sogoodlooking Reviews

The Rising of the Shield Hero: Raphtalia (2019) Season 1, Episode 15

Terrific series savaged in this ep by terrible, TERRIBLE writing.

[1/10 · 6 November 2023]

When Raphtalia comes face to face with the beast of a human who destroyed her childhood and violated her friend, the writers ruin her vengeance in the cheapest, laziest possible way by having the swine trip over his own whip's handle then fall through a window to his death.

It's obscene. Do they really think we'll adore the character any less if she executes this grotesque ______ of ________ herself?

Writers do themselves and their characters no favors by trying to keep the latter 'morally pure' especially in a world full of necessary compromises. In addition, there's nowhere to imprison this worst of all criminals---any prison will only be temporary, so leaving him alive is only to leave him to continue to do the worst sort of harm.

Shame on the writers for their narrative cowardice!

Horimiya (2021)

Violence by women is supposed to be funny? 1/10.

[1/10 · 5 November 2023]

What was charming early on, two awkward kids finding each other and beginning to fall in love, quickly became repugnant. By episode 5 she's throwing books at his face, hitting him repeatedly, screaming "dummy! Dummy! Dummy!" at him---and HE apologizes to her.

Something is brain damaged about this sadly lacking romantic comedy that substitutes violence for conflict resolution, and wants us to think her violence is something other than abuse that he should bring to a halt immediately. But rather than treat her behavior as pathological we're given no hint that we're supposed to see it as anything other than something he's supposed to tolerate---when, of course, he should dump her immediately.

Imagine if the sexes were reversed! We'd be rightly appalled and revolted.

Kansas City Confidential (1952)

Delighted to have rewatched this after several years.

[9/10 · 9 January 2023]

Delighted to have rewatched this after several years. There's some gun grabbing that's not entirely persuasive and does detract, but the violence in several cases is absolutely convincing, riveting, and included to a purpose far more so than nearly every attempt to show and engage us with violence this decade. Coleen Gray's passionate smooch w Payne hours after her father's death is an unfortunate and unwise end to the film (the same day? Really??), but otherwise this is sensationally cast, smartly plotted, and very, very well-written.

Director Karlson keeps an elaborate plot firmly in hand, never letting it once become confusing or unwieldy. Numerous closeups and medium closeups that appear to have been shot with a slightly fisheyed lens show a brilliant touch with several powerful actors, the hint of distortion tipping us into the frame in ways conventional shooting does not and imparting a distinct unease and tension---so much so I'm surprised it has never been used in quite this way.

Enjoy the brutal interrogation scene by Kansas City's ugly police force: from the configurations of the players showing Payne surrounded and dominated by police even when they're merely talking to him adds great weight to his unjust imprisonment. It's a marvelous film, start to finish, with the beautiful Coleen Gray as distinctive-looking in her own way as Evelyn Keyes was in hers, in 99 River Street and the sadly unknown noir, Johnny O'Clock.

The Tomorrow War (2021)

Dumb, dumber, and worse

[3/10 · 31 December 2022]

The Tomorrow War (2021) is one of those ridiculous popcorn films which, whenever it has to deviate from formula or work out an action scene in detail, careens from incompetence to disaster. Case in point: Pratt is leading his ragtag band of citizen-soldiers down a stairwell. He calls for absolute silence, but then everyone including himself shines their bright flashlights all the way down the 100 foot stairwell, instantly alerting any aliens anywhere near them of their presence. That's in addition to such absurdities as the group of human time travelers we follow surviving a fall of at least 200' into a swimming pool, a fall that is the equivalent of a fall of at least 60' onto concrete pavement. The filmmakers are simply dopes.

The actress playing young Muri is charming. She and Yvonne Strahovski, along with some decent creature effects, are all that save TTW from the absolute bottom of the sci-fi barrel.

Shantaram (2022)

Astoundingly stupid.

[1/10 · 23 November 2022]

We begin with a ridiculous, generic prison escape scene where Hunnam and his pal would have been observed by guards and outside workers throughout as a matter of course, so badly written is this abysmal series. At one point Hunnam climbs through the inevitable trap door in a ceiling, legs kicking wildly, but the four workers entering the room don't see him. Yes, it's that bad. Same as he lowers himself down a gray wall while in light blue clothing where he's perfectly visible to guards on both sides.

His cowardly fellow escapee fears heights and wants to go back: Hunnam: --You can't. I'll get caught.

Escapee: --Okay.

It's that miserably brainless. Hunnam passes through Bombay customs with a phony passport. A guard glowers at him, then stamps his passport. That's Shantaram's version of 'tension.' Pick up a beautiful girl on the street? No problem. Twenty minutes of this drivel was about fifteen minutes too many.

Jesse Stone: Stone Cold (2005 TV Movie)

A tired cast trudges through a weak script

[5/10 · 21 November 2022]

A tired cast trudges through a weak script in this barely passable, not-quite-a-thriller.

Tom Selleck was already 61 when this tepid, formulaic dirge was trotted out, and it shows. He's playing a significantly younger character and just can't muster a credible interest in his 30 to 45 year old woman counterparts and foils.

The lengths the script has to go through to pull off its predictable dramatics are also offputting, such as when Jesse invites a r#pist and his father into his office, where the victim and her father are present. The sheer absurdity of it all is repeated throughout.

Oh, and Jesse knows who the pattern killers are, but somehow waits until after his love interest is killed by them to solemnly announce he won't let them kill again Gah.

Just writing this review made me realize this is more a 3-star than a 5-star production.

How to Get Away with Murder (2014–2020)

The usual bullying, abusive, vicious teacher who is supposed to somehow be good for students, but in practice never is.

[3/10 · 20 November 2022]

Lead Viola Davis has none of the gravitas of John Houseman in Paper Chase, the model of this kind of professor. None of his gravitas, nor his intelligence, nor his self-certainty. Instead she's a bitter shrew who we're supposed to believe attracts handsome men despite being a plain, mannish woman in her 50s. Sure.

The 'writers' even fall back on the abysmal trope of the colorblind female witness, and throw that chestnut at us within the first 20 minutes of s1 e01.

It also tries to dazzle us, with a bombastic music video soundtrack, and impress us with pointless, graphic gay sex and implied cunni******.

It's one of those amateur productions where someone yells "get out of my apartment" at someone who is not in her apartment, and they never bothered to change the script or the blocking.

Dawson's Creek: Discovery (1998) Season 1, Episode 4

Dawson's reviled for having feelings.

[1/10 · 1 November 2022]

His girlfriend lies to him about being a virgin. He invests a lot of time and feelings with her, then she admits she not only lied, but lied enormously. That in truth she had had so much sex with random guys that her parents actually had to send her away. Within the day said girlfriend pounds up to him and demands to know if he's having feelings about her lies and promiscuity, but since"You go, girl!" is the law of the land, or something, he's not allowed to....

1) resent her for lying about something critically important to him, and 2) have his own opinion about her promiscuity without those feelings being vetted and approved by her.

Guess what, though? He IS entitled to resent her, and he IS entitled to his own opinion on the matter.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994)

It's Trek for Tweens, really. The adoration of many for TNG baffles me.

[3/10 · 1 November 2022]

The acting is weak, with only Stewart standing out, while the characters of Wesley and Troi are patently absurd. The dialogue is weak, with very little memorable about it. Makeup is ordinary, set design is unexceptional, aliens are unimpressive, and other than the Borg, which is just an idea with silly makeup and the absurdity of cubes the series doesn't establish even one alien race as interesting as any of the Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, Gorn, Tholians, or Andorrians.... They even waste Nimoy, when they have him.

Worst, though, are the scripts, most of which play like hour long exposition dumps. Perhaps one or two episodes per season stand out. Even The Drumhead is ploddingly written.

Babylon 5 (1993–1998)

It just doesn't get there.

[5/10 · 1 November 2022]

Babylon 5 has potential but it lacks all the things that made Star Trek TOS great. The cast here has almost no charisma and doesn't include those actors who know how to suggest hidden depths, or the kind of nuance that develops chemistry . The makeup and alien design are uninteresting, at best, and plain silly at worst. There's nothing interesting b/t the main cast playing humans, nothing is done to create any sort of rapport, chemistry, or relatedness b/t them. The fx are insipid. The sets are cheap and uninspired. The bridge of the station looks like someone's living room from the 1950s, only worse.

It lacks all of the worldbuilding of the original Trek. They're trying, they're working at it, but there's just nothing of real interest, nothing that suggests professionals anywhere close to the top of their game. What's lacking, finally? Talent. Hard to say, but it lacks talent in every department.

Blind (2022)

Absurdly poor editing and preposterous subtitles ruin this tepid thriller

[5/10 · 14 October 2022]

...from Korea.

9 stars is the average review? Talk about review bombing, but from the show's cast and crew. The cartoon villain who whistles menacingly doesn't help matters, either. Everything is completely on the nose, with zero subtext.

Picks up a little bit, but the cartoonishly oddball cop chasing the bad guy doesn't impress. And are all Korean cops about 25?

...from Korea.

9 stars is the average review? Talk about review bombing, but from the show's cast and crew. The cartoon villain who whistles menacingly doesn't help matters, either. Everything is completely on the nose, with zero subtext.

Andor (2022– )

Limp, slow, weak, dull.

[3/10 · 4 October 2022]

We get a long walk through tame, uninformative scenery that's not even sequenced correctly. Next comes an absurd scene in the bar, which as a setting offers nothing. The irritants in the bar are, of course, white men. Because they can't come up with an interesting conversation or something dynamic and revealing, the two twits are sad, stupid bullies.

Cassian doesn't even persist in asking what name the woman used, the woman he's looking for and who he hopes might be his sister. Wouldn't it help to know what name she was going by, at least at one point? Of course it would. Doesn't matter. The writers can't do two things at once.

The two dull twits actually follow him out of the bar because the hostess talked to Cassian first. That's how limp this all is. They try mugging him. Cassian accidentally kills one. The other, enraged, then terrified, suggests they go in together to his station and explain it was an accident. Cassian knows this is blather and that if he goes in he'll be hung for the man's death. He shoots the surviving man dead and flees the planet. At least he's capable of decisiveness and the show isn't hung up on giving its lead moral excuses.

Cassian has a flashback (why?), to a ship on fire flying overhead, which crashes over the horizon. There's a nonsensical conversation with a robot, probably expository. A robot has to have extra power in order to lie? It's nonsense. Oh, and we were treated to an alien boar urinating on the bot. The bot then shocks the boar. This is 'comedy,' the equivalent of a fart 'joke'. Having fun yet?

At least the cop in charge who grasp the real cause of death is amusing. That scene was written by someone other than the cluck who wrote the first scene. This is how you introduce two characters, give us their natures by implication, and reveal more about the world without getting bogged down in bald exposition.

Women are next pandered to, because Disney thinks women are so pathetic they can't get through even one ep without being told how amazing and how much better than men they are.

I have no idea where the series is headed. What was he aiming to do? What are we watching, other than an unfortunate accident and its consequences, and a man looking for his sister when he has a minute here and there?

Really poorly done, in the main. I won't be watching episode 2.

Reboot (2022)

Goes nowhere.

[3/10 · 30 September 2022]

There's no center to what's nothing more than a series of tepid, ineffectual skits based on themes such as... old comic writers v young diverse comic writers; a woman's first time with another woman; a man with a co-worker's mom; a man's lingering attraction to a co-worker; a woman's problems working with her absent father. Nothing goes anywhere. The cast leans towards the sluggish elderly. The 'comedy' involves things like an older person not understanding the slang someone younger used, and looking it up on their phone. That's it. That's the 'joke.' Or we go through a tedious attempt by one of the cast to break up with a castmate's mother. That's it. That's the 'comedy.'

What can they possibly be thinking?

The Librarian III: The Curse of the Judas Chalice (2008 TV Movie)

Good, goofy fun. Features the rare nerdy lead whose limitations are nicely balanced...

[8/10 · 26 September 2022]

...by his intelligence, learning, and self-awareness.

One of the rare made-for-tv films that pitches its lighthearted silliness just about right, leavening that with scholarship and wit. Stana Katic is just right as the French opera singer, and Wylie's foil and romantic interest. Makes me wonder if Katic should have been the comic and Fillion the serious partner in Castle. She certainly could have handled it.

Here the male and female leads actually like each other, and we're not condemned to listen to endless insult humor or mockery between them passing for comedy. Hey, for that, call it a 7.5, rounded up.

Don't Say a Word (2001)

Fairly solid thriller that goes on way too long, and suffers from forgettable bad guys.

[6/10 · 20 September 2022]

Britanny Murphy in particular is terrific as the young woman who appears to be suffering extreme mental illness while hold the clue to the location of a $10 million ruby.

Sean Bean can't do anything as the brutal, unsympathetic, one-dimensional villain. He just wants the loot. No dynamic develops between the bad guys and Famke Janssen as the bedbound mom beyond a brief leer from the slug she eventually kills in self-defense.

And Douglas as a benevolent shrink is saved from any moral dilemma having to do with killing the evil lead thanks to some baffling gunplay that leaves Douglas in a kill or be killed situation. Ugh. That's the kind of thing you do in a weak tv series so that the audience, who would have accepted violence from a generally sympathetic, recurring lead, doesn't get upset.

The Last Seduction (1994)

Linda Fiorentino is brilliant as the lead.

[8/10 · 17 September 2022]

The rest of the cast is good enough, but otherwise forgettable. Good to see a neo-noir that holds up on repeated viewings, and that's entirely Fiorentino's doing. It's a shame she didn't get more roles with bite. She's vastly better than actors such as Scarlett Johansson, and I would have loved to see Fiorentino lift up a soggy mess like Marriage Story with her vigor and biting line delivery.

And The rest of the cast is good enough, but otherwise forgettable. Good to see a neo-noir that holds up on repeated viewings, and that is all Fiorentino's doing. It's a shame she didn't get more roles with bite. She's vastly better than actors such as Scarlett Johansson, and I would have loved to see Fiorentino lift up a soggy mess like Marriage Story with her vigor and biting line delivery.

The Killing: Pilot (2011) Season 1, Episode 1

Perfectly ridiculous scene destroys all the credibility the first episode has built up.

[3/10 · 15 September 2022]

Rosie's missing, and Det. Linden finds A body---not THE body, just A body. Its face is obscured. The missing girl's dad shows up at the scene (cliche me, baby) and Det. Linden DIRECTLY IMPLIES to him that this is the dad's daughter. She has no reason to think it's surely the missing girl. The car has no connection to the missing girl, and they haven't even run the car's plates, yet. It's absurd, and I go from interested and engaged to rolling my eyes at the sacrifice of all authenticity just to milk the scene for a few seconds of a father's agony, which the script could have delivered anyway, without this nonsense, two minutes later. Awful.

It's almost enough to make me give up on the series. If you can't intelligently handle the reveal of a central character's death, how likely are you to get much else of importance right, especially with the handicap of charisma-vacuum Joel Kinnaman as one of the leads?

Just a completely pointless, utterly ridiculous bit of business no self-respecting writer nor showrunner would permit---but here we are, in Farceland.

Run Hide Fight (2020)

Even if you can tolerate the sleazy premise, setting a convention hostage flick inside a flimsy school shooting wrapper

[3/10 · 8 September 2022]

...there are far too many blunders in the fight choreography, plotting, and timing of events, for Run Hide Fight to serve as an effective action film.

SPOILER ALERT:

Take the largest explosion. Zoe releases all the students in the cafeteria, where the bomb is located. But then she rolls the van containing the explosives outside the cafeteria, where it harmlessly detonates---meaning all the kerfuffle over both freeing the hostages from the cafeteria (where they would have been safe, given the van is moved away) AND moving the van (had it remained in the empty cafeteria, no one would have been harmed) was completely unnecessary.

This kind of thing happens more than once, and is just eyerollingly bad.

As for the interracial romance, apparently a prerequisite for these films, its limp resolution is painfully out of the blue and completely disconnected from Zoe's previous behavior, that gave no hint at all she was interested in the friend who lacks anything resembling heterosexual characteristics.

But sure, tall, fit, attractive blond girls are notorious for being attracted to short, effeminate, charmless guys who are useless in a fight...?

3 stars for the effective female lead, and for somehow pulling off her imaginary conversations with her mother, dead from cancer, without completely wrecking the film. As for Thomas Jane, his everyman charm is completely wasted as her father.

Game of Thrones: Dark Wings, Dark Words (2013) Season 3, Episode 2

Quality continues to rapidly decline.

[1/10 · 25 August 2022]

The writers substitute disgust for character. They think witty, Jaime's inevitably dull provocations of Brienne. Graphic urination and physical torture substitute for cadence, intelligence, and craft. Joffrey is merely repulsive and vicious, the easiest sort of character to write---imagine how interesting he might if he had sympathetic qualities, if he was tormented by his conscience. Notice, too, how often in film and tv men are openly, graphically tortured, while women never are. Imagine if Sansa had been tortured onscreen the way Theon is.

The show would have been forced off the air.

Red Rose (2022)

Yapping tedium had me out after 10 minutes.

[1/10 · 24 August 2022]

Absolutely nothing memorable. Not a single interesting or evocative line of dialogue. Not one shot or framing that lingered. Not a single character who stood out.

The BBC, in sum. Abandon hope, all who watch this tripe.

The Leftovers (2014–2017)

One of those odd, fascinating series whose season 1 is superb, then which completely falls apart with s2x01

[7/10 · 23 August 2022]

Such a shame, and you can instantly tell the writing is entirely different. Subtext is gone. Cliches abound. Plotting is sloppy. Imagery is dull, inspiring no internal depictions, failing to draw us in. Characters are mealy and soft, thanks to this, and the actors correspondingly have nothing to work with, and nowhere to go with the limp material.

The Sandman (2022– )

Dear god, when will they learn to edit?

[5/10 · 19 August 2022]

This would be a good tale at 42 minutes. At 54 minutes, it's quite the slog. There is no shot that is not lingered over. Not even a... car... pulling... up... in... the... rain. The mythology is doled out painfully, painfully slowly. Wait for the fan edit that turns this into a well-paced fever dream. As it stands, the lack of dialogue and overall sluggishness turns what is supposed to be a son pit against a father focus of ep 1 into tedious convention.

One Of Us Is Lying (2021–2022)

Drags badly right from the start. None of the characters including the lead, registers.

[2/10 · 16 August 2022]

And when that's the best of the first half of the first episode, it's not likely to get better. It's the kind of series you come away from with the sense, 'what could they possibly have been thinking? Where did they get the idea they should make exactly no one even remotely interesting or likable?' There isn't one memorable line of dialogue. Not one character with some flash or flair or zest. Not one engaging mise-en-scene. Not one location that stands out or makes you see with fresh eyes. Not one actor who doesn't fade into every other actor too old to believably play a high schooler in every other limp series that failed.

With every clause of this very brief review I keep wanting to subtract a star simply because there's nothing whatever about the series that stands out. It's impossible anyone found anything to like about this tired melodrama. That the average rating is close to 7 is a tribute to bots, only. Spare yourself, fellow human, and skip this dog.

Better Call Saul (2015–2022)

Sadly boring. Impossibly slow. Gilligan has forgotten how to pace a story and keep it moving.

[5/10 · 16 August 2022]

One of those misguided misfires that believe, because a character's life is fitful, sluggish, and slow that the scripts have to be, too---or Gilligan's simply not capable of writing well and compactly at this stage in his career.

Banshee (2013–2016)

Ridiculous fun.

[8/10 · 11 August 2022]

Sex, drugs, the Amish, stolen identities, lost love, organized crime, disorganized crime, Native Americans and corrupt casinos, fistfights with a hundred punches--any one of which in real life would put the combatants in hospital... nothing is too much for this lunatic series that never takes its foot off the accelerator.

Shameless fun, and we can only envy writers commissioned to stop at absolutely nothing to pique our interests or perversely curious natures. One of those times when excess succeeds.

And Lili Simmons.