How Did You Find Me

So here I sit at my computer trying to Google my own blog. Funny thing though, I can't seem to find it that way. However, when I look at the stats for my page I see that some of you have found me through Google. So the question I have is what are you guys typing into the Google search bar that I'm not to come across my page? Please leave a comment below to let me know what key words you are using to find me.

Identity making you Question your Own

                Identity is a movie that was introduced to me by my boyfriend. He likes to show me all these really great off the wall movies that somehow made it past me as I gathered my collection of over 1,000 movies and tv shows. This was really an interesting movie to me, but it is sadly one of those movies that you are only completely enthralled with the first time you see it. After the first time the surprise is gone and from the very beginning you know the surprise at the end, but in my book movies like this can be fun if you watch it a second time and see if you can pick up hints that you missed the first time. My opinion is that it is a real puzzler that everyone should try to puzzle through at least once.

                One dark and rainy night 10 strangers find themselves with no choice but to stay the night at an old motel in the middle of nowhere. The worst thing that people are worrying about at this motel is cockroaches and mice but what they should be worried about is how they will make it through the night. As the guests begin to die one by one will they be able to stop the killer before there is no one left?

                When my boyfriend told me about Identity it sounded like any other slasher film that Hollywood had made. But I was proven wrong as I sat watching this original idea come across the screen. I can’t say exactly what makes it original without completely ruining the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it but let me just say that the real story of this movie is quite the surprise. Michael Cooney, the writer, definitely knew what he was doing when he wrote this gem of a movie. However, I do have to nitpick that some of the characters were very much clichés and it seemed that he could have used a little more imagination while outlining these people. I mean if I had a dime for every movie with an actor playing a washed up actor who spends all their time on screen trying to show that they are still important and deserve to be treated as such then I would have enough money to at least buy a half way decent car. The colors of this movie were almost completely the same through the whole thing, however they were not exactly the same. If you pay enough attention you will notice that at parts of the film a little more color is added to the pallet. But for the most part, since the movie takes place at night, the color pallet is very dark and the colors are muted. Of course with that said you should know that the blood tends to be the brightest color (even though sometimes it is too bright and looks as fake as it really is). The director, James Mangold, seemed to really want the audience to see the blood and be drawn into the horrible deaths of the people. Before I end this review I would like to say that the boy who played Timmy York, Bret Loehr, did an amazing job. Hollywood tends to go for the child actors that look good when filmed but not when acting, but Bret had it all. He was very convincing in his role and it almost made me worry that maybe this role might have screwed with his head a bit but he seems to have moved on nicely in his career. I almost forget to mention the great use of a poem that is apparently very popular to use in movies. In Identity they quote lines from the poem Antigonish (I met a man who wasn’t there). It’s a haunting poem and it really added something to the spooky level of the movie, it sort of makes your skin crawl as the characters say it throughout the movie. Okay, now I must stop talking about Identity before I give away the best parts. The end result is that this movie may not be for those with a weak stomach and it is definitely not a family film but it is a movie that you should see at least once. So mull it over and then go rent Identity and enjoy trying to figure out the movie before the movie shows you what you were missing.

Questioning your identity a bit? Maybe if you watch this trailer you'll have a better grasp on things.

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Tron User Friendly Since 1982

            Today I look to the past. The days before everyone and their brother had a cell phone. I look to a movie that is as old as the word “internet”. I’ve been blocked lately on what I wanted to review so I took some suggestions and the one I settled on wasn’t even one that was directly suggested. I was told by someone very close that I should review the latest installment of Tron. However, after this person suggested it they said, “Actually that won’t work because you haven’t seen the original and you won’t fully appreciate the latest one and how well they did with it.” Well I took that advice and found the original so I could watch it and then I planned to do this review on Tron: Legacy, but since I just watched a fairly well known classic I thought, “Why not review the one you just watched stupid.” So my feel personally for the movie is that I am really not much of a fan of it. Its main strike in my book is that it is so much a sci-fi film. That is just one genre that I could never get into. There was too much technical talk that made no sense to me and with the age of the film the computer lingo made even less sense because it’s so out dated. But, alas, I will keep those feelings to myself as I move on to the rest of the review.

            Hacker Flynn, Jeff Bridges, thinks that he is in a dream when suddenly he finds himself in a digital world surrounded by people calling themselves programs and speaking almost religiously about people outside their world known as “users”. All Flynn ever wanted was his due credit for some video games he made, but now he must fight for his life and the life of all the programs if he ever wants to get back to the real world where he belongs. But have no fear because he will have help in the form of a security program by the name of Tron, Bruce Boxleitner.

            This is an interesting and original concept for a film for the time that it came out and actually it is still a fairly original movie for today. The idea that a person can get sent into a computer and meet programs as if they were real people is just not something you hear a lot about.   It was actually pretty funny to hear the programs talk about what they are meant to do in the system and see the delight on their face as they tell others what they do for their users. It’s interesting to see this side of a computer too because it probably made a few people think twice before deleting an old program after watching this movie. Really probably one of the best things this movie did for people is that it made them think after they left the theater. You always have to remember that in every work of fiction it is still based on some truth. The question with Tron would be, how much truth is hidden in this old 1980s sci-fi film? Then I would like to compliment this film on some pretty cool special effects. Just about the whole film takes place in a digital world and, while yes you can tell as you’re watching it that this is a very old movie, you see the creativeness in the machines and creatures of that world. There are no strings to be seen helping the disc fly through the air and actually there is like a reverse Wizard of OZ effect in this movie. Just think about it for a minute. In the real world Flynn and everything else is in perfect color, but then he goes to the digital world and it’s different. The only color on the people there is in the lines of the outfit they are wearing. Everybody’s face is in black and white. There are even very few colors at all in the computer world. There’s blue, red, yellow/gold, and I was going to list one more but it would seem that there are no more except for black and white (and if you ask any student of art those are not colors they are shades). Also it would seem that in 1982 when Tron was released that people had more of a sense of humor about religion. They flat out say pretty early in the movie when one of the programs mentions his user something along the lines of “Oh boy another religious one”. Come on, even in Tron: Legacy they couldn’t get away with a joke like that. Then there is basically a short religious ceremony towards the end that just seemed to slip past the radar of all the people with outrageous opinions about everything. On a down side though, the movie felt a bit slow at times. It falls into the action and adventure genres but I just feel that some of the action was really not all that action packed. It felt at times like The Lord of the Rings trilogy. By this I mean that there was someone that needed to get from one place to another that is a fair distance away so the writer, Steven Lisberger, created hardships for that character to make the journey more exciting. This works for some movies where the whole movie is not just the journey, but for The Lord of the Rings and Tron it just seemed like the writer could have made the journey a bit easier so it wasn’t 90% of the movie and maybe added some more things before and after the journey so we, the viewers, could see some good old fashioned character development. In all reality there isn’t really an obvious lesson that I noticed in this film. I mean everyone started and ended exactly as they were. There just really doesn’t seem to be much of a character arch in this movie. So in closing I would say that you should probably look around and find this movie if you can if only to see some pretty cool connections between the original and Tron: Legacy.

Ready to join the fight between Tron and the Master Control Program, no? What do you mean you can't digitize yourself into your computer? Well then I guess you'll have to watch the trailer and see how Flynn did it.

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