Ghost whisperer season 5

 1-Birthday presence

Melinda has an emergency delivery and Aidan is born. We are moved instantly to “five years later”, and they’re happy throwing Aidan’s birthday party, but also a bit worried by what Delia calls “the birthday curse” because every year something happens. He can see ghosts too, and there’s a ghost woman telling him to go with her. He sees her every birthday. The woman died right when Aidan was born, so she thought that Aidan was hers, but it’s not. Her baby is well and lives with his dad and his wife.

Aidan has ‘empathy’, he can feel other people’s emotions and is affected by it.

2-See no evil

A girl died in a car accident that put her mother into a coma; now Gwen thinks that it’s because she didn’t forward a chain-mail that her mother is between life and death, and she sends that chain-mail to everyone, and hurting people that delete it, trying to save her mom.

Her mother had a brain tumor that cause the accident, and when she dies she explains it to her daughter. 

A little girl that lives in the hospital has a scary ghost-friend that made her start the chain. 

3-Til death do us start

Eli’s dad dies and Melinda sees Eli’s mom’s ghost. She died seven years ago. They’re both ghosts, now, and his dad keep trying to keep Eli and his childhood friend Casey apart. Melinda thinks it’s because she might be his half-sister. His father Ray was very jealous of his wife Evelyn and Casey’s dad Dom, but nothing ever happened between those two. Evelyn was having an affair, yes, but it was with Casey’s mom Ann. Ray was so sure she had an affair with Dom, he was never sure if Eli was really his son. Now they move on, but Casey is freaked out by the ghost-thing so they won’t be a couple.

4-Do over

Delia is having a terrible date (after that business with Charlie’s ghost, I thought she had started to date that friend of Jim… Charlie was sure he was the right person for her, but apparently she thought different…). She eventually finds her secret admirer, the one who’s been sending her gifts and spreading flower petals for her: the waiter who spilled wine on her because he felt nervous around her.

The morgue at Jim’s hospital is haunted.  :-p

Eli’s sick and has no voice, and is tired of his mom being there all the time :-p

In the 50s a patient died in surgery, but Melinda finds out that he’s still alive. He was dead for three minutes and then came back. The doctor had a heart attack and died, though. Melinda talks to the ghost of the doctor, making him understand that he didn’t kill anyone, he saved his patient. 

So, who’s haunting the morgue?

5-Cause for alarm

Melinda sees Aidan talking to imaginary friends.

Melinda reveals her ‘secret’ to Aidan’s teacher. Years ago she was going to elope with Sean, but he was accused of stealing, ran away and had an accident, and he died weeks later in a hospital. Carolyn’s father framed him to get him out of their lives.

Aidan can see things that Melinda can’t see, friends made of light scared of the shadows left by broken people…

6-Head over heels

Rich Nathan asks Eli to help him with his anxiety attacks. Eli is worried because Melinda knows who his patient is and that his sister died, and she tells him “who can keep a secret better than me?” which is funny or stupid, just choose one, because she’s always telling everyone or doing strange things and talking to thin air in public…

Nathan was in love with a girl that died, and never knew he had a son, never knew she was sick. After her death, her son found out about Nathan being his father and believes that he neglected them and is very angry with him. Melinda brings them together to talk and make peace. 

Melinda is worried because her empathic son keeps picking up feelings and odd behaviour. Aidan tells his parents of his imaginary friends, who are different from ghosts somehow.

7-Devil’s bargain

A 19-year-old girl scared of an operation has Jim promise her that he won’t let anything bad happen to her, but then she dies. He feels guilty and thinks she’s haunting him, but no, it’s a completely different story.

Surgeon Morgan, Jim’s teacher, had a story with student Tina who was in Jim’s class, but then she disappeared and died. President Bedford tells Eli, out loud and clear, that he doesn’t like him, but later he tells Eli that he did keep him behind to protect him , and Melinda too.

The shadows are scaring people, they are dangerous…

8-Dead listing

Kirk died of an allergy reaction and tells Melinda that his wife Rita killed him. Delia knew them both because they worked in real estate as well. It’s a tough case because they appear to hate each other, it’s a ‘war of the roses’ situation. What they don’t know is that they were both trying to make up but he died first. The fights started for jealousy, and she ends up electrocuting herself by accident, so now that they’re both ghosts they can see each other and talk and make peace and cross over together.

Aidan’s friend can do magic tricks, so he wants to do magic too, using his ghost friends. Melinda and Jim speak to him to make him understand that he must not do that. They don’t know that there’s a ghost of a little girl in his room who tells him that if people find out she’s there, something bad will happen.

9-Lost in the shadows

Melinda finds the little ghost-girl in Aidan’s closet, it’s Julia, the girl that lived in the hospital. Melinda talks to her parents, tells them her secret of course, and they’re very quick and willing to accept it. 

Julia acts scary, tells Melinda “you don’t know what you’re dealing with” and that same night Aidan goes missing. Melinda is going crazy, she tells Eli’s cop-friend that she can see ghosts. 

Julia leads Aidan to a train station where she thought there’d be kids. The place was shut down while she was in the hospital, so she doesn’t know about it. 

She believes that she can’t go into the light because the good ghosts will suffer. The shadows attack her and Aidan helps her to call the shinings, but they don’t come in. Aidan points a light at the shadows to make them go away and it works. Melinda and Jim finally find him and take him home. There, Melinda has Julia’s parents talk to her and introduces her friends to her: Ned, Eli, Delia.. Julia thinks that when she tried to help her little friend she made her more sick instead, until she died. Lili had leukemia, the same thing she had. Her parents didn’t tell her to let her have hope, because she died a lot later. Finally Julia sees Lili smiling into the light, so she says goodbye and goes into it.

Carl tells Melinda not to anger the shadows. 

10-Excessive forces

Melinda and Jim have a night out leaving Delia with Aidan. While going to meet them, Eli gets pulled over by a cop with a ghost in his back seat, who tells them “do what he says, he’s a killer with a badge”.

Melinda’s car was toed away, and “accidentally” stripped down looking for drugs. Jim gets her a new car. 

The ghost is Dylan, a kid who died in an accident. His friend Jake was dating AnneMarie Ramsey, the cop’s daughter, but Ramsey was harassing Jake to keep him away from her. Dylan had been breaking his mailbox with a baseball bat, and AnneMarie was so mad at her dad that she had Jake do it too. Ramsey was a control freak, and he cemented the mail box, so when Jake hit it, it didn’t break, and the bat moved backwards and hit Dylan. They all have a good talk together and Dylan crosses over. Last thing he said was: “will you tell them I said goodbye?” and Melinda said “I will, I promise” … now, why didn’t she say it right away while he was there? I don’t understand this way of writing things…

11-Dead air

Ned has a radio show, and he airs a made-up break-up-call. Delia’s upset about it, and because she barely sees him anymore now that he’s in college. 

A woman bursts in accusing Ned of broadcasting a real story, her story. He found it on his computer, and after she goes out the machines go crazy, the word ‘killers’ appears on the laptop and his friend’s ear starts bleeding. The ghost reveals to Ned’s girlfriend that he cheated on her. 

Delia is very angry after hearing it all on the radio. Melinda finds Delia in her shop and says: “do you want your job back?” (when did she stop working there?)

Years ago a man pretended to break up with his wife for another woman to win a trip to Bahamas, which seems even more stupid an idea when you hear him say how jealous she always was! Come on!

The wife Maggie actually put the radio dj up to this, so sure that her husband was cheating on her that she wanted the dj to get a name out of him.

She was wrong back then, she ruined her marriage; now her ex Jack is married to the girl he named, Daisy, but that happened later and she never knew about the radio show. She was engaged to Bruce, but when Maggie called him to tell him everything, he died in a car accident. 

Bruce was jealous too. Jack and Daisy got along well together, but maybe they would have remained good friends, they had no intention of leaving their partners.

12-Blessings in disguise

Ned likes a new girl in town, Katie. Her family acts very weird. Melinda has a vision touching her brother’s hand, and Aidan saw it too. 

Her real name is Rachel, and her parents were ‘protesters’, and one of his friends died instantly in an accident trying to do something bigger than just spraying, and all this time he’s been haunting them believing that he left him behind to die alone. Melinda allows them to talk it out and the ghost Trevor tells them where to find the proof that he didn’t kill him. 

Rachel’s father still has to answer for the fact that he ran away, but his family won’t have to, and they’ll be able to stay where they are, and not keep running away anymore.

13-Living nightmare

Robert (Will from Criminal minds) comes to Jim’s hospital all bloody and Melinda has a vision of a girl being hurt with a knife. 

Robert’s biological father was believed insane and the murderer of his wife. Robert has the same pathology, a chronicle insomnia without cure that leads to death. The ghost of Robert’s father says that the demons get to you when you sleep, that’s why he doesn’t want the doctor to make Robert sleep. He didn’t want to hurt his wife, he wanted to protect her from the demons inside him (and she died from a single cut on her arm? She simply stayed there to die??)

Dad was preventing Robert from sleeping, but he’s not sick like dad was; dad never slept. 

Robert is about to kill himself when his girlfriend and Melinda stop him. Without his father interfering, he can now sleep.

Jim says to Robert: “my name’s Jim”… ehm no it’s not. Everybody sees Sam, right? He’s supposed to be Sam, people don’t know that Jim’s soul is in there, he shouldn’t go around saying that he’s Jim :-/

14-Dead to me

Ned gives his teacher of the occult a ouiji board, and they have a message from the dead.. She thinks that he’s trying to hit on her, but he tells her that she’s haunted. 

The ghost leads her to meet a man, and they like each other, until Brian turns out to be the guy on the other car in the accident that killed her fiancée Curtis, and his daughter too. She brought them together, because they’re so much alike and understand each other, and Madison wanted to do something for him, like finding him someone to talk to. After that’s over, the board still tells Melinda that someone she knows is going to die.

15-Implosion

Aidan’s turtle Giovanni died. Eli and Ned take turns in hiding the book of Changes :-/

A 12-year-old kid dies at a military base and he tells Melinda and Eli that Bedford, the President of Eli’s university, took away a mine from the base. He keeps asking for the book, he’s scared of the shadows, and he threatens to kill himself along with Delia if they don’t give it to him. Eli goes to Delia’s office with the book, freeing her, then talks to him and gives him the book (all pages blank now). Eli goes away and the shadows make the bomb explode, killing Bedford. 

The Book of Changes is now in Ned’s room disguised as a school book, but Bedford’s ghost sees it.

Eli’s cop friend was transferred.

16- Old sins cast long shadows

Ned is hurt again while checking out a house for Melinda (haunted, obviously, they all are apparently..) and Delia can’t take it anymore, after the explosion, but of course Melinda doesn’t stop looking for her ghost. 

Little Cassidy’s ghost is there, but she’s not the only one. In that house many years ago an old woman pretended to be a medium, and now she keeps ghost children trapped in there to please the shadows. Melinda can cross over both Cassidy and her two older ghost friends who tried to protect her, and Delia comes to help them all.

17-On thin ice

A graphic novelist is haunted. Now we have an episode, and Melinda, in graphic novel style…

The anthropology teacher helps them. 

Thanks to her “anonymous call” the body of Shane is found frozen in a lake. His stepbrother Colin is the real author of Damon’s new novel. Finally Damon admits it in front of everybody at his book signing. Shane took Colin’s work and brought it to Damon, than took a shortcut across the lake and fell through the ice. Now Colin and Damon will probably work together.

Eli cried reading Twilight… oh my..

At the end, Aidan draws two figures, him and his ‘brother’: just imagination or premonition?

18-Dead eye

The ghost of a clown scares Melinda, she has a sort of phobia for clowns I guess. Charles was actually a private investigator who died dressed as a clown at a party. He’s still here to protect Sherry because she’s a very good girl. She won the lottery and gives a lot to charity. She left her long-term boyfriend because she thought he proposed after eight years together because he had found out about it, but he didn’t. He proposed because he thought she was pregnant. 

She became engaged to a guy she thought was rich already so did not need her money, but he’s actually almost broke and does know that she’s rich.

At the end, Sherry and Todd get back together. Charlie fell in love with her too, and goes away not that he knows she’ll be happy. 

Bedford’s ghost comes to tell her “trust nothing and no-one”

19-Lethal combination

Jim wants to take Melinda out on a date and calls a new babysitter, and Aidan tells her (Kelly) that she stinks, and then insists on playing hide and seek. He got locked in a little cross-space and she called 911. A ghost tells Melinda to keep Kelly away from children. They ask a man who gave Kelly references (the ghost was his wife) and again they introduce themselves as Melinda and Jim! :-/ How annoying, they completely forgot their story, he’s Sam for the world!

Accidents keep happening to children in Kelly’s care. The ghost Laura caused the accidents and tried to kill Kelly and Gil. Laura had been addicted to painkillers and alcohol, and Kelly became Gil’s second wife, according to their traditional lifestyle (??). 

He loved Laura, with Kelly was something different, not romantic. Kelly took care of their daughter.

20-Blood money

A kid is missing and Melinda and Eli talk to detective Coulson, and he asks their help, believing in intuition, so Melinda tells him her “secret”. Danny is found alive but they found the body of a kid kidnapped eleven years ago, Henry.

Henry staged his kidnapping along with his friend agent Coulson; now Coulson holds Melinda at gunpoint and looks for the money then tries to kill her but Henry saves her. 

At first Henry was happy and didn’t care about the money, until he met Jeff Coulson who strongly wanted money, and talked him into it. When he saw his mother crying on television, he wanted to go back home and Jeff killed him. Melinda has Henry talk to his mother, and make peace.

21-Dead ringer

Gail and Kyle are moving in together in Grandview, and she says that her dad didn’t like that , when he was alive. Melinda sees Kyle’s ghost and tells Gail that he’s dead, but he’s not!  Kyle had a twin brother and they were both adopted by a loving couple, but Seth died when he was eight years old, only a week before they would be brought home. Melinda gets served with a restraining order. Kyle can see Seth too, and Seth threatens Melinda’s life. Seth is angry because when their adopted mother died in the plain crash, she went into the light instead of staying with them. Melinda tells Kyle that she went because she was happy from all the love that she had for them (well, for Kyle, but Seth hoped he could have her too now.) Seth breaks a lot of stuff at the shop, and finally Melinda gets him to calm down realizing that he’s just mirroring Kyle’s image but he died at 8 so he always stayed eight years old, wanting her mother and family. Before going into the light, Seth tells her that Bedford told him to be angry at Melinda. 

Melinda’s visions are getting more and more stronger and real, scaringly so. Ned thinks the Shadows are messing up with her head. Aidan falls and hurts his head and she didn’t help him because she thought it was a vision. Carl tells her that Aidan is in danger, from the Shadows, and he tells her to make Aidan stop seeing ghosts, to tell him that these things are not real, but she doesn’t want to , at first. Melinda and Jim have a discussion about keeping Aidan safe. 

Melinda is sad because to keep Aidan safe she’ll have to lie to him and change who he is.

Ghosts can do a lot of things that people can see..

Watcher Carl keeps teaching Aidan board-games, chess…

22-The children’s parade

Aidan tells his parents: “I feel better, that there’s no such things as ghosts. I feel better”.

Melinda acts strangely, in a bad mood, saying hard things like that she hates her shop, and then she can’t see the difference between real people and ghosts. 

Carl tells Eli that making Aidan believe that there’s no ghosts is a terrible thing, and maybe the Shadows made him say otherwise to Melinda. Aidan can still see ghosts and shinings, and he tells Carl that the shinings are children who have crossed over already, that’s why the shadows want ghost children. The shadows take hold of Melinda, so Carl asks for Aidan’s help. He calls all the shinings, to help and fight the shadows away and save her. Melinda and Aidan go together to talk to the ghost boy at the hospital who was sad thinking nobody ever loved him or wanted him, but his mother did, so much she died saving him, and he crossed over along with a lot of children that many years ago died in the polio ward. 

At the end: Melinda says to Aidan : you were my hero tonight” and he says “just like you are mom, every day”.

Quite mushy, but nice, and the big army of shiny ghost-children was rather cool. 

Melinda Gordon-Jennifer Love Hewitt

Jim Clancy-David Conrad

Delia Banks-Camryn Manheim

Ned-Christoph Sanders

Eli James-Jamie Kennedy

Bedford-Bruce Davison

Kirk of ep 8-Greg Germann

The huntsman: winter's war - 2016

A good enough movie, I liked it enough, the actresses were great, the story has holes but the visuals were great. 

It is much better than SnowWhite and the Huntsman, mainly because there is no SnowWhite here and the Queens have a bigger role. 

There are four characters (“tall” people playing dwarves) that are supposed to be the comedy relief. The actors did ok, mind you, but I think they were written very much over the line, Gryff was unbearable and an idiot, Nion was just stupid, why was the huntsman bringing them along? 

Actors:

Emily Blunt is very good, she did a marvellous job here. Freya looks innocent at first, then you can see on her face how she ‘lost her mind’ because of her grief; there is fragility in her strength, she does evil things because she’s heartbroken, crazy with grief, the pain was too much and she blocked it all down to go on.

Charlize Theron is also good, although we have no explanation here on why she is so evil. It sounds like the mirror has taken control over her, but it is not explained.

Jessica Chastain does her role well, and Chris Hemsworth is as handsome as ever.

We see Ravenna gaining power by marrying a king and then killing him, taking the power and making it grow, while at her side there is her sister Freya who is not like her. She has no magic and doesn’t want to have it, she fell in love with a man and thinks it will be forever. Ravenna tells her that love doesn’t exist, that it always ends in pain, but Freya believes in her love and gives birth to a daughter. One night she finds the baby’s room on fire and her lover who just put the baby’s cot on fire, and her power comes out, freezing the man who crashes on the ground and shatters.

Freya becomes the ice queen, she renounces all kinds of love, she goes to the North and becomes a queen, she wages war over the local villages, killing the adults and taking their kids, that she raises as her personal soldiers. She tells them that love is a weakness, a lie, that she saved them from it, and that they must become strong without it, and they train all the time, all of them.

Eric and Sara are the best, and all of a sudden she’s all over him, giving him her pendant saying that she is marrying him, and they make a shared promise to always be together, in life and in death… just like that, yesterday they were just fellow soldiers and now they are married, everlasting love and all that… pretty quick, huh?!?

Anyway, it was dangerous and the queen found out immediately by having one of her icy owls spying on them, so when they try to meet up again they are surrounded by the others, and even the queen. She tells them that if they can reach her they can go free, so they fight everyone who tries to stop them, but then the queen raises an ice wall that separates them. 

From Eric’s pov, we see that Tull killed Sara, and he was barely knocked unconscious. He was thrown into a river but he survived. 

We are told that it is at this point that the other movie takes place. Eric goes south and helps SnowWhite defeat Ravenna, all the while mourning for his lost wife.

Now SnowWhite’s husband finds him to tell him that she’s not well (because she spent too much time looking at the evil mirror… whyever did she do that??) and also and most importantly that the mirror has gone missing and they must find it again and lock it up.

Freya’s soldiers have conquered all the north, but now that she knows about the mirror she wants to conquer the south as well.

Eric goes with the two male dwarves and finds SnowWhite’s men killed where the mirror was stolen, then they are attacked inside a bar by Freya’s other huntsmen but is saved by Sara.

Dun-dun-dun, Sara is alive and also pretty pissed off because that day, when he saw her killed, she saw him simply leaving her behind. The ice wall was enchanted by the queen, apparently, which would explain a lot because it made no sense to me that Tull would kill her just like that.

She joins them in the search for the mirror, then they fall into a dwarves’ trap and are joined by two female dwarves as well. 

They find the mirror by battling the goblins who took it (many were already dead, the mirror makes people fight against each other) then Freya shows up with her soldiers and reveals that Sara was acting on her orders, because love is not real and all that blahblahblah.

As proof, Freya tells Sara to kill him, and she… sort of does. Her arrows never miss, and she hit him where he had her pendant so that she did not kill him, it only hurt a bit.

Freya takes the mirror to her castle, and then she asks… who is the fairest of them all??? Why, what does she care about that???

Anyway, Ravenna comes out of the mirror. Instead of a formless human-sized golden-coloured shape like it used to, this time it takes the shape of Ravenna, and then she loses the golden color to appear as the Ravenna we all know and love :) 

She says that when she was defeated she renounced her body to become part of the mirror, until Freya let her out.

—— The scenes here were quite impressive, you know, Freya’s realm was all icy while Ravenna is bright gold and black.

Eric sneaks inside the castle with the intent of killing Freya like a sniper, but unfortunately Ravenna was there to intercept the arrow. Sara also tries to attack her, but is easily stopped.

They are both sentenced to death, but Eric gives a speech on how they used to love each other, how they loved their parents before Freya had them killed, and now Tull and many others join them against the Queen. It is Ravenna though that attacks them with magic, and Freya yells for her to stop hurting them. Ravenna doesn’t listen so she raises a big ice wall.

Ravenna speaks of how it is all thanks to her that Freya has her power, and so Freya learns the truth: the mirror told Ravenna that Freya’s baby would grow up to be the fairest of them all, so Ravenna used her magic on Freya’s lover to make him go and kill the baby.

Now it’s a sort of all-against-Ravenna, although Freya doesn’t do much fighting, she tries to freeze her with her magic, but Ravenna stabs her (she has no weapons but she is the mirror, so it’s like a changeling, she creates what she needs).

Eric fights hard against Ravenna, and a dying Freya helps him by freezing the mirror, so that Eric can destroy it.

Eric and Sara hurry in each other’s arms, Freya tells them how lucky they are (I know what she meant, that their love is real and alive and all that, but she still has a weird concept of “lucky” and “saved”, given that both Eric and Sara are orphans because of her and have their bodies covered in scars.

Wonder woman 1984 - 2020

It was entertaining, some bits were a bit boring but on the whole it was good and I’d like it if they made a new one, I would surely watch it. There’s the annoying fact that even the heroes in this movie were rather immoral most of the time… other than that, it was indeed entertaining.

The beginning was fun, with a child Diana taking part in a sort of tournament in honour of  Asteria, a great warrior that stayed behind and withheld humans while all the other amazons fled to their wonderful island. All the other contestants are adults, but she is sure she can make it, so all of them start running and doing amazing stunts, then riding a horse fast and shooting arrows to specific points to indicate who has passed that spot, and Diana is indeed in the first place, but then she turns to look where the others are, and doesn’t see a tree up ahead, a branch hits her making her fall off the horse. It keeps going and she’s on foot, but she can see it far ahead and so sh doesn’t give up, she takes a shortcut and jumps on her horse again and keeps going, but she didn’t do the whole checkpoints, so even if she would have won, she is stopped shortly before the end by Antiope who teaches her that it wasn’t true, she might have become first, but it wouldn’t have been true anyway, it would be meaningless, and she’ll win when she’ll be ready for it, and then it will be  the truth.

Now, in 1984, Diana works at the Smithsonian in Washington, but she also does crime-fighting in her WW outfit. She stops a theft at a mall, and then all that ancient stuff is sent to the Smithsonian where expert Barbara Minerva has been hired to evaluate every piece.

Barbara is insecure and shy when it comes to social relations, and nobody seems to remember her even if they have spoken before. Diana goes to lunch with her - but only because sh seems to take pity on Barbara, because she really looked like she could do with a bit of social time. 

Diana usually sticks to herself, she stands apart from anyone, she is still hung up on Steven, the love she lost… and the first man she ever saw, way to go Rapunzel, first man you meet and you can’t shake him out of your head…

Amongst all the treasure there is one stone/crystal that seems to be absolute garbage, nothing precious about it at all, but it is a very very special piece indeed. There’s a writing in Latin that says that if you make a wish holding it, the wish will be granted. Not believing it is real, nevertheless Diana wishes to have Steven again while Barbara wishes to be like Diana.

Steve wakes up in another man’s body and finds Diana, convinces her that he is in fact himself and she is beside herself, she doesn’t waste a moment to fall into his arms  —————  It seems neither of them has any real problem with the fact that they are using another man’s body without his consent, or that for all they know he might even be dead because Steve took his body… when I was little I found some body-switching plot funny, but they were both swapped, like A is in B’s body, but B is in A’s body, which makes it more even somehow, but here it is very different, it was more like ‘a life for a life’, and she never showed the least bit of concern for the other man, even when they were in his flat, she never cared about him. Yes, alright, she says repeatedly that Steve is all she’s ever wanted, but still, a little bit of humanity please… she’s supposed to be all about Truth and Honor and The Right Thing To Do, and she puts everything aside in an instant simply to have her man back…

Barbara meanwhile has Diana’s self-confidence, but also her strength. 

The theft at the mall had been orchestrated by Max Lord, a showman/conman, after searching for it for a long time. Now he takes it from Barbara after charming her with some silly words that no silly girl should be so silly as to fall for.

With the stone in his hands, Lord wishes to be the stone in human form, and then he goes to people, touches them and makes them say a wish out loud (not so difficult when sometimes all they need to do is say ‘yes’ after he said ‘don’t you wish….’)

So he grants them their wish, but takes something in return, something of his choosing and they have no control over it, often don’t even realise it.

Barbara at first helps Diana in her research on the stone, but when they learn that to stop it they have to give up their wishes, Barbara doesn’t want to and goes immediately away. Diana also doesn’t want to do it, and her wish is worse, so at this point in time it is too early to judge.

The stone gives, but it also takes, and entire civilisations are no more after they used the stone.

Diana doesn’t stop even a second to wonder what happened to the man’s soul after Steven’s soul got in his body. Yes, she loves him, but is that enough to forget that Steven being here means he took somebody else’s life? Nobody ever mentions this out loud (other than a short, nice moment at the end).

When Diana and Steve reach Lord, Barbara appears to stop her. Diana lost her super powers, she still has her skills but is not as before, while Barbara has all her strength - she sort of lost herself instead, like her heart and compassion. 

Lord goes away with Barbara, and who knows how he grants her another wish (usually it’s only one per person), and she wants to be the number one, the strongest predator, and it’s not surprising after her choice of words that the next time we see her she’s rather cat-like.

The world is going into chaos, the US president wished for much more nuclear weapons to threaten Russia, and a war is about to begin (one soldier even admitted that they would have reacted to much less than that). Lord reaches out to everyone using a special tv signal that hacks into every tv everywhere, courtesy of the US president, and everyone in the world can have their wish, even when they are not really making a wish - like a couple fighting and shouting things like I wish your people were sent back to where you came or I wish you were dead.

Finally Steve stops Diana, probably worried about the whole Lord problem but even more by her loss of her powers, she gets hurt now. He talks to her and after a lot of crying she finally leaves him behind and says “I renounce my wish”. She’s the first to do it, she gets her powers back, even learns to fly, remembering Steve’s words on riding wind, and hurries to Lord. She has to fight Barbara to get to him, but she’s wearing Asteria’s armor and even if the battle is a tough one, she manages to prevail and reach Lord. Through him, she manages to send her message to everyone everywhere, speaking about truth and stuff like that, urging them to renounce their wishes to save the world, making them realise the truth, realise what the cost is, and then shows Lord memories from his sad past and images of his son that is now out there looking for him, the poor dear. Small children don’t want money, they want their parents.

Slowly, everyone does the same, renouncing their wishes, and things start going back to normal, rivers reappear, missiles vanish… we don’t see Barbara saying it, but she doesn’t look catlike anymore, so maybe she did…?

The ending: Diana looks around, it’s Christmas time and the place looks right out of a Christmas postcard in its perfection to make us see a beautiful world, and Diana sees the man that ‘hosted’ Steve’s soul, and they exchange a few pleasantries before they part ways. (I was so so glad they didn’t start anything, and neither of them tried to chat the other up.)

After a little bit of credits we see that Asteria is still around, living among people.

Cast (copied from ending credits:)
Diana Prince- Gal Gadot

Steve Trevor- Chris Pine

Barbara Minerva- Kristen Wiig

Maxwell Lord- Pedro Pascal

Antiope- Robin Wright

Hippolyta- Connie Nielsen

Young Diana- Lilly Aspell

…. also

Handsome man- Kristoffer Polaha

Carol- Natasha Rothwell

Raquel- Gabriella Wilde

Agatha Christie's Poirot - Problem at sea

 Well, it wasn’t bad, because Poirot was the usual perfect Poirot, but it wasn’t exactly good either. Mostly because as soon as the mystery started, it was over already. There was much more time spent leading to the murder, introducing all the characters, and little to none investigating.

There was a colonel with his unpleasant, overbearing, commanding wife. There was the general who was in love with her because apparently he knew her before she became so insufferable.

There were two young ladies who liked to spend their time with the colonel, and a woman who was in love with him, for whatever reason.

There was a couple that had nothing to do with anything other than being on the same cruise by chance.

The colonel is rumour to have worked on stage for some time before gaining his title without actually doing much during the war. During a game with the girls and Poirot, he is so good that people start thinking he ought to do that on stage, and he appeared kind of upset and unsettled by that, and leaves immediately.

Most of ship empties when they reach land; the colonel goes out with the two girls but his wife doesn’t; Poirot and others see him talking to her closed door, and her voice saying she doesn’t want to go. Poirot himself goes out with Hastings.

When they all go back to the ship, the colonel asks the crew to open the door because his wife doesn’t answer and he doesn’t have a key, and he finds her dead, stabbed.

The colonel has been all day with the two girls, the woman who wanted him was out as well, but the general had stayed behind, he wanted to talk to the woman he loved but since she didn’t answer or open the door, he left for his own cabin.

Poirot suddenly has an idea, and asks for a little girl’s help. He shows everyone her doll, saying she can tell them what happened, and the little girl, hiding from view, speaks the same words they heard the deceased woman say to her husband to let him go out alone while she supposedly stayed behind. 

Hearing those words, the colonel paled and tried to run; stopped, he merely said “yes” and was taken away. Poirot then explains that the colonel faked being caught doing stage-tricks with cards to make them believe that was what he did, while he was in fact a ventriloquist: his wife was already dead while he pretending to talk to her through the door, and it was him pretending to be her that said those words (so not just a ventriloquist, but a superb impressionist, because that was his wife’s voice alright).

That’s it, the end.

Little thing noteworthy: Poirot talks to Hastings about suspects, and after Hastings only speaks about the man, Poirot introduces the notion that it might have been a woman. Hastings is not convinced, and when Poirot asks if he doesn’t think that a lady might commit murder, he replies that ladies do not get caught. It was cute.    

 ITA crociera con il morto

Rampage - 2018

in progress.... 

Not bad, quite entertaining, although I’m not too eager to watch it again because the scenes without animals are also a bit boring… but the scenes with George were adorable!!!

Though there is the question of why George didn’t become much much bigger… why was he smaller than the wolf? Different sample, maybe? But wasn’t it all the same research? Well, it’s the only explanation I’ve got…

Plot in details:

A company dealing in altering genetics sent some experiment to be analysed in space, but it got out of control and all the humans died. There was one survivor, but she was forced to try and save some samples of the experiment or they won’t allow her access to the escape pod; she manages three before fleeing, but her pod is damaged and she dies too, and the explosion scatters the three samples through the US. One gets eaten by a crocodile, one infects a wolf, and one infects our George.

George is a gorilla living in the wildlife Sanctuary of San Diego where Davis Okoye works, the expert on primates and also the one who ‘adopted’ him after some poachers bastards killed his mother. 

Davis has been a soldier in many battles, survived a lot, and has learnt that humans always lie and look for something, always minding their own personal interest, and that animals are actually much much better.

He’s so very worried when George starts growing and growing and also becoming increasingly aggressive.

Thing is, soulless bastard Claire Wyden and her spineless, brainless brother Brett are responsible for this. They sent mercenaries after the wolf, but they all die. 

Claire activates a signal that will make these genetically altered animals do whatever it takes to get to it and make it stop (they can hear it because the bat’s sonar is part of the genetic alteration)

Kate Caldwell used to work for Claire, but she hoped that her research could help her dying brother, while Claire only cared about money. Kate got fired, and when she tried to take away her own research, they had her arrested for theft and put in jail for a year.

Davis hoped Kate would help him cure George, but at least she figures out that they might be following the signal.

ITA Rampage furia animale

Ex-machina - 2014

Interesting. A bitter finale, but that was not a surprise, you could tell it could not have the typical happy ending. It was interesting though, and better than I expected. There was a lot of nude scene, which was a bit off-putting, but it was part of the story, because machines have no sense of modesty. Still, as always I do think this kind of images are totally gratuitous and not at all necessary, a good filmmaker will let you understand and imagine and believe without actually showing the whole head-to-foot image.

Before saying any more, this is the story in details:

Caleb wins the chance to work with his boss Nathan to a very secret project, and is brought to the secret place via a helicopter. Once there, he learns that Nathan created an artificial intelligence that he called Ava, and wants Caleb to test her, to determine if it really works, if it is human enough, if it thinks with her own head or simply follows orders, stuff like that. He is to stay there for a week and have weekly chats with Ava. She has a mechanical body, but her face is human - meaning Nathan covered her mechanical head with artificial skin, a face.

They talk and Caleb is incredibly impressed. Soon Ava starts asking him about himself, saying she wants to know him too, then during a blackout she tells him that Nathan is not to be trusted, that he lies. 

Well, up to now we’ve learned that Nathan is quite arrogant and sort of thinks of himself as a god, and also drinks way too much. Caleb thinks he figured out that he didn’t really win anything, he was chosen because he’s good at programming. Nathan has a girl around that does everything he wants her to do, from waiting on him to sex, but never speaks, called Kyoko. 

Caleb asks Nathan if he programmed Ava to flirt with him but Nathan says no. Nathan tells Caleb that Ava is totally functional, meaning he can have sex with her if he wants to.

Ava shows Caleb that she is worried for her future, for what Nathan will do to her if he is not satisfied - riprogrammed to make a new version, so basically the Ava as she is now would cease to exist, would die, Caleb says - Nathan already told him that’s what he plans to do, to always get a better model, to improve…

Ava tells Caleb that she’d like to go out, that she’d like to be with him. Caleb wants to free her, so he plans to hack into the security system and go away with her. 

One night, he encourages Nathan to drink which is as easy as usual. As soon as Nathan passes out drunk, Caleb takes his keycard so he can access everywhere, and goes looking around, and into the computer he finds videos of previous “experiments”, other machine girls that he treated like objects; one ‘girl’ wanted to go out of that room so much that she broke her arms trying to break down the door. Caleb then finds some sort of cupboards that contain a machine-girl each, all naked and complete with human ‘skin’, and there is also Kyoko, lying on a couch all naked, that takes off a bit of her skin to show him that she’s one of them too. 

Caleb is shocked and a bit sickened by it, so he tells Ava that he’ll set her free, she only has to cause another blackout at a specific point in time (we already knew that she was the one causing them). Caleb is so shocked to learn that Kyoko is a machine that he somehow wonders if he is one himself, and cuts his own arm to see the blood come out.

When Caleb tries again to get Nathan drunk, though, the man refuses to drink, then the conversation moves on and Nathan shows him a recording of Ava telling him how she hates him, and also of Caleb’s own conversation with Ava during the last blackout, after he installed a new camera powered by batteries. Caleb realises that Nathan knows everything, but he already suspected Nathan might be listening in. What surprises him is that Nathan knew Ava would try to escape: Nathan tells him that the question is not if Ava really feels or mimics feeling for him, the truth is that she is pretending to feel for him in order to get him to help her, and this was Nathan’s plan all along. He didn’t choose Caleb because he’s a good programmer, but because spying on his internet searches he found that he is a good guy, with no family and a good heart, the kind of man who would most likely react to Ava’s pleas. To Nathan, this is the proof he wanted on how Ava really thinks for herself.

There’s a surprise for Nathan too, though, because Caleb already changed the security measures the night before when Nathan was drunk, and now during the blackout all doors fly open instead of locked, and Ava is able to get out by herself, without waiting for him. 

Nathan punches Caleb and hurries to Ava to try and force her to go back into her room (yeah, right). Ava fights him and loses an arm. Kyoko stabs him in the back and Nathan hits her with the piece of metal he brought taking off half her face. Kyoko falls down and never gets up again. 

Ava stabs him again in the front, and it is Nathan’s end.

Ava reaches Caleb who is back on his feet, and she tells him that he is to remain here. She then wanders around and finds the other machine-girls, but doesn’t feel anything, doesn’t react like Caleb, she only sees an opportunity and takes the fake skin off then to cover her own body, and also a wig for her head, and a white dress. Now she looks very much like a human woman.

At this point she walks out, and it is only now that Caleb tries to get out and can’t.

…

really? So smart and yet he stayed put after she told him that he was not to go with her, and simply looked at her calmly walking around… come on, I would have tried to get out right away! Maybe not making it, who knows, if she had reacted fighting him, but at least try when the doors are open!

Ava goes out, not caring about Caleb’s pleas, and walks around looking at the nature outside. When the helicopter arrives - it was supposed to carry Caleb back to the world - she goes instead and is free, while Caleb is imprisoned with no way to access the computer softwares.

This is the end, but if we like, we can theorise… is it possible for Caleb to access the hardware and make some changes that might allow him to get out? Who knows, I’m not the expert programmer, and it is not even all that relevant at this point, because it’s not likely he’ll ever find Ava again.

I kind of liked this movie. It is not, as I feared for a moment, a tale of how artificial intelligence can create actual feeling and such, it is sort of more real, showing how Nathan treated these ‘models’ as slaves, as objects, as mere things to use (because let’s face it, why else would anyone create something like that if not to have slaves without it being illegal? History teaches us that humans have killed a lot (but if they won it is called colonised or bringing civilization…), how they wanted slaves and stuff like that.

What is the reason for giving a machine a face and “feelings” ? To have a “person” call you master, obey your every whim, “someone” you can be cruel to without guilt, or maybe let’s be generous and think of reasons for non-jerks: to create toy-friends for children? As if social medias haven’t already isolated people enough, they did not unite people, they isolated them, because that is the truth when you see people not even saying happy birthday to each other because they already wrote it on facebook, or spending all their time on their phone even when they are in the company of “friends”. Maybe that’s another sad consideration of modern times, people do not want friends, they want “fans”.