20130705: Reviews--Amber Lake, Alien Hunter, .hack

20130707, dimanche

A. (hulu+) Amber Lake

1. Released 2011, live action, 5.5/10 on IMDB, 45% on Rotten Tomatoes.
2. Three half-sisters, all named Amber, meet their wayward psychiatrist father at a lake.
3. Two days later, he's dead (blunt force trauma to the head followed by drowning), and the local police get the sisters' accounts of the activities leading up to the murder. 
4. Liked the actors who played the father (Carmen Argenziano) and the lead cop (Timothy V Murphy), but did not care for the amateurish, over-the-top performances of the actresses who played the daughters. 
5. Useless ending.
6. Gave it one star of five on hulu.

B. (hulu+) Alien Hunter

1. Released 2003, live action, 4.9/10.0 on IMDB, 22% on Rotten Tomatoes.
2. James Spader, Keir Dullea, Roy Dotrice, and Carl Lewis.
3. Spader's character is a womanizer and brilliant code breaker whose career mostly crashed after the shutdown of SETI.
4. An artifact found under the Antarctic ice near an American research site is recovered after emitting a signal tracked by the US government.  The signal resembled remarkably a signal sent from near Roswell in 1947.  Spader wrangles passage to the site.
5. The usual perfect storm of instances of Murphy's Law culminates in the alien getting lose, research staff dying from alien disease vectors and from shooting each other.  The Russians bomb the site at the behest of Washington, obliterating evidence.
6. Similar to The Abyss, the aliens break into the proceedings with their superior technology.  Quite differently than The Abyss, no humans notice this, except the four who were saved.
7. Slow moving, neither compelling nor funny.  The ending was a bit novel, but not much.
8. This was probably my least favorite James Spader film.
9. One star of five.

C. (hulu+) .hack//Quantum

1. Released 2010, anime, 7.0/10.0 on IMDB.
2. A bit more lively (so far) than .hack//sign, judging from 2 episodes of the new one.
3. .hack//sign was produced by Bandai, .hack//quantum by Funimation.
4. I'm missing context on numerous other .hack efforts, but most of them seem to be sequels of .hack//sign.
5. (20130730) I subsequently finished this; there were 3 episodes total.  This was actually a good thing; the plot was wound up expeditiously.  I rated it four stars of five.