tymothy Reviews

The Irishman (2019)

Absolutely mediocre

[6/10 · 8 December 2019]

Scorsese books DeNiro and Pacino and Pesci just COASTs the rest of the way. At BEST, there are glimmers of great films like the Godfather, but that's it. Hardly feels like there was even much of an attempt made. Last half hour of the film lags completely. Stakes are rarely ever that high or characters well acted or scenes shot for me to care. Most characters feel flat and after 3.5 hours I barely know them. Does it have its moments? Sure. But you make me sit 3.5 hours for some nugget, sorry, I have better things to do.

If you want to see a fantastic film with Pacino and DeNiro, try Heat by Michael Mann.

Seven Samurai (1954)

Simply doesn't hold up

[3/10 · 4 September 2018]

Lots of great movies stand the test of time. Seven Samurai simply doesn't. You're lying and deceiving yourself if you consider this to be a great movie.

Why do people rate this so highly?

1. It's in Japanese 2. It involves Samurai 3. It's old 4. Kurosawa 5. Relative obscurity

All of these factors allow people to like something non-mainstream and thus profess superiority.

Look, no doubt this is a relevant film in understanding the evolution of moviemaking. But historical significance alone doesn't make for a great film. While various action shots might have been ground-breaking for the time and stunning to audiences in the 50s, they simply don't hold up decades later.

The movie is extraordinarily long- well clearly, we must get a great character development of the Samurai then? Nope. Hardly anything.

Fantastic dialog? Nope. Perhaps the subtitles weren't great, but discourse is extremely shallow most of the time.

A real emotional involvement? A sense of urgency? Excitement? Nope. Aside from fleeting moments in the first two hours and a little later on, you get almost nothing. There's a persistent and constant malaise as characters slog through the plot.

Instead the movie lags and relies on portraying mediocre sets and "action". I'm sure audiences in the 50s would consider the film almost immersive into various landscrapes. As a modern movie goer, a few fake trees with a backdrop isn't engaging by itself. A character falling into a pile of fake flowers shot in blakc and white does nothing for me.

So yes, if you watch this you'll see the development of interesting camera techniques that would become staples of work to follow. But as a movie, bleh, terrible pacing, shallow characters and a work that falls flat emotionally. And that's the opposite what good movies are supposed to be- entertainment through delivery of a compelling story.

If you want to see a Kurosawa film that still holds up, look at "Only the Bad Sleep Well", which has some absolutely fantastic camerawork, an engaging plot and delivers a gripping story.

Westworld: Akane no Mai (2018) Season 2, Episode 5

Worst episode- sums up everything wrong with season 2

[3/10 · 8 July 2018]

Complete waste. Has filler written all over it. I could have cut everything relevant in this 80 minute episode down to 5 minutes and put it into another episode. It's a terrible feeling watching a show feeling "oh wow I'm wasting my time".

The shows writers don't understand at this point that we simply don't care or feel emotion at all when hosts experience pain or die. After seeing a thousand resurrections WE DON'T CARE or empathize with a host being in pain or dying. We care about hosts only to the extent it impacts the plot, which means we care about 0 for new characters.

WIthout spoiling, the events in this episode have nearly minimal bearing on the outcome of the rest, the plot arc or honestly much of anything.

We sort of expand on the Westworld backstory a bit, but that's also a crutch inherent to the state of the Westworld plot right now- there's so little runway going forward with the plot, so the writers try to fill the time by going backwards.

We ended season 1 with the plot "There's an elaborate resort world called Westworld, where robotic hosts let the wealthy live out Wild West fantasies. Then things go horribly awry, the hosts become self-aware, rebel and start killing everyone and then..." season 2 comes along. Season 2 doesn't know where to go from there!

Meet the Spartans (2008)

The movie you'll watch when you dine in hell.

[1/10 · 26 January 2008]

This is perhaps one of the most awful films I've seen. Much as I enjoy tacky spoof humor, this movie just falls flat. So many of the film's jokes are so drawn out that whatever humor originally present just gets diluted. It was funny kicking a celebrity into the pit of death once. Five times later, it's just stale and dragging. If you've seen the trailers to this, you've basically seen about 90% of the film. The script could have been easily condensed to a 10 minute sketch for Saturday Night Live. The humor is so repetitive; almost all of the jokes play off either the Spartans questionable sexuality or celebrities' promiscuity. A blurred-out vagina just isn't that funny, why did the movie choose to use it 5 times? While there were numerous pop-culture references, there simply wasn't much done with it. Someone forgot to tell the middle-schooler who wrote this that having a poorly impersonated celebrity appear isn't funny by itself.

Don't see this movie, even if you liked similar spoof movies (like Scary Movie).