My Blog In the Middle of Your Net

The day was May 27, 2012.   Maxwell Haddad released a review on The Racked Focus of an anticipated, though maybe not highly, return to film by Will Smith.   The movie was Men in Black 3 , directed by Barry Sonnenfeld.   Also in the movie were Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin, among other actors that you might notice upon seeing them.   How well was the review written?   Let’s dive in and get a taste of it. Maxwell, as per usual, covered the actors, director, and writer relatively early in the review.   This is an interesting thing that he does in the reviews.   It allows the writing to move beyond the surface level aspects of the film and delve into the deeper meaning.   The surface level aspects of the film are interesting in and of themselves, however, and some time is spent with one particular aspect of note: the effects.   Max describes the look of the movie as top notch and appropriately retro, thanks to Rick Baker.   I...

This week is a special week for the Sunday blog post about a random movie that many could consider a bad movie.   This week isn’t just a one movie week.   I have three movies that I’m going to write about.   This week, I am covering Death Race , Death Race 2 , and Death Race: Inferno .   Not included in this is Death Race 2000 .   I am only dealing with the remake, and its subsequent series of movies. In 2008, Paul WS Anderson re-imagined Death Race 2000 as a prison set, dystopian future, racing movie.   The idea behind it was that prisons are run for profit and one of the ways to create profit was to televise a possibly fatal race between convicts.   This was where the title Death Race came into play.   The races have characters for the viewer to latch onto.   There is violence and death involved.   It’s exciting for the viewer, but does it make an exciting movie?   That’s a tough question to answer and all comes dow...

Previously on Work Stories, I told a tale of a face that had appeared on a pane of glass that I needed to clean.   This was interesting to me, but you may have needed to be there to fully understand the wonder of that moment.   This week, I move onto something that is not so visual.   I move onto math. The first part of this story takes me back to high school.   High school is where I learned all my math stuff.   Addition, subtraction...that basic stuff was elementary school, but the meaty math came in high school.   High school brought me multiple variable algebra.   High school brought me functions.   High school brought me calculus.   And high school brought me vectors, the bane of my existence. I could easily get 90% or higher in my math classes throughout high school.   I was never bad at math (until university, but that doesn’t matter in this story).   I understood every concept that was taught to me, and didn’t h...

On August 17, 2012, a review appeared on The Racked Focus for the film The Expendables 2 .   The movie was directed by Simon West, the director of such classics as Con Air and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.   It starred many actors, including Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Jet Li, and Liam Hemsworth.   The review was written by none other than Maxwell Haddad. The most prominent thing in Max’s review is the topic of nostalgia and how it is influential in the current movie business.   This line of thought brings up the ideas of how nostalgia has influenced movie viewing throughout the past couple decades and how it has affected the ever-changing landscape of filmmaking.   More and more movies have become nostalgia driven.   They will star actors who were popular in different eras for the sole purpose of people craving another movie with that actor.   Movies will play up...