Markus_Beer Reviews

The Responder (2022– )

Love the grime, but tonally inconsistent

[6/10 · 18 July 2022]

Whenever the story is with Freeman, the series is great. But the supporting characters make it hard to really love The Responder. Marco, for example, has been borrowed directly from Scooby-Doo: he's portrayed as such a comically stupid comic-relief character that you get whiplash from the tonal shift of his scenes. Likewise, Rachel, the partner of Freeman's Chris, is somewhat bizarre in her development towards the last third of the series.

It is this inconsistency that has somewhat spoiled this high quality series for me: Chris's life feels real, the lives of most of the supporting characters feel like made-up stories.

Next Level Chef (2022– )

It's THE PLATFORM as a cooking game show

[7/10 · 4 January 2022]

A platform of ingredients is lowered over three floors, from a state-of-the-art kitchen to a standard industrial kitchen down to a nicely decorated basement hole with hardly any cooking tools. With five contestants per level, those at the bottom must cook with the leftovers left by the two teams above them. This is very reminiscent of the film "The Platform" (El Hoyo, ESP 2019, D: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia), only without the sharp social criticism, it is after all a Gordon Ramsay game show.

Unfortunately, at least to a degree, because the style of "Hell's Kitchen" or "Masterchef USA" can also be found here: very fast cuts, plastic orchestral music from the computer, and the focus here is clearly on the drama of contestants under time pressure, all wonderfully consumed by their ambitions and egos, while the food itself, on the other hand, is not that important.

Although the pace and action is still enjoyable, I sometimes wish for the return of Ramsay's much more relaxed edited Euro productions, where the camera lingers for a while to give the viewer a chance to be absorbed by what's going on. But alright, you can't have everything. Here it's all about breathless action in the kitchen, spiced up with little details from the private lives of the candidates, whose names you won't remember anyway at this early stage.

The basic idea is interesting and you can be sure from which source the producers got their inspiration, but after the first episode the show looks like solid, albeit very familiar feeling entertainment.

The Twilight Zone: 8 (2020) Season 2, Episode 6

Mere outline of a boring monster movie, but at least CBS has a running gag now

[4/10 · 26 June 2020]

Episodes of the first season had their message embedded in such bad plots that it seemed as if the authors were only interested in the message and not in telling an interesting story. Here's the message of this episode: be nicer to each other and protect your environment! Otherwise Octotus monsters will come to your flooded coasts and deservedly kill you! Okay, not very original, but essentially classic sci-fi.

Except that this, like much of this episode, is merely told rather than shown. Everything before this "twist" is a really below average, incredibly hastily told monster movie. Half of the nameless characters are already dead while the credits are still running. Joel McHale stomps stiffly through the tiny sets, looks into faces, displays and holes, and blabbers paragraph after paragraph to make the viewer understand what is happening right now and why. The language of the Chinese antagonist is monotonously translated by an app with a time delay. What I want to say is: hasn't anyone noticed that there's... there's a lot of talking going on. Show me something. "Show? Sure! There you go!" Cut to the squid, who continues to kill without a sign of resistance from his victims. Okay, yes, but I'm still not feeling anything but mild annoyance.

But that's all it is, because everything here is too "typically bad" to actually get upset. There is exactly one scene that is supposed to create tension when the tattooed bald guy in the monster room is tinkering with his back to the monster while listening to deafening music, even though he had clearly shown fear of being in a room with the beast a moment before. Hey, I've seen that a thousand times, it's just like in a real movie! Could have worked anyway if I had known who this guy actually is. Because "Monster vs. some human" is not necessarily enough for me to take sides directly. It could also be a bad person, then maybe I want to cheer for the monster. But this way I know nothing and feel zero.

There is exactly one scene that shows the growing distrust between the crew members, but it doesn't lead anywhere because time is too short and the characters are too underdeveloped. Eventually, they stand opposite each other and prefer to talk a little more. Predictably.

And there is exactly one scene in which a human eye is plucked out of a person's skull, which is apparently now a running gag of CBS since ST:Picard. Looking forward to many more freshly plugged eyes in future productions!

Really, it's a pity, especially since several episodes of this season are surprisingly strong. But this episode was so empty, so stuck in the first concept stage, that it's already hard for me to remember details. Tomorrow I'll have forgotten the episode and the day after tomorrow this text.

Two Sentence Horror Stories (2017–2022)

Interesting premises are undermined by amateurish craftsmanship (Season 1)

[4/10 · 29 September 2019]

The idea of short horror stories is intriguing, but the direction, editing and unfortunately also the script feel like a first semester's film school project: they worked with ambition, but without craftsmanship. While the acting is completely ok, the stories don't give you anything. After the first five minutes you regularly think "yes, that might be quite exciting", but then you quickly realize that the rhythm of the stories is just not right, that the editor only has a vague idea of how to create suspense and that the director is simply unable to shape the sloppy script into a coherent whole. There are thousands of horror stories in literature that are only a few pages long, but whose stories leave an impression you will remember years later. That's not the case in any episode here. The whole first season reminded me very much of first film school projects that stood under the motto "learning by failing". Then we sat down and analyzed why everything didn't work out as it was supposed to. We can only hope that this concept will also be applied here and that the second season will be better.

Fuck You All: The Uwe Boll Story (2018)

Uwe Boll is the most interesting hack director ever

[8/10 · 24 June 2019]

Back in the day I had a discussion with a few collegues of mine about Boll's movies and we all agreed that he is a terrible director, but a really great producer who raked in those millions and millions of dollars as if it was nothing. He essentially used a loophole in German law so any potential losses of his investors were covered by the German tax payer. This documentary doesn't even mention this, just "German film funds". I would have been interested to know how exactly his financing looked like. But that's the only really negative point about this documentation tbh. In addition to Boll, many former colleagues and friends have their say, drawing a truly three-dimensional picture of the "worst director ever". Boll is a thoroughly interesting guy, who doesn't seem to apologize for anything and at the same time seems sincere. I am glad to have seen this film because I could see behind his label and realized: the person Uwe Boll has so much more depth than his films. Although I still hope that Postal will become cult one day. Because "What's the difference between a duck?" is still the best question I've ever heard in a job interview scene.

Star Trek: Short Treks: Calypso (2018) Season 1, Episode 2

A really enjoyable short story

[8/10 · 11 November 2018]

Unlike the main series, this little story is actually good. It has heart, is cleverly built and well acted. But what's even more important for me is that it feels like real science fiction because it almost casually deals with topics like loneliness, longing and being human. In my eyes that makes this short film a far better star trek product than the ridiculously confused war series it's supposed to promote. I wish the second season were the same: less loud, less superficial, quieter, more thoughtful and smarter.

Battlefish (2018– )

Entertaining, but feels a bit fake in places

[6/10 · 27 September 2018]

I enjoyed the first season, it was far more entertaining than I anticipated (as I'm not into fishing). The camera work is great, the fishermen are all varied characters and from time to time it's really funny. But to me the whole "replacement captain" arc felt really weird, so I looked up that "captain" Joshua Barton and he's an actor, which on one hand was a relief, because his scenes feel like there's a guy acting, but on the other hand it threw me a bit off. So 7/10 it is.

Searching for Ingmar Bergman (2018)

A very inept docu made by a bragging show-off searching for her own lost fame

[2/10 · 11 August 2018]

This documentary is a hard pass. There are a few interview tidbits that are interesting (if nothing really new), but every scene, every move is counteracted by von Trotta's deep need for attention and recognition. I don't have a problem with filmmakers inserting themselves into their own documentary, but this is just ridiculous: She is front and center. And about half of the runtime is about her, not Bergman. How she was inspired to become a filmmaker because of Bergman, how she felt honored, because he liked a movie of hers forty years ago. It becomes unbearable very quickly.

If you want to watch a informative documentary about Bergman, avoid this production like the plague. There's some interesting information burried there, somewhere beneath the layers of self-promotion and self-congratulatory chest pounding, but it's simply not worth the effort. A better title would be "The wonderful filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta looks back on her greatest achievements (and there's Bergman)". I hated it.

Hover (2018)

A pointless, very amateurish film that stretches its very manageable plot to over eighty minutes

[3/10 · 3 July 2018]

The main problem is the script, because apparently Ms Coleman lacks the experience to write three-dimensional characters and embed them into a working story.

Spoilers: A duo (he is old, she is young) help old and sick farmers to die - because of overpopulation or something. Both talk a lot of expository text, then a drone catches the old man at his house and kills him. Shocked, the young woman (played by Ms Coleman) questions her work.

The movie never really makes it clear what it wants to be about. Are drones evil? Or the AI? Or the people behind it? And how can any tension arise when the audience sees in the first minute of the film that a drone toasts the head of a poor innocent farmer? That would only be possible if our heroine were to come to the conclusion relatively quickly that something was wrong here.

But here we are back to the horrible script: after twenty minutes of filming her partner dies, then our heroine needs an endless series of completely obvious clues. By the time she finally understands (finally!), we are already two thirds done with the film. So far we have learned, among other things, that she is expecting a child from her boss with whom she has no chemistry at all and who cries like a child over the death of her old colleague. This emotional outburst is particularly surprising, because the general performance follows the pattern of "looking concerned and whispering sadly". That was genuinely funny. The atmosphere of the movie should probably be reminiscent of Blade Runner, with its calmness, synth music (plus a probably stolen song from a well-known cracktro from the 1990s. What the...) and its countless, irony-free drone shots. There is just a difference between a protagonist standing in front of spectacular future architecture and thinking about the definition of existence and life itself or a protagonist standing in front of a crop field and thinking about the possibility of the use of drones for murder.

In the end, of course, it's a clear culprit: the evil, evil management. Because "the bad guys up there" is always a wise solution when you have to come up with antagonists, right? So the ending is a classic ending of a conventional B-movie. And Sci-Fi? There is no discussion of the actual science fiction topics. Here they are little more than buzzwords for the following non-action.

So: A film without tension or focus but with a lot of padding, a messed up script with a very limited imagination, flat characters, monotonous acting (except the cry surprise), unremarkable direction, laughable special effects. If at least everything would be proper terrible, it could get cult status, but that's just not the case. And what's not terrible is just okay. That's why I had to write down my thoughts about the movie quickly, because in 48 hours I'll have already forgotten it completely.