to IMDb, the movie occurs "During a preview tour," when "a theme park suffers a major power breakdown that allows its cloned dinosaur exhibits to run amok." That's the polite way of putting it, I suppose; perhaps they should have added that the park founder should not have let his grandkids test out the exhibit…