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Reacher (2022)
throw skinny kids at a 6"5 mass of muscle and that shows how skilled he is
Yup, that the level of writing you get in this series
lots of eye-rolling one liners as well.
Cuise's version was smart as it juxtapose a smaller man against larger adversaries, as a show of his martial prowess.
This series just bullies. True to the books , which are pretty terrible in themselves.
Nightmare Alley (2021)
Predictible with no flourish
Imagine watching the Great Gatsby but filmed on a theatherical budget.
You know how the story starts and ends, the beats are all to familiar , the grift repeated in it's myriad of intepretations over the decades on TV and film.
But all of that could still be a compelling watch, if only the bits in between are interesting. This film does not satisfy in this critical requirement.
3 stars for the set dressing and location shoots.
Foundation (2021)
Only about the Foundation for the first two episodes
The rule of thumb that most of the budget and the most effort in script refinement are pooled into the first two episodes hold true.
Unfortunately, this means that all of the --- hard scifi , the fantastical far future sci-fi sights and socio-political speculations and ramifications of a genetic monarchy , sentient non-human beings and the challenges of ruling a galaxy wide empire , intriguing enough to hold a thought exercise for more than 10 minutes, --- ceases past these two episodes as well.
Rest of the series is a generic scifi about a Mary Sue with specials powers overthrowing some abstractly bad government . It is ironic when this said government are most likeable and sensible of all the other characters in this series.
Also goes in the tropes of an extremely advanced government with ships far superior to any other planets, being completely hapless when confronted with the 'heroes' of the Series.
Ted Lasso (2020)
9 for the 1st Season, 3 for the 2nd Season
Football with some players dramatics in the 1st Season = good watch.
2nd Season = a soap opera with football as the stage's backdrop
So just watch the first Season and leave it at that.
The Serpent (2021)
Documentary-reenactment quality
Terribly boring, very wooden acting, and an extremely stupid directorial decision to edit it with flashbacks and forth.
At least a documentary gets the last part right. You can't even get a proper heading in this Series.
And there is no licensed soundtrack to accompany the period thriller.
Beckett (2021)
Lazy B-grade exploitation straight from the 70s-80s
Dude get chased hunted by a cop for no good reason. Pretty straightforward lazy B-grade expolitation flick.
Where as the films from the 70s-80s either have charismatic leads, an interesting locale or tight break-neck tempo, this film has none of that.
Oh, the location-shoots of Greece in this film just look like some village in the Med.....
Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021)
saving grace is Takehiro Hira
The singular actor with any sort of gravitas in this film, and the only positive element
and what's with the magical fantastical elements in a guns&tanks action franchise, and the writers not even adding in 1 casualty of 1 side character of the 'good' or 'evil' side? Well, it can be argued that this reflects the movie's roots of a kids cartoon where the good guys always win, and the bad guys always loses but always comes back a few episode later.
The protrayed purity and moral perfection of these 'good guys' (a test is featured prominently in defining this attribute) and their mirrored 'absolute evil' Yakuza and Cobra feels extemely out of place in a world setting that is based on today's reality.
They really should had gone full cartoon for the world-building as well, rather than leaving it half-and-half.
On brawls, only split seconds snapshots of potentially exciting action. Unfortunate.
On set pieces, they couldn't come up with anything better than a knockoff copy of Matrix's 2 highway action scene (other than an obvious CGI background on a countryside highway)
Oh, and the clan also have some of the lamest rules ever written in any film. No wonder their boy-wonder was pissed.
Initiation (2020)
All victims are of a particular gender
Remember those revenge flicks of the expolitation era? This is a double-pump half-shot vanilla soy latte, version of it. (the R rating is a misnomer. It's more deserving of a TV-MA rating)
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
Dumber than Transformers 5
Replace robots with 1 robot and two very ordinary looking monsters ,
add in scenes written for a 7 year old watching power rangers / Utraman on tv, (there really is a scene where the spilling water on a console will disrupt the enemy at the most critical moment. Perfect setup for these kind of kids friendly superhero, mega-sized shows )
plus knowning full well that that the two monsters on the bill cannot be killed ,
you get this embarassement of a movie.
Fatman (2020)
what you see in the trailers, is all the movie has to offer
You can skip through 1 whole hour of the film , and just watch the last 30 minutes, and you will not miss a thing .
Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)
Accolades for the cinematography
Gorgeous . Just gorgeous.
(except the Martian manhunter. )
4 hours felt like 90 minutes.
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With the relevation of review scores by so-called professional arbiters of good taste, the profession of a mainstream film reviewer is now as silly as being a a window knocker in 2021.
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If the film execs are smart and are actually looking forward to a bountiful return on investments, they will restore and continue this particular universe.
Murphy's Law (1986)
What i learned from this movie
1. 10c per entry locks for toilet cubicles exist
2. motorcycles explodes with 2 gunshots
3. car explodes with 3 gunshots
&
4. action is much more raw in 1986
5. drowning by being dunked sucks
The Undoing (2020)
Very poorly written ending
It is a complete 180 degrees turn from the narrative style of the preceding 5 episodes and 40 minutes of good acting and scripting.
rather than serving as a satisfactory conclusion, it just makes the viewer feel as if they have wasted 6 hours of their life watching a cop-out right at the end.
It is so bad that it smacks of a rewrite of another more suitable ending, to suit a socio-political agenda. Or it could just be that the writers just flopped at the end when it all matters.
(helicopter rides and chase sequences involved too, for this bizarre change of narrative style)
update from an news update:
"I sent it to some trusted people, and I said, 'Who do you think is guilty at the end of this?' They all said, 'Well, it's not really clear.' And I got paranoid," Grant recalled. "I thought, 'Is this all about a second series? Because that's not so much fun for me - I'm here to play a killer. That's why I'm here."
should really have let it continue on a "not really clear" ending
The Third Day: Last Day - The Dark (2020)
discard everything from eps 1 - 3
So the kid and the mystique built up from episode 1 to3 ? They effectively retconned that central storyline. It's clearly done to diminish Jude Law's character to a sideshow day-walking bum. A typical characterization of a misandrist production, of which the second half of the mini series strongly embodies.
considering eps 4 and 5 are nothing but useless filler episodes, this mini series should had just stopped at 3.
(the change of production cast for eps4-6 reflects this turn about of quality)
Death of Me (2020)
unexpectedly gory
You can pretty much sum it up as wicker man in thailand. (with a direct to dvd/to stream budget)
They even referenced it directly in film. Extra star for them knowing exactly what they are filming.
and it's unexpectedly gory, despite it looking like a mild horror flick made for general audiences in the first half of the film.
Maqqie Q and Luke both likable, but you don't really care much about them. Like the WickerMan, the ritual, the islanders and the island itself are the main characters of the film
Good watch for a horror film fanatic. Too bad the ending is not as spectacular as the afore referenced film/s
2067 (2020)
Ending ruins everything
In a world where synthetic oxygen kills, and natural oxgyen cannot be generated as all plant life is dead, a hero needs to be sent to the future to retrieve a cure
(they are deadly serious about natural oxygen thing)
--
it turns out that the hero that's selected to travel to to future (to pull a lever, of all things) is because the designer of the machine thought that it would be a good idea to lock it to that person's DNA
at the denouement, the more sensible choice of saving humanity from the dying world is exchanged for a cure more ridiculous than a silver pill.
well, i guess that scene is worth watching for how unintentionally funny it is
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Tales from the Loop (2020)
Another series where it is better served as a 15 minutes short
Disappointingly, all the sci-fi bits you see in the trailer, is all you get. (Static backdrops and that's that) . Everything else is just padding.
And neither are the stories very much anchored in sci-fi either. Could very well had made it as a supernatural show, as they don't bother to explain the mechanics as a sci-fi should. On the themes explored, it is bad re-thread on a low-budget, that is already better explored elsewhere. (even on even lower budget shows decades past)
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Do not waste your time. It does not get better from the first 15 mins of the 1st Episode.
Tenet (2020)
It is actually EASY to follow
Just think of it as an adaptation of a 'classic-comic book' . The silly and funky type of comic book.
You're not meant to understand the concepts presented in this film , because the in-universe explanations don't make any sense in of themselves. Explanations are 'just as it is'. It is deliberate that it is not explored with different perspectives in the film nor is there an attempt to actually explain things in a clearer manner , cause Nolan could not explain it other than on face value, to himself either.
Perhaps the sound mixing was done this way too to muddle whatever explanations that was attempted in the film. And to pass off any confusion in the film's concept as being too intellectual for the viewer to comprehend.
Zany time travel ideas which makes zero sense, but looks cool? Supervillian and superhero motivations? Shallow characters and conveniences? This is pretty much the whole shtick of the film. Expect nothing more.
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A good time travel movie (or novel) is a movie which does not make the whole time travel the center piece of the movie. (cause any time travel is inherently an impossibility, and the said story will fall apart if that is the sole focus) The good ones make the stories about the characters and their motivations.
The bad ones just use time travel as a SFX showcase.
A kaito (1998)
Not gory, not sexy
Gratuitous violence and sex scenes plopped in randomly . Spawn (HBO) feels more violent than this despite Kite having scenes of people being shot and blown apart. The violence is comical over-the-top ( just 80s styled blood. No viscera. Other anime series are more violent)
Plot is as cliche as you can get -> Assassin sent out on random jobs, seeking revenge for her backstory, discovered that her handler was the killer all along,and the movie end with her taking care of that (without the movie actually showing how that conclusion came to be. It just is...)
Add in a completely random romance subplot with a fellow assassin, which drags the movie whenever such scenes come up, and you get this failure of an exploitation film. Think of a rip-off sequel to Cannibal Holocaust , and you probably get a good idea of what this movie offers.
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oh, and the girl has a pinup body that rivals any Penthouse model in the sex scenes. Drawn completely different than her non-erotic scenes. So, the description of the youthful assassin doing it is only controversial in writing.
Sputnik (2020)
what is the difference to other space-monster horror thrillers?
It's a low budget monster thriller worth watching. Better than other low budget monster horror thrillers from the West. A slow burn thriller in the first hour or so, where you slowly learn of the creature and the experiments conducted. The last third of the film could had done with more exposition on the condition of the cosmonaut, and should had explicitly explored the current motivations of the female lead. Overall, the characters seems real and are well acted on
On other technicalities: Good set design, good cinematography and sound design. Some anachronism, but it is 'possible' that the interior of the base is modeled on a fancy hotel from the era. (there are examples in interior design magazines of the era but heh..if it was truly realistic, it would look hideous on screen)
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Spoilers below which involves the final scene of the movie:
They gave the main character the motive and the background to do what she did. Why the attempted escape? Why the drive to separate the specimen when? Why attempt to do all this when it feels like an impossible to the viewer?
it is because she had experienced something that is suppose to impossible before as a kid. A medical miracle to realize her dream to walk and run. That also explains what motivated her to attempt to cure cases deemed hopeless, by controversial means (the latest case of hers was adjudged by a committee hearing early on in the film).
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critique on critique:
some others has said that there is a love interest in this movie. There is none. Nothing remotely romantic is shown between those two main characters.
Ghosts of Mars (2001)
only 1 thing is good
The special effects for the de-limbing and decapitation by flying discs is still cool in 2020.
rest of the movie is some B-grade direct to DVD stuff. $28 million budget for this ? Some extreme levels of Hollywood accounting they did here.
Cursed (2020)
why not just make a standard king arthur series?
Make it R. and everyone would watch it. Even many people watched Viking on the History channel.
No need to swap this and that for identitarian purposes. (more like the personal politics of the writers and showrunners, rather than allowing the audience to identify with the characters, cause everyone watches good TV regardless of the virtue signalling swaps)
This is just young-adult fiction trying hard to convince it's viewers that it is actually more than that, when it's in the ranks of the Mazerunner's sequels / Divergent.
Brave New World (2020)
from an 8 to a 4
This might be the first case in TV history where the first episode is a stinker. Feels like it is made just to turn people away from the series. Everything is superfluous, set design and costumes are bland and boring, characters are unlikable. ~~ (Due to the last two episodes, it is better to just not watch it at all)
From Episode 2 to 7, the quality is flipped, and it becomes an enjoyable marathon watch.
Episode 8 and 9 is a stinker, worse than the 1st. While the 1st is plastic, 8 & 9 is just plain stupid and makes you hate the writing and the characters . It becomes a melodrama set in a loosely sci-fi society that the writers have not sat down for longer than 5 minutes and thought of the intricacies that such a setup presents.
I recommend a first time viewer to watch Episode 4 first, then watch episode 2 and 3 as a sort of flashback. Then continue on wards with 5-7. (then stop watching)
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Spoilers:
But it gets real soapy with mopey , possessive, emo-man childs at the ends, in a love triangle, but the women is written with all the modern day feminists would imbue in such a character.
It is very very difficult to watch the last episode for how terrible it is.
The most egotistic counter-culture male with the messiah-complex in this triangle ( ..he actually dresses all black too... ) goes on to lead violent massacre perpetrated by a bunch of mentally deficient slave-workers , killing millions of innocents and destroying what they have built, so that can live as primitives in the wild. ( A fantasy these lovers flirt with during their dalliances)
(Why can't they use robots in such an advanced society ? They can launch to space daily, build an entire metropolis hundred of meters above the ground, have a universal information matrix .... Cause the writers would actually need to work, and create a rebel class that the viewer would relate to. Oh, and no security cameras and actual security personnel to handle those that refuses 'reconditioning' )
The writers probably meant for this to inspire the viewer as a rousing emancipation of the oppressed and of the soul ( something which the writers equate to unfiltered and unchecked negative emotions , and it's manifestation of violent actions ) and a remodeling to a fairer society ( they think the 'might is right' society of Episode 2 is more perfect, and if you don't agree, you literally deserve to be murdered) , but all this does is to tell the opposite. The truth is that it actually shows how readily available beneficial pharmaceuticals (zero side effects shown) , polygamy, and an ordered and civil society, is actually good.
Attempts to show the cultural downsides of this society is also undercut by internal contradictions. The attempt to show the lack of art and music is contradicted by montages of fashion, detailed landscaping, good interior design, a great electronic score at the clubs, and even award ceremonies for their movie-equivalents.
it all boils down to this being a naive love story. The negative implication that the writers stresses is the inability of having sexual monogamy. But emotional monogamy and friendships is allowed. Do the writers not understand why Kings and queens have harems, paramours and doxies for millennias, and at the same time be praised and blessed by the religious authorities too? ( different standards for the paupers & proletariat , of course )
What a purile outlook in such a series where orgies are commonplace, and dates are rare .
The Hunger (1997)
Great Horror shorts for the 1st Season
2nd Season is offloaded to the Brits as a 2nd production. So , it's at best, a 30% hit rate for that season. As this is an anthology, with 20+ episodes per season, a general score for this diversity is inherently misleading.
This is an era of production where some themes of sexual depravity can be put on film. (only some episodes explicitly explore this) . I do not understand why this is a critique by others, as this series is meant to explore the results of quenching the thirsts of the various dark Hungers of our souls.
Watch the more highly rated episodes, and skip the rest (most of season 2).
The Hunger (1997)
Great Horror shorts for the 1st Season
2nd Season is offloaded to the Brits as a 2nd production. So , it's at best, a 30% hit rate for that season. As this is an anthology, with 20+ episodes per season, a general score for this diversity is inherently misleading.
This is an era of production where some themes of sexual depravity can be put on film. (only some episodes explicitly explore this) . I do not understand why this is a critique by others, as this series is meant to explore the results of quenching the thirsts of the various dark Hungers of our souls.
Watch the more highly rated episodes, and skip the rest (most of season 2).