Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer: This beautifully filmed and scripted episode was let down for two reasons. 1) Perhaps it was the morality of the 1950s talking, but no man left alone on an asteroid for years would react with such hysterical negativity to the gift of a female android. 2) It wasn't an android at all, but a woman, the beautiful Jean Marsh.

The popularity of the sex doll industry in the coming decades could have traced its origins back to this episode if they'd done it properly. In fact, the modernization of sex-bots are in the news as I speak.

Robots were not new to movies or television when this episode was made, so they could have at least had her act like one. Her fleshiness would then have added a creepy element. Instead, it becomes a nice little love story about two humans on faraway star.

The Twilight Zone always stretched the imagination and credulity. Normally no one cared. But this episode seemed hamstrung by a Calvinist morality eschewing what would have amounted to masturbation with a machine, or downright carelessness.
An example of a movie review. negative (OPTIONS:
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- positive).

A: This is possibly the most boring movie in history. I was really looking forward to seeing this movie given the actor/director Roman Polanski. I think I would rather see the Three Amigos than ever watch this movie again. It promptly went from the DVD player straight into the garbage. My apologies to those of you who apparently liked this movie however you probably liked New Coke as well. I am at a loss to see why anyone would have enjoyed this movie, it is slow, dull and has no real plot. You wait for 105 minutes for the movie to get started. I understand this was made in 1976 however this was an era of bad television all around. Thank god disco and Three's Company are gone along with stop sign glasses and the Bay City Rollers. Oh well just my thoughts.
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: This movie is yet another in the long line of no budget, no effort, no talent movies shot on video and given a slick cover to dupe unsuspecting renters at the video store.

If you want to know what watching this movie is like, grab a video camera and some red food dye and film yourself and your friends wandering around the neighborhood at night growling and "attacking" people. Congratulations, you've just made "Hood of the Living Dead"! Now see if a distribution company will buy it from you.

I have seen some low budget, shot on video films that displayed talent from the filmmakers and actors or at the very least effort, but this has neither. Avoid unless you are a true masochist or are amused by poorly made horror movies.
Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: One reason Pixar has endured so well, and been so successful, is that while their films remain technical marvels and visual mosaics, they have a story to match their style. And often very moving style at that: affecting, charming and cross-generational. That a lot Anime (speaking in broad terms) and a great many other animations fail to match their technical virtuosity with real substance is, I think (and I might be wrong) partly because either the makers aren't bothered with character and plot and focus far too much on sound and image, or the sheer effort that goes into making some animations is so enormous, so enervating that they don't have the energy to create a really engaging story.

That same cannot be said of Renaissance. There are flaws in its plot, but I'll get to that later. Those same flaws, however, are not reflected in the visuals - Renaissance is nowt short of stunning. The ultra-high contrast images (sometimes so high-contrast that is nothing but one face or one beam of light visible) and incredible detail are always impressive, always a joy to behold. The futuristic Paris on display is the grim offspring of Blade Runner and Brave New World; dark, murky, quite affluent and even clean, but shrouded in intrigue, corporate malfeasance, obsessed with beauty (capital of the catwalk, after all) and disguising the squalor and neglect of its labyrinthine passages with a veneer of monumental, sophisticated architecture.

It's a compelling environment, not entirely original, but great all the same. The film's much-touted 'motion-capture' technology and incredible attention to human and design minutiae result in images a black-and-white photographer would die for. Not that the detail prevents entertainment, because Christian Volckman crafts some superb action sequences: a hell-for-leather care chase, a couple of gruesome(ly imaginative) murders, several tussles in the dark and a nasty dust-up in a gloomy apartment. The locations are great, too (I want to visit the nightclub). While the central character of Karas is your regular off-the-shelf maverick cop, the other two female characters (who are sisters) are the real motors of the movie. Coming from war-torn Eastern Europe, products of a war, diaspora and a family spat, they're a compelling metaphor for Europe as a whole.

The film is tremendously atmospheric, its dizzying, swooping faux-camera moves and adult tone making for a very engaging experience. However, the plot... It never becomes more interesting than the initial hook, in which indefatigable plod Karas must find Ilona Tasuiev, a drop-dead gorgeous and pioneering scientist, after she's snatched from the street. The sinister corporation Avalon (is ANY corporation ever not sinister?), which she was working for on 'classified', projects are hell-bent on her retrieval, and soon Karas is up to his neck in official reprimands, dead bodies, cigarette-smoke and narrowly-missed bullets, and falling in love with Ilona's sister Bislane (very sympathetically voiced by Catherine McCormack), as he plumbs the depths of the city's sordid underbelly (and his own past).

Text-book noir, in other words, but while I enjoyed the film a lot more than Sin City (to which it bears a passing visual resemblance), the plot and resolution are dull, the theme of immortality being raised but never examined, and the shenanigans of high-rolling Avalon CEO Paul Dellenbach are also dull , undercutting a lot of the dramatic tension. The basic ideas are familiar sci-fi genre materials, and there's a nagging sense that the visuals and atmosphere are disguising the mundane material.

However, the film as a whole is lucid and perfectly coherent, even if some of the scenarios the characters get into occasionally feel like excuses for displays of technical wizardry. But it's the projection of life in Paris circa 2054, the vision of community and creation of another city from the ground up that makes this film something to behold. I may be taking it too seriously, and if that's the case I can at least say that it's superbly made, extremely entertaining (and pretty mature, too), and with an ambiance like no other.
Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer: A fascinating look at the relationship of a single father in 1998 and a single mother in 1881, tied together by a time-traveling teenager. Reminded me of "Somewhere In Time," Richard Matheson's "Bid Time Return," as rendered by Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour.
Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer:
This is pretty much a low-budget, made for TV, type of movie intended to capitalize off of the success of the original. I'm a fan of b-movies, and this one might have been good had they not attached the name "Cube" to it, because as is, the director and plot of the original were better, and this movie just about ruined my taste for the entire series. The characters are annoying and cliched, there are problems with continuity, and several outright production screw-ups. The story hardly gets a chance to develop because of superfluous dialogue and suffers from that. They more or less use the same horror gimmicks over and OVER throughout the movie, and because the first one was so good, this simply turns out as a disappointment.

If this was a stand-alone b-movie, I'd probably give it about a four. The "1" rating I give it was pretty much a statement about how it utterly paled in effects and intelligence as compared to the first.