The Friday Link for 1/18/19

Hi all!

For this Friday, I want to revisit something we talked about on the radio show, Bird Box, the new Sandra Bullock movie on Netflix.  We were talking about it because of the stupidity of some people who are trying to mimic the blind driving scene from the movie.  Driving without watching the road apparently leads people to have accidents.  I KNOW!

Bird Box itself is not the focus of the Link this week, but I will say it's not a bad film.  I liked Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich, and Trevante Rhodes really shines, but the film feels somewhat warmed over.  Multiple other movies have done similar end of times like plots.  A good example of this would be A Quiet Place, a very solid film.  A bad example would be The Happening.

The Happening was kind of the final straw in the previous downfall of M. Night Shymalan, the director who exploded onto the scene with three of the best movies from the turn of the centruy, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs.  He got known as the guy who put a last second twist in a movie full of jump scares, and those three movies deliver.  He then did The Village (not a bad film but you kind of see the 'twist' coming from a mile away) followed by Lady in the Water (an outright dud).  The Happening was his chance at trying to come back, albeit with one major mistake.

If you have not seen The Happening, I recommend you do for one reason.  They made the horrible decision to cast Mark Wahlberg as the lead.  I like Wahlberg, and he can act, but this was NOT the role for him.  Half of his facial expressions seem to be him wondering if he's in the movie or if it's the real world.  It's the facial expression of a guy who's the dumbest guy in math class being asked to answer the toughest problem on the test.  Think I'm lying?  CinemaSins will set you straight!



By the way, it should be mentioned M. Night Shymalan is bouncing back with the third movie from the Unbreakable series, Glass.  It was a smart move for him to go back to an old friend.

For another video, I'm going off to deep pace again, and the 'Nova' program's excellent episode on the New Horizons space craft, the one that went past Pluto, and the challenge for them to see what they could find further out.  I love the frantic look to see if they could find something further past Pluto to focus New Horizons on, and when they finally do find a faint tiny body way out there, how the Earth based telescopes actually got a decent idea of what it looked like from Earth.  Science is amazingly cool.


Have a great weekend everyone, and have a wonderful MLK Day!