The Digital Movie Collector

  New vs Old The original 1968 started a series of five movies the last being Battle for the Planet of the Apes . The current series started with the 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes  with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes  the fourth in the series. While similar in concept, I do not anticipate Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes  to be the last in this new series. The original series focused on what I consider the human’s side of the story. The current series focuses on the ape’s side of the story. Based on the ending, I suspect there will be another movie to come. Review You care for the characters and the story moves at a good pace. You hardly notice it is nearly a 2.5 hour movie. You can watch the movie for simply the entertainment or you can find a message about coexisting. There are several surprises in the movie which is something I look forward to since I have seen way too many movies. I appreciate the cinematography in this film as way too many movies get t...

 General 2024 has seen the end of many of the rewards programs that I have used over the years. Whether due to the economic times or other reasons, below are all the programs that have come to an end. I find this extremely disappointing since many have provided me with free movies or extremely affordable movies. Universal All-Access Rewards While not the first program to notify users of closing, Universal All-Access Rewards was the first to close on June 30. When you would buy a Universal movie, the digital card would have a code for the movie you purchased and generally included a code for 1000 points in their rewards program. These points could be used for a free digital movie or other digital items. You could also earn points on their site by watching movie trailers or taking trivia challenges. They would generally have five to ten digital movies to select from each rolling couple of months. If you didn't like the selection, you could save your points for the next batch of digit...

 Goodbye 20th Century Fox This movie is an appropriate send off to the 20th Century Fox Marvel Universe. I am sure this will be the last Fox Marvel movie ever. I will try to keep this spoiler free but there are a lot of cameos in this movie. This movie was definitely for the fans. Review This movie starts out with action and is pretty non-stop action throughout the two hour run. The story focuses on the main characters journey. While the movie has elements from the Loki series, Deadpool's fourth wall breaking explains it enough for those who have not watched the series. This was a welcome departure from recent Disney Marvel movies like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness where Wanda is a villain with no summary of what was missed from the WandaVision series to explain her change. While the Fox Marvel movies are heavily referenced in the movie, long time comic fans will notice many references as well. As a comic fan from the 80s and 90s, I appreciate all the references in t...

General With my self published book, I understand the cost benefits of digital over physical copies. I kept my price low for the book so that it was affordable. I get about 67 cents for each physical copy. Even with the price a dollar less, I get over twice that amount for digital. Is it a wonder why companies are starting to scale back their physical media for profit. So this scaling back keeps the physical costs high. I recently learned this lesson when I started looking for a music soundtrack. Turns out the company never made a physical copy. In fact, they have only released the music to streaming services (I will talk about that later). So I was unable to get the soundtrack. But this made me start to do some research. I was in Best Buy recently with my daughter and her husband. This was a good size store unlike the one in my town. I was surprised to find no movie section and at the time, I didn't notice an audio CD section either. Records are apparently the new craze so everyon...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CWYHTMSB I started this blog back in January 2019 because of my love for movies and my desire to write. It didn't matter to me how many read it. What mattered was sharing information. Over the years, I got busy and wrote less often. One thing, that I started working in 2023, was my Common Sense Finance book that I finished and was able to get self-published in February 2024 on Amazon.com. The book uses real examples of what you can do to get out of financial debt so you can live in financial freedom. My son was especially a strong motivator on writing this book as he saw where I was and where I got to with my finances in six years. My father was also a great influence on me writing this book. He had so many ideas and stories that he shared. He was busy supporting six kids that he never got a chance to write them down.  He passed at the end of 2021 thinking he would be forgotten. I promised him he would not and mention some of the wisdom he passe...

  In The Beginning I have to admit it have been a long time since I saw the original  Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and I have yet to see  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . From the tone and the costumes, I believe Wonka  is the origin for the Gene Wilder version. What I do remember of that film, this movie does an excellent job of recreating the magic and tone. I know Timothée Chalamet from the latest Dune  movie. Seeing him in both movies shows how versatile this young actor is. I later realized he was also cast in the Super Bowl commercial as the son of Edward Scissorhands back in 2021. Although initially not convinced of Hugh Grant as an Oompa-Loompa from the trailer, I found his performance surprisingly well done. Calah Lane is another young actor that appears to have a promising career ahead.  Review For those not familiar with Wonka, the movie is a musical. Don't let that stop you from watching it. It has a very good story that is l...

  https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/ Read the Fine Print      My first experience with loosing digital content was back around 2013. I had bought a digital game for 99 cents from the Apple App store. The content was not updated for the latest OS so it was digitally removed from the store. I never went after the company because I was not playing hardly at all by then. I had another time where I may have gotten digital codes from an online company and noticed a few weeks later that the content was back in my wish list. Fortunately, the online company gave me new codes that are still working today.     So what is the fine print? If you read about digital content, the companies  license and distribute from the studios. While this relationship has gone on for years with hardly any notice, Sony PlayStation users are taking notice now of the fine print as their purchased digital content from the Discovery Channel will be removed at the en...

  Change Is Coming Recently Disney+ has been cancelling content like the Willow series among other content on their service. This has given me pause as to what will happen to this content if you want to watch it. Series like the Mandalorian and the final season of Clone Wars were on available through the streaming service. The new idea that this content might eventually be removed from the service to never be seen again was a real possibility. Now we have some hope. I recently received an emailed from Marvel Entertainment. Generally, I would take a quick look and discard it but this one I had to look into more. The link pointed towards Best Buy or Walmart to preorder but I did find Loki Season 1 and WandaVision Season 1 available on Amazon. My hopes started to get raised. So with some quick searches, I did find in fact the Mandalorian Season 1 and 2 will be released on disc later this year. Here are the release dates per the email and what I found at the retailers. Loki - September...

 Content May Be Removed  I know it has been a while since I posted a review let alone any other content. The current events of today seam to be relevant for some commentary and facts. Netflix was the only streaming service for the longest time. I was mistaken back then to think everything they streamed would be there forever. Alas, my mistake was realized when I sold a TV series on DVD that my son had watched eleven times on Netflix and not once on DVD. Within months of selling the series, Netflix removed the series from their lineup.  Fast forward to the likes of MAX (formerly HBOMax), Paramount+, and Disney+ (who seams to own everything these days) and now we see content you might not be able to stream anywhere else. In the case of Disney+, content you can't even buy on physical media so that users are locked in to their subscription plans. For MAX and Paramount+ just to name a few, sell their content on physical media along with streaming options on Vudu and Amazon. As...

 Surprise Ticket I recently purchased The Doom That Came To Gotham and Justice League x RWBY animated movies that were on sale at Vudu this week.  I received a bonus of $8 off to go see The Flash movie from each movie.  So both my brother and I utilized the discounts for a rare trip to the movies.  Of the two animated movies I purchased, I highly recommend the Justice League x RWBY crossover movie even though it is Part 1 and Part 2 does not currently have a release date yet. Review While The Flash movie was decent, positive reviewers of the movie have obviously not seen The Flash TV series that just completed its run on The CW network.  The story in the movie and the special effects were much better in the TV series than in this movie.  Obviously, TV series has a longer time to tell a story.  Some of the movie’s special effects looked like they were from a couple of decades ago.  While this was only mildly distracting from the movie, it is defini...

  Not The Story I Remember I admit my knowledge of Black Adam comes from the animated movie "Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam". I have done my some research and found there was a mixture of comic story and creative licensing for this movie. Obviously, Dwayne Johnson would not want to be a full fledged villain but the later evolved anti-hero like Venom (I know Venom is Marvel not DC). I did find this new story interesting. Review The movie was pretty action packed through out with only a few times that it slowed down. The story was interesting and refreshing. I very much enjoyed seeing characters like Dr Fate and Hawkman. I loved Pierce Brosnan as Dr Fate. One of the best casting choices in my opinion next to Dwayne Johnson as Black Adam. There was a point in the story I had to look at my watch and realized the movie was not over yet. It could have been made into two movies with the amount of content but I am glad they made a single long movie. Although, I do sus...

  Split Reviews My children said they could not finish this movie. Others said it was one of the best Batman movies. So I of course had to watch it...free on HBOMax. Robert Patinson was definitely a reason I was skeptical. Surprisingly, he did make a decent young Batman. His Bruce Wayne was okay. Zoe Kravitz, Colin Farrell (unrecognizable as Penquin), Jeffrey Wright, and Andy Serkis made this an amazing cast. John Turturro was good but I am still getting over his character from the Transformers franchise. His character is much better in this movie. Review I felt like this was based in the early days of Christian Bale's Dark Knight, if you skip the part that Batman meets Selina Kyle in his second year as Batman and he forgets who she is by The Dark Knight Rises. So this is obviously a different version of Batman. I enjoyed the more realistic versions of Riddler and Penguin vs the ones from the 1990s. Although, I have to admit I loved Danny DeVito in the role back in the 1990s. There...

  Miles Teller I want to start off by saying I almost passed on this movie simply because Miles Teller has not played a character that I could like. I found a speck of reason to tolerate his character in The Divergent movies. In Fantastic Four, I felt his Reed Richards was one of the main reasons this movie was panned. I started to feel it was his acting and not the writing that made his characters unlikable. As Goose's son in this movie, I knew he would be a main character in this movie. For this reason alone, I really thought I would pass on this movie. To my greatest surprise, his character was one of the better parts of this movie. I would have never of guessed. Review It is very hard to review this movie spoiler free but I will do my best. Not sure what they could have done differently about the plot. The movie is definitely a continuation of the original 36 years later. Part of it did feel more like a remake than a sequel. Don't get me wrong, the original still is good ev...

  So It Begins Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has gotten mixed reviews. Let me try to shed some light on this. Those who have kept up with the Marvel series exclusive to Disney+ will understand what is going on. This expands the universe in ways that can be appreciates. For those who have not fallen into the Disney+ scam to keep customers shackled to their content that can only be found on their streaming service, the movie has some rather large plot holes that could confuse the normal MCU movie goer. This puts a large gap of those who will understand the whole story making it an extreme range of why some like and some don't like this movie. So for those who wish to enjoy the movie, I would recommend at least watching WandaVision on Disney+. If you have time, I would also recommend the What If...? animated series as well. Because Disney is not releasing their streaming content on DVD/Blu-ray anytime soon, I suspect this may start effecting viewers opinions on if future...

  Hercule Poirot I knew Death on the Nile was the sequel for The Murder on the Orient Express without reading the books. Hercule Poirot was the character that tied them together. His deductive search for the truth reminds me of Sherlock Holmes. Alas, Holmes did come first in literature by about 23 years. Holmes being English and Poirot being French. Like Holmes though, Poirot has several novels and short stories about his adventures. The new movies with Kenneth Branagh as Hercule are some of the more popular novels. I say new movies as The Murder on the Orient Express was a movie back in the 1970s. It also was followed by Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun, and Appointment with Death. One wonders if they will remake all of these for the series. Review While this was a good mystery movie, I did feel the focused on the clues a little more than the first movie taking a little of the mystery out of it. The cast was great and the cinematography was amazing. I very much enjoyed this f...

  Retro Movies Everything from the 80s and 90s are coming back. Continuations like Matrix, Scream, and Halloween or reboots like Mortal Kombat have come up in recent years. Ghostbusters is no exception. I had been waiting for this movie to come out. I almost saw it in the theaters it looked so good. I have to admit that even though I had gotten a free copy of Ghostbusters 2016 through one of my rewards programs, I have still yet to watch it. Maybe I will one day. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a continuation of the original two movies. This made the movie much more desirable to watch. I feel other movie goers had the same feelings towards it as it was not regarded as a flop like the 2016 version. Review Mckenna Grace really sells being the granddaughter or Spengler. Paul Rudd adds his humor to this movie. I can't even talk about who else shows up in the movie but if you liked the originals, you will enjoy this one. While the movie was not action from start to finish, it did have enough...

  Games to Movies With Disney/Marvel the primary source of successful comics to movies company, it is not surprising that other studios are leveraging games to movies. While not a new concept, live action movies based on games have been around since the 90s. Love it or hate it, Super Mario Bros started it all. A steady stream of movies based on games has been going on since then with only a few years with no movie released. Games are owned by several companies with notable names like Capcom, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Sega, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony to name a few. The most popular movie series in this genre being Resident Evil which release six movies with Milla Jovovich and a reboot of the series staring Kaya Scodelario as the new lead. I know more would say that Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft was much more successful but it only had two movies before an attempted reboot in 2018. Review Uncharted is a video game series produced for the PlayStation systems (a Sony company). ...

  Digital Gripe First, I want to apologize for the delay in posting a new reviews.  Had several personal things come up in January. I am hoping to do better as there have been a few movies I have seen recently that need reviewed. MGM is the production company for this movie. Like Paramount and Lionsgate, MGM does not participate in Movies Anywhere digital locker. As such, I tend to want the disc with digital purchasing. I have waited for this movie since it came out and finally the disc with digital was on sale for $15. The digital copy was on sale for $13 so I thought $2 extra for digital with disc was a good deal. Read the fine print. I have all my Bond movies in Vudu. Naturally, I assumed the digital copy would at least offer option between Vudu and iTunes. After ordering, I noticed the packaging specifically said for iTunes. Really! What happened to having a choice? I should have just returned it at that point but I was frustrated and tired of waiting. Lesson learned. Revi...

  Impressive Box Office Spider-Man: No Way Home appears to be making more in its opening weekend than Venom: Let There Be Carnage did gross. I am not surprised based on all the rumors about who may appear and what will happen in the story. If you are looking for confirmation to any rumors, I am going to try not to give anything away. I will only say there are two post credit scenes that setup two different movies. So, stay all the way until the end of the credits. Review Oh I wish I did not promise not to give anything away. This movie is so full of surprises that you just have to watch it. I would recommend watching both Hawkeye and What If...? on Disney+. I could recommend other things to watch but that would give too much away. I keep wanting to say more but will just leave it at that. The movie is almost two and a half hours long. I doubt they could have shortened the movie without loosing a lot. The movie was nearly a constant non-stop pace. I will say almost the entire theate...

  Another Remake I will start with a little spoiler. Dune 2021 is Part 1 with Part 2 expected in 2023. That being said this remake took at least 37 years to happen. With the special effects now able to match the scope of this movie, we are no longer subjugated to a majority of the movie being made on dark stages where you cannot appreciate the scope of the story. Granted the new is full of CGI but it makes the movie seem more grand than the original. 1984 vs 2021 Review The 1984 movie has a run time of 137 minutes. The 2021 movie has a run time of 155 minutes and is only part 1. For starters, the 1984 version has a lot of monologue at the beginning and throughout the movie because the effects and budget were not able to meet the vision of the movie. There is a little monologuing in the 2021 version but it has full action scenes as a backdrop to this monologuing. Both 1984 and 2021 feature a stellar cast of actors and actresses for their time. One thing to note about the new movie i...