KNOWING NOW AVAILABLE

Here is the summary for the movie The Knowing from imdb

A teacher opens a time capsule that has been dug up at his son's elementary school; in it are some chilling predictions -- some that have already occurred and others that are about to -- that lead him to believe his family plays a role in the events that are about to unfold.


Here is a review for the movie The Knowing from dvdtalk

While "I, Robot" was a massive moneymaker for all participants involved, I don't know of anyone who exited the theater ecstatic with the results. Well, director Alex Proyas is back on the sci-fi chain gang, this time tackling the apocalyptic thriller "Knowing." A broad, leisurely jumble of Alfred Hitchcock-style suspense architecture and a dreary, paint-by-numbers Sci-Fi Channel Original, "Knowing" only seems to extract two reactions: nail-biting and eye-rolling. Proyas misjudges the material to both frightening and facepalm results, leaving "Knowing" a frothy brew of pleasing chaos and absolute absurdity.

Dealing with the heavy psychological burden of spousal loss, MIT professor John (Nicolas Cage) watches over his young son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) carefully, protecting him from life's social demands. To commemorate the unearthing of an elementary school time capsule buried 50 years earlier, each child is handed a drawing from the tube to study. Caleb is entrusted with a sheet of seemingly random numbers composed by a disturbed girl, triggering John's curiosity. Figuring the numbers to be a cryptogram that has successfully predicted the world's worst disasters for five decades, John sets out to prevent the last three codes on the paper from realization. Trying to save lives while seeking out the author's offspring (Rose Byrne) for answers, John races against the clock to prevent a worldwide disaster from becoming a reality.

While I walked out of "Knowing" semi-disgusted with the film and with Proyas's shallow bag of tricks, I will readily admit that the feature shares a few wonderful moments of unpolluted suspense. Clearly motivated by Hitchcock's distinguished timing, Proyas finds amazing inspiration within the picture's disaster set pieces, in which John's frantic decoding takes him to the sites of plane crashes and subway collisions -- events he's attempting to prevent. Proyas, ever the meticulous visual stylist, knows how to the twirl the tension knobs with skillful camerawork and a blaring Herrmannesque score from composer Marco Beltrami to accompany the havoc. The scenes connect, even with a few special effect blunders (John can apparently walk through fire unscathed), because they plug directly into the film's cracking premise as a chest-tightening disaster film. The ingenious ticking clock here is the code sheet, making "Knowing" a startlingly tight thriller when it boils down to the essentials of John identifying patterns and racing to save the day. Sure, plot holes and drastic leaps of logic swarm the picture, but all that can be forgiven when the film snaps to attention. "Knowing" has a few of those superlative moments.

However, "Knowing" also hungers to be a sci-fi extravaganza, populating the second half of the film with shadowy "whisper people" and reoccurring symbols of otherworldly recognition. To write that "Knowing" lost me with this detour is an understatement; the film positively croaks reaching for a more philosophical conclusion, seemingly embarrassed with the exhilarating coding clockwork that's come before. Proyas has always fumbled plot mechanics in his previous efforts, and "Knowing" is not immune to the director's butterfingers. What easily could've been a tight, swell 80-minute-long joyride of a motion picture is flooded to 120 cumbersome minutes, force-feeding a frenzied climax that doesn't fit the tone of movie at all. To spotlight more of the script's screwy direction would be sprinting into spoiler territory, so I'll leave it dangle here. Suffice it to say, "Knowing" should've left well enough alone. To fatten the experience just to play to Hollywood blockbuster rules dilutes the tension and humiliates the cast.

Proyas attempts to sand down the blunt ends using Beethoven's mournful Symphony No. 7 and an unrealistically redemptive ending, but it can't cover the mistakes of the final product, which reaches further into lunacy with a masturbatory staging of a Roland Emmerich-style mass destruction derby to please the nervous executives. "Knowing" is 40% greatness and 60% hot air, which is especially maddening when, for a moment or two at least, the movie was perfect.

Here is the direct download for the movie The Knowing.

12 ROUNDS NOW AVAILABLE

Here is the summary for the movie 12 Rounds from imdb

Detective Danny Fisher (John Cena) is about to have the worst day of his life. A nearly untraceable internationally-known terrorist named Miles Jackson (Aidan Gillen) has kidnapped his girlfriend Molly Porter (Ashley Scott) and forced him into "12 Rounds" of dangerous games carefully plotted throughout the streets of New Orleans. Danny struggles to keep focus while the obvious ticking clocks and crude consequences that accompany each one of these "rounds" do their best to derail him from rescuing the love of his life before it's too late. The movie is 108 minutes long. [D-Man2010] A New Orleans police detective's girlfriend is kidnapped. WWE champion John Cena is New Orleans Police Detective Danny Baxter. When Baxter stops a brilliant thief from getting away with a multi-million-dollar heist, the thiefs girlfriend is accidentally killed. After escaping from prison, the criminal mastermind enacts his revenge, taunting the cop with a series of near-impossible puzzles and tasks 12 roundsthat Baxter must somehow complete to save the life of his fiancée. [D-Man2010]

Here is a review for the movie 12 Rounds from dvdtalk

John Cena made his feature film debut with 2006's "The Marine," a dumb-as-rocks actioner lacking sufficient style and kinetic energy to help digest its rancid helpings of explosions and ghastly screenwriting. It certainly played to the primary color level of a professional-wrestler-turned-actor like Cena, but the whole experience was intolerable, failing to join the ranks of the numbing, trigger-happy schlock cinema it was aping. "12 Rounds" returns Cena to the big screen and this time under the guidance of director Renny Harlin, a tattered but venerable action craftsman who knows a thing or two about hokey line readings and fireball evasion.

When a FBI sting to capture notorious Irish terrorist Miles Jackson (Aidan Gillen, "The Wire") goes horribly wrong, New Orleans cop Danny Fisher (John Cena) is caught in the middle, accidently sending Jackson's girlfriend to her death during the melee. A year later, Jackson has busted out of prison and kidnapped Danny's wife (Ashley Scott), setting up a twisted game where the detective must survive 12 violent challenges to retrieve his loved one. Quickly mired in the series of lethal situations, Danny finds little help from vengeful FBI agents (including Steve Harris), leaving his raw police skills and love for his wife as his guide to navigating this twisted contest.

Actually, it turns out Harlin is absolutely no help here. Let's get the obvious out of the way early: "12 Rounds" is implausible, wretchedly scripted junk food that cares more about bursting the limits of absurdity than it does about telling an engaging action story. Of course the film is garbage. With wrestling powerhouse WWE producing, chances are the statement, "Guys, this just doesn't make any sense," never came up during a script meeting. I can't fault "12 Rounds" for being dumb. However, I will criticize "12 Rounds" for being awful.

Even as a cheesy, blow-em-up distraction of the lowest possible order, "12 Rounds" fails to capture the same deliciously machismo orchestrations the Schwarzeneggers and Stallones of the world used to churn out by the bucket load. Most of the fault lies with Harlin; it's a cruelly agitated directorial job fixated on a specific zoom-laden chaos that plunges the audience into the middle of the madness along with Danny. I view it more as a cheap ploy to generate a false sense of excitement to cover the ridiculous screenplay, but Harlin seems assured that continuous camera movement equals surefire stimulation. Hey, if it keeps the focus off of Cena's wooden acting, I'm all for it. Still, it doesn't take long for the visual toxicity to become unbearable.

"12 Rounds" is a stunt-happy picture, and that's the one element I feel comfortable praising. Structured litigiously like "Die Hard with a Vengeance," "12 Rounds" rarely stops to breathe, always on the hunt for a dilapidated New Orleans location to blow up or to find a fresh way for Danny to barely escape assured doom. The titular games permit Harlin a chance to concoct a few compelling action set-pieces, all of them swiftly ruined by the camerawork, the dialogue, and the acting. "12 Rounds" is about bigness and furious action beats, and for a few moments here and there it feels like the Renny Harlin of old has returned. The sensation is fleeting, especially when Cena, Harris, and Gillen feel they must open their mouths and kill the tension with words. That's what "12 Rounds" needed less of: words.

After two movies, I still don't spot a single reason John Cena should be a movie star. He's virtually free of charisma, and to find stunning actors that would make him appear gifted would require more money than what the WWE is willing to part with. "12 Rounds" is the second strike on his celluloid career. If Cena's not careful, one more of these stinkers and it's nothing but DTV potboilers with Hulk Hogan.

Here is the direct download for the movie 12 Rounds.