Watch "Long Way Aground" instead
585283
This was so boring that I only watched the first couple of episodes.  I was hoping Charley, Ewen and Claudio would dump the support crew and ride into some crazy stuff.  When it became clear that wasn't going to happen, I gave up.  Nothing special here, just a couple of guys riding their motorcycles for many days.

Watch "Long Way Around".  That one is a real adventure.  The support crew plays a very small role, until they get to Siberia, and then they have a meaningful role and added something to the viewer's enjoyment.  Lot's of adventure, lots of fun, lots of local people met.
3174536
All I kept thinking is when are they finally going to get to the cruise? Talk about disappointed. I know it's just a farce but it was an actual good idea. Doing something different to appreciate what you have. Talk about peer pressure. The movie itself is more of an advertisement against xmas.
2886476
Josh Hutcherson returns as Sean from 2008's "Journey To The Center Of The Earth."  Now he's a brooding teenager focused on finding his grandfather (Michael Caine) who has been sending him coded messages from some unknown island, not found on any map.  With the help of his very tolerant step-father (Dwayne Johnson), a former Navy sailor, he discovers the location of the island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

Being a good guy, Hank (Johnson) agrees to finance a trip and accompany Sean to find the island and the grandfather.  Sean's mom (Kristin Davis) pretty much just nods in agreement in the few scenes she's in.  Departing from some fictitious Polynesian island, the two hook-up with a helicopter pilot (Luis Guzman) and his cute daughter Kailani (Vanessa Hudgens).  They then fly this rickety old `copter into an approaching hurricane.  I guess they didn't get the warning??  The next thing you know, they're on the beach of a beautiful mysterious island.

After Sean flirts with Kailani and Gabato (Guzman) does his I'm-so-dumb comedy bit, they find grandpa' Alexander.  Then he and Hank go at each other playfully.  Would you believe that Alexander has found the lost city of Atlantis too?  Most mythology has Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean.  Couldn't they at least call it Pacificas?

I haven't read Jules Verne's novel but I doubt much of the silliness in this film can be found in the book.  For example.  Instead of walking around a large nest of eggs, the adventurers walk on top of them, even after one cracks.  This allows Guzman to fall into the embryonic fluid.  Ewww!  The eggs themselves are about 3 times as large as they should be based on momma lizard's size as she comes running.  I'm not sure how many eggs a lizard normally lays but there are dozens at this location.

I didn't see this in 3-D but I suspect that would have added some fun to the film.  In 2-D, the scenery and animals look very fake to my eye.  This film with a PG rating is aiming at a younger audience and I'm sure many will like the adventure.  For those of us over 13 or so, I'd say find something else.

There's nothing wrong with the Blu ray transfer.  Shot with a 1.78:1 aspect ratio it looks very good.  Maybe too good given the obvious green screen shots and animated backdrops.  The audio is first rate as well with DTS-HD MA 5.1 sound being delivered nicely throughout the film to all the speakers.
3770940
Not much can be said in this one.  I bought it for really cheap because I am a huge Dale Midkiff fan.  Luckily, I know God to be forgiving, so he can rest assured he'll survive this.

The scenery was good, the acting was not.  Then again, the lines were so stupid that it would be hard to put in a good performance.  We have the mother just disappearing out of the car into the rapture, we have the ice in the driver and the gal praying for his salvation as the pregnant woman screams in the back seat, the tiny plane with the disappearing pilot, the non-believer quoting Thessalonians, the little gal with the tiny cough, and on and on ad infinitum.  Sorry, I hate to spoil the plot --  IF THERE WAS ONE!

According to the jacket it was about the 2012 disaster.  Please don't be fooled.  It would appear the disaster happened in 2008.

I bought this on impulse, which I occasionally do.  I will sign off now and once again view "Confessions of a Shopaholic" to see if I can break my evil ways.  The one that worries me most is the impulse shopping!
2156817
I remember how excited I was back in 1972 when "The Eyes of Charles Sand" was first announced.  "Dark Shadows" had recently ended its original run, and star Joan Bennett had been cast in this TV movie, which was the pilot for a proposed new prime time series.  I was in middle school, and the prospect of a new weekly show that dealt with the occult sounded like a sure-fire, can't-miss proposition.  For some reason, I missed the broadcast of the movie; I was doubly disappointed when I later read that ABC had passed on the whole idea.

Well, over forty years have gone by, and having finally seen the DVD-R issued by the Warner Archives, I can well understand why "The Eyes of Charles Sand" disappeared so quickly.  It starts out promisingly enough, with the title character (Peter Haskell) dreaming of his sightless uncle popping up out of a coffin; seconds later the phone rings and his Aunt Alexandria (Miss Bennett) tells him that his uncle has, in fact, just died, and that she knows about the dream.  It seems that Charles has inherited "The Sight", the ability to see into the world of the dead.  Sure enough, at his uncle's funeral, Sand sees the corpse of a woman who died 100 years ago beckoning to him, and the main credits, a far-out blend of op-art letters and circles of light, begin to roll.

Unfortunately, it's all downhill from that point on.  The main "plot", something about a girl (Sharon Farrell) who has read about a murder in an old diary and confused it with what might have been the murder of her absentee brother, is rambling and unbelievable, and the performances of Miss Farrell as the heroine, and Barbara Rush and Bradford Dillman as her sister and brother-in-law, are shrill and amateurish.  The discordant musical score, blatantly ripped off from Henry Mancini's masterful composition for "Wait Until Dark" (Mancini sued the producers for copyright infringement and won the case), is annoyingly over-utilized, and the production values are an abomination, with what appears to be thick pink nail polish substituting for blood.  The only assets are the earnest performances of Mr. Haskell, Miss Bennett, and Adam "Batman" West, playing a shrink.  This film is cautiously recommended to die-hard fans of these three performers; others will probably find the entire enterprise a visual embarrassment.
3701864
I toyed with giving this series two stars, but settled on three. This is a turn of the 20th Century "costume" drama about the building of the Titanic. The second season was to be about its sailing and sinking. The computer graphics are lovely and the characters are compelling. Its strongest suit is the attention it pays to the history of the labor movement in Belfast and the sectarian conflict emerging with it.

Unfortunatley  the filmmakers took major liberties with the historical background. For example, the series depicts Titanic being built alone at the Gantry at Harland  and Wolff Shipbuilders, when in fact Olympic and Titanic were built side by side. Olympic was started three month before Titanic, but they stood dramatically together in the shipyard during most of the project. Most jaring to me was the climactic sailing of Titanic from Belfast, when Titanic in fact sailed with it passengers from Southampton, England. Especially because the writers are making a controversial point about the underlying cause of the sinking, attention to detail is critical. These were careless and non-trivial errors which undermine the credibility of the series. Not quite a waste of time, but close.
576136
The first Blue Lagoon was daring and a bit controversial. It showed two children growing up without adults in their lives, growing up without inhibitions, without guidance, and learning some fundamental truths without help. It dared to show full-frontal nudity (carefully!) because that seemed natural. It had the courage to confront things like child birth for child-adults who had no idea of what was going on. That's some of what makes it a classic film, one which holds up even today.

This film, for all that it is a sequel, comes across as a revisionist attempt to "clean up" the original. It starts where the previous film left off, with a small boat being seen by a sailing vessel. Unlike the end of the previous film, where all three occupants of the boat are pronounced alive, in this film the parents are dead, and only the child survives. He is taken aboard the sailing vessel and entrusted to the care of a recently widowed woman who has an infant daughter. The woman, Sarah Hargreaves (Lisa Pelikan), and the two children, are cast adrift in a lifeboat a short while later because the ship is infected with cholera (a virtual death sentence for all aboard) - they are cast adrift in the hope they may survive. By pure happenstance (alright, by a piece of not-very-clever script-writing) they happen to arrive at an island that is supposed to look awfully familiar.

This time the children grow up with Sarah to teach them right and wrong, and all about God (she was a missionary), and so forth (all the things that were "wrong" in the first version). Eventually Sarah contracts pneumonia and dies, but not before she has time to explain how she'd like to be buried. Time passes and we get to see the new teenagers, Lilli (Milla Jovovich) and Richard (Brian Krause - best known as Leo in the TV show Charmed) doing the same sorts of things as we saw in the first film.

All in all, I cannot recommend this poor-quality remake. Buy the original, certainly, but leave this one sitting on the shelf. Perhaps the one good reason to watch this film is as an object lesson, to see what the original film could have been like, had the makers not taken the risks that they did.
2979505
I don't go to the theater that often. A film really has to light my fire to get me to actually go out and see it. Well, "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" got me interested enough to go see it when it was released in the summer of 2003. Why was I so interested? Probably because I occasionally enjoy fun adventure films in the manner of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) or "The Mummy" (1999). "Black Pearl" is a film of this ilk.

WHAT WORKS: The film looks and sounds great, which includes the actors, costuming, cinematography, locations and score. Johnny Depp as pirate Capt. Jack Sparrow is a notable character; Sparrow comes off as a young Keith Richards gone Pirate. Keira Knightley is beautiful as Elizabeth Swann; and Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom & Lee Arenberg are all fabulous in their roles.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK: When I first saw it in 2003 the film struck me as too long for such lightweight fare (2 hours and 23 minutes). It also struck me as boring and forgettable. I decided to see it again recently and came away feeling the same way. What makes it boring and forgettable? I don't know, it's hard to pinpoint. Maybe because it's too drawn-out; light fare like this works best at around 80-95 minutes. Maybe it's because many of the characters are unable to die because of the curse, which naturally creates a lack of suspense. Mostly it's because the story and characters, although fun, are absurd and superficial. I suppose it's too much to expect to glean some morsel of depth or truth from a film like this.

CONCLUSION: "Black Pearl" is a fun, goofy pirate adventure; it's okay but far from great like, say, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or even the 1999 version of "The Mummy." It's overlong, overly light, kinda boring and ultimately forgettable. I know I'm in the minority here, but I'm not a fan and can't recommend it, except maybe to kids. But if it trips your trigger that's great.

GRADE: C+
4487304
There is a lot wrong with the sailboat scenes when in the storm. I don't think a sailor was involved to give any technical advice. If you are not a sailor you may enjoy this movie. If you are a sailor, you will wonder how this movie got made.
2664861
The only thing that could have made this movie watchable is if Leonardo DiCaprio's character had died before the ship left the harbor.  It's a good thing that women find him attractive, because he will not be able to support himself on his acting ability alone.
The movie was a melodramatic mess.  The characters were just cutouts, two dimentional and without depth.  I felt no sympathy for any of them when the boat went down, just a sense of relief that this long winded tear jerker was almost over.
Lowest common denominator story-telling at its finest.
I'm really saddened that Cameron would unleash this "disaster" on us.  He's done some really entertaining work, Aliens and True Lies come to mind.  Maybe now that he's gotten obscenely wealthy off of this flick, he'll go back to writing and directing deeper films.
980409
What could have been a great opportunity to apply modern fx technology to a fascinating true story gets bogged down by a ridiculous teenage soap opera "human interest" narrative;  that at times is so smarmy it is painful to watch.

I saw this movie when it first came out in theaters and thought it was overrated.  Watched it again in my home theater and my opinion is unchanged.

The premise of the plot that Cameron used seems to be based on the following idea:  "Hey! what if we took two typical oversexed, vulgar, smart-alecky American teens from the 1990s and placed them on a ship in 1912?"

We are asked to believe that in the space of 3 days a sheltered upper-class girl of the Edwardian era, with no outside experience of the world, would suddenly:

1)  fall for a scruffy third class guy
2)  pose naked for him on a couch and have sex with him in the backseat of a car
3)  give the "middle finger salute" to someone
4)  spit on her fianc
5)  tell her mother to SHUTUP!

DiCaprio is way too girlish-looking to be the hero.  Winslet looks about 10 years older than him.  The movie depicts Jack as having the run of the ship, including free access to the first class areas.  Not only is it very unlikely that a wealthy girl like Rose would ever go for a guy like Jack, on the real Titanic they wouldn't have even met;  since first and third class were very strictly segregated.

The dialogue throughout the entire movie is wooden and clichd, and in the climactic last part of the movie consists mostly of "Jack! Jack!" and "Rose! Rose!"

Billy Zane is a caricature of a villain, and is almost hysterically funny.  He does almost every "villain-thing" except twirl his mustache and mutter "Curses!  Foiled again!"  I'm surprised Cameron didn't depict him carrying a bullwhip around on the ship.

The caricature is  also applied to almost everyone else in the movie.  Nearly all the first class passengers are depicted as cynical, selfish, unfeeling snobs.  The third class passengers are all noble and brave.  Obviously money and its acquisition is evil, Cameron seems to say.  A particularly odd message from a director who made mucho $$$ off this movie and lives a lifestyle of multiple big homes, yachts, and private airplanes; that would have astonished the wealthiest of Titanic's passengers.

The only way to watch this film is to fast-forwarded through the silly Jack-Rose scenes, and view some of the scenes of the ship and the sinking;  which at least capture some of the feel of the real Titanic.
2175294
Seriously, this film is even worse than the Titanic. I've tried to enjoy it, tried to search for the film's deeper meanings, well, there aren't any believe me. If the film's theme is just The finding of good company even in a strange world, The solace one finds in another in loneliness,then I would have to say that it is very poorly done.

The story is basically about a famous American actor who got an advertising job in Tokyo, but when he got there he is alienated by the Japanese culture and had some difficulties communicating, but then he met a woman named Charolett, who also feel the same way. Well, first I have to say something about the acting, it's B-A-D. Bill Murray, in the entire film has nothing but a depressed look on him. He showed almost no character transformation, at least not in his acting. He did not get more and more cheerful, but continues to "get lost" in his loneliness. The whole film did not give me a feeling of comfort, since the message is "The solace one finds in another in loneliness" and therefore it's suppose to be comforting. But after I watche the movie it left me with an empty feeling that I even cried. Because the message the movie gave me is that life is empty and meaningless, that even in such a gorgeous city, you can't be happy and find things you enjoy. I also felt tramendously lost, lost in wandering what the purpose of life is. Lost in feeling that there's always something missing in life.

The other thing is the Asian discrimination. Like another reviewer said, the two protagonists never managed to learn about their surroundings, never bothered to learn to speak Japanese because they just assumed that everybody knows how to speak English. If that is not a sense of superiority, then I don't know what is. Through their eyes, the Japanese people seemed extremely uncool, they are silly, stupid, couldn't say the "Rs" right, and have no artistic talent. All these things are discrimination and racisim. And I don't find it the least bit funny. So yeah, the protagonists wanna get the hell outta there, I would too. But the reason I received was not because they are so alienated, but that the place itself was so incredibly stupid to stay in. And this is also shown in the plot too, for example Bob and Charolett complained about cooking their own food.

Overall, I cannot understand why this film actually touched the Oscars, I guess once again I can say that the critics are mindless idiots. Also I just have to say to you guys, don't persume you know a culture or a country just because you've read books on it, studied it or watched it on TV. Because all those things can be biased. Go to the country, spend time there, and you may be deeply surprised. As someone who lived half of my life in one country and half in another, I have the right to say this.
3775859
I had hoped this would be a nice film showing lots of scenery on the train rides. Something I could watch over and over again or even on a loop for a couple of hours. Unfortunately it's more of a commercial documentary, something you might see playing in gift shop whilst you were on vacation there. There seem to be more shots of inside the buffet section of trains than any thing else, and sadly due the voice over narration explaining everything constantly seen on screen (and it never stops) it's unlikely this will get watched more than once.

A shame.
1112325
Boat's n Hos! Okay, that was the highlight of the entire movie. Stick with Talladega Nights. More fun to watch and more funny than this being in what I call the Will Ferrell situation that needs to end already or I need to be drunk to find this funny.
954803
Unfortunately, I don't like this film.

The story is so sad.
It is about a greek peasant Alexis Zorba from the island of Crete, and his british business partner.
The two men start business enterprises with coal mining and timber.
But the enterprises are not successful.
They build an overhead cable line for transporting wood timbers.
And the line collapses, scaring everybody from the village.
The two men have love affairs which end disasterously as well.
The british man loves a widow, so her former boyfriend drowns himself in the sea.
Then the villagers slash the throat of the widow, as a revenge.
Zorba has another love affair with a french dancer women.
He promises to marry her, but she gets sick and dies in his hands.
The poor greek peasants rob everything from her house.

I wish I had never seen this movie, honestly.
The story is so unfair and tragic.
The british guy and Zorba try to cheer up themselves by dancing
and having some exciting "madness" in their lives.
But it didn't cheer me. Worse yet, the movie is black-and-white and
the scenery shows old-fasioned, ugly village houses.
I give it an extra star for the good performance of the actors and
the nice greek music, which is played occasionally.
2869902
If this attempt at rendering Jules Verne's Mysterious Island wasn't such an obvious attempt at serious movie-making, I might have enjoyed it as a farce. Everything about it smacks of amateurish cinematography, so I won't belabor this review with critiques of the alleged acting, editing, writing, directing or production. Unless a viewer possesses a decidedly odd sense of humor, I recommend passing this one up.
764284
I am not, not, not, in any way, shape, or form, a sailor. I've never even been *on* a sailboat, and in my 60 years I've been in a rowboat exactly twice.

However, I very much detested this movie because it required me to suspend disbelief.

The two most egregious items for me: (1) WHY did he leave the life raft tied to an obviously sinking boat and then go to sleep? (2) I kept saying to myself, "I know crap-all about nautical stuff, but SURELY there must be a safety device -- some kind of pinger or transponder -- that one could use in a situation like this." Sure enough, it only took this landlubber a short time with Google, beginning with "emergency transponder," to learn about EPIRBs and other kinds of distress radio beacons. In what world would a multi-zillion-dollar craft like the one depicted in this movie not be outfitted with multiple EPIRBs?