Blue Ridge Ben

  The first time I saw Titanic I was just a little kid, and I bawled my eyes out and then once I dried up I begged to see it again so we sat through that extremely long movie twice in two days. Our VHS copy was well worn by the time we upgraded to DVD, we watched it regularly as a family in the late 90s and early 00s. It is probably a quite vital piece of media when it comes to my love and respect and awe of grandiose filmmaking even though these days I maybe only watch it every 5 years or so. So since my parents got Paramount+ through their cable and it was the only film on there that spoke to me when I was first glancing through their library, I figured why not see how it holds up? Honestly, every time I do revisit the film I spend like the first two hours being painfully reminded why it is so rare that I do. I grew up with a mom and older sister, a very female oriented household, so trust me when I say I’ve heard my fair share of really painfully written and delivered romantic ...

  Most of the memories I have associated with Steven Seagal were my step-grandfather’s attempts to connect with me when I was younger. I hated having to spend a week with my grandmother every summer because she wasn’t a very kind person to me and showed very little interest in anything I cared about or had to say. However, her husband tried a lot more with me, taking me out to go karts or big arcades (they still had arcades at that time!) or renting movies for us to watch together. He had no clue the kind of stuff I actually liked to watch, so usually he just picked dumb action movies such as multiple Steven Seagal movies that I didn’t really enjoy much at that age, but I appreciated his efforts. So honestly, I don’t know what drove me to pick up this 4 pack of Steven Seagal films (used I should note, I would never do anything to financially benefit that man, he is a 100 different shades of awful) when I ran across it on Amazon other than how much I’ve been enjoying 80s and 90s a...

  Like many I’m sure, I can often spend an hour just browsing various streaming platforms available to me just trying to settle on one thing to watch. Sometimes more than an hour if I’m being honest. So sometimes I just simply have to put my foot down with myself and say “Okay, you’re just going to throw on the next thing that sounds remotely interesting for the next reason” with whatever streamer I’m on at the time. Well this time, I was on the Roku Channel, and for some reason the film that was chosen was Timecop. The first thing that’s notable is that they use my favorite cheapass stunt in 80s and 90s low budget time travel movies, which is setting it in the future so that the primary time travel is to the year the film was released so most of the time they don’t have to do anything to dress things up. Sometimes, such as Terminator, this device can be used quite effectively, most of the time though it is clearly pretty low effort like here. Jean-Claude Van Damme is a pretty aw...