marcos-73933 Reviews

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999)

Inconsistent quality - Don't know why I watch this

[5/10 · 21 December 2023]

DS9 is inconsistent. It vacillates from outstanding, memorable episodes to outright yawners. I've only watched five seasons but stopped due to boredom.

The biggest issue is the lead actors.

• lead Avery Brooks looks like he has just reached the point of remembering his lines and rehearsing in front of a mirror. He stares at the camera and ignores those around him. No chemistry with the other actors whatsoever and he does not even begin to become the well-written character that he portrays. Like a decent guitarist in a show who has only just learned the song and is also out of sync with the rest of the band.

• beautiful Terry Farrell is one dimensional, doing her best but seems like she needs a better cast to let her really show her skills

• the actor who plays Bashir looks good but makes you fall asleep whenever he comes on the screen. He would do better as a photo model.

• the actor who plays Kira is cute and likeable but the portrayal needs to be stronger. It's as if she's focusing on being cute and not letting go to portray the character.

• Worf has a powerful, over-processed voice. Keeps your interest for a while, but you need more

• the exception is O'Brien, an excellent performer. When he stars in an episode you breathe a sigh of relief. And of course Odo is fantastic in his role.

• but: the unusual races, the Ferengi, the Cardassians, even the other Klingons, have outstanding actors. One never gets tired of Dukat, Garak, Martok, or even the female changeling.

The writing is inconsistent. Some episodes are the best of many ST series. Others look like they're designed for character development but instead of having the characters face interesting challenges in these episodes they just talk you to sleep.

Still, this series is better than many other shows. No loud sound effects, shaky and jumpy camera work, or fast cuts designed to hide weaknesses in writing. This often sleepy, slow-paced series is still far ahead of many of the other offerings out there.

Furious 7 (2015)

Just a video game. (Yawn)

[4/10 · 18 December 2023]

What is the difference between a video game and a movie? The makers of this flick don't seem to know. This movie is so boring that towards the end it just becomes little more than flashing lights. Way way too much camera movement too.

Kind of like listening to a band with their volume at maximum that plays only one chord.

Who would have thought that this fantastic cast would be reduced to such imagineless boredom? No character development, hard to find a story.

Too bad, because Paul Walker deserved a send off much more worthy of his talent.

As an FF fan, I wasn't even disappointed. Just dizzy.

Las Villamizar (2022)

Excellent show except for music and sound

[7/10 · 8 February 2023]

This show captures your attention from the first episode. The acting and writing are both strong and it is exciting to watch a historical show. But the sound effects and music are horrible. They are loud and jarring like in TV commercials and they take your attention away from the action. Also while they have beautiful period costumes and sets, the music is modern. It should be music from the time period. And the sound person should have realized that sound effects are supposed to help the show, not overpower it and jar the viewer. I've watched about eight episodes, but don't know if I'll keep watching.

Manifest (2018–2023)

Like a boring afternoon soap opera

[1/10 · 20 August 2022]

Based on the positive reviews, I watched three episodes hoping it would pick up but it didn't. A total waste of time. Banal characters and lazy writing.

The Walking Dead (2010–2022)

Excellent until season 4

[3/10 · 5 September 2021]

There were so many good things about this show until season 4. Then it got boring. Boring characters, boring dialog, boring story, boring music. Don't know what happened.

Hell's Kitchen (2005– )

First few seasons entertaining, then falls off a cliff

[5/10 · 14 June 2021]

The first few seasons were engaging and even worthy of binge watching. Then the show nosedived in season 9. Tried to watch season 10 but the constant edits make me dizzy.

It´s as if they hired the dumbest producers and editors they could find starting in season 9. If these people were contestants on the show, they'd be making dishes with 90% salt and hot peppers and 10% actual food.

I thought the show might make a good drinking game, but you'd be falling over even two minutes in. This was the idea: take a swig every time you see or hear:

• edits after less than 3 seconds (two swigs if less than two seconds)
• strobe lights
• dizzying camera pans or zooms
• obviously coached, overacted reaction shots
• commentaries that look like they're being read off cue cards
• loud kettle drums or explosions
• music louder than the person talking

And as a bonus, finish your glass if a quiet, talented person is sent home.

It´s too bad they ruined the show like this. I was enjoying watching it as a guilty pleasure during my workouts.

Inferno (I) (2016)

Cheap gimmicks, some good photography

[3/10 · 19 November 2020]

The movie fools you at the beginning making you think that it's going to follow the story in the book. Then it becomes a long train of cheap Hollywood gimmicks. Not only is the plot changed, but many characters are as well.

The movie is sloppily edited and uses to many quick cuts. It focuses on scenes of speeding cars and people pushing through crowds and throws aside the richness of the original mystery to the point where it becomes just another bad chase movie. Important "eureka" moments of discovery just show up as one line of dialogue in order to save time to show more chase scenes.

The characters mumble their lines and speak in passionless voices, even at the most dramatic moments.

The scenes of Florence, Venice, and Turkey are the best thing about the movie. But even some of these astounding visuals are ruined by overuse of shaky cam.

Vis a vis (2015–2019)

Starts out great, then they wreck it.

[6/10 · 9 February 2020]

It seems like most of the positive reviews are from people who have only watched the first two seasons, which are excellent, 10 stars.

Then they get a new writing team or something and start to use cheap plot techniques, gratuitous violence, and copied ideas from Pulp Fiction and horror movies. Season 3 started out good but they had to kill or maim someone at the end of every episode, like they were using a stupid formula. They also stopped developing characters and just rode on the character development from seasons 1 and 2. (That was the only thing that made it still worth watching, is that the characters had already been carefully developed.) But the story kept getting worse and worse and season 4 was unwatchable.

Studios need to put more care into the selection of their writers and possibly pay them more in order to get good ones.

Arrival (II) (2016)

WRITTEN BY ALIENS TO MIND-CONTROL US

[1/10 · 3 January 2020]

This movie is so bad that there's only one way to make sense of it: it's written by aliens who have little understanding of humans but want to put us in a trance to mind-control us. So beware of their tricks!

HYPNOSIS TECHNIQUES AND NARRATIVE DISCONNECTS

Long, pointless montages of unimportant aspects of the story with an annoying single violin playing randomly in the foreground that force a cognitive dissonance -- and we wonder, "Can this actually be important? It must be if it's emphasized like this. But it's so banal." It makes one's stomach churn like a spinning computer wheel.

A main story that is edited to leave out the most important parts, like a football broadcast that doesn't show the touchdowns or concert footage that doesn't show the band. For example, the translator's first encounter with the aliens and later her discovery of how to read the language are simply...left out. We're not supposed to notice that she simply starts to use a translation app that has magically appeared on her tablet as if the aliens got it approved on the app store.

Too much time in general spent on unimportant aspects of the main narrative, like a chef who serves up an excellent steak dinner and talks to you at length about the color of the plate. A long montage at the end of the movie that forces us to endure supposedly meaningful scenes of a close relationship that for the rest of the movie has only been terse interchanges involving work, and which becomes as impactful as watching strangers kiss in the park.

DISCONNECTED CHARACTERS

People who don't talk to each other in normal language, but use unnaturally quick, staccato remarks as if they are mind-controlled aliens themselves. Interactions in which there is nothing beautiful or even moderately functional. A linguist who can barely speak as the main character, who spends most of the movie muttering in half-whispers.

LOGICAL DISCONNECTS

Aliens that make animal-like sounds while authorities bring in a linguist and not an an expert in animal communications, or at least someone who speaks Wookie or who has seen the whales in Star Trek IV. Kind of like a hockey team bringing in a soccer coach.

Not giving a briefing or any training to the translator, as if one's first encounter with an alien species doesn't need that. An encounter team that is forced to wear awkward, loose plastic suits when over on the next hill a ski team is wearing state-of-the-art, skin-hugging protective fabrics. Forcing the team to go to meet the aliens immediately after they receive a broad-spectrum antibacterial vaccine as if the body doesn't need the required three days to integrate the formula and develop immunity, as if it's enough to take the vaccine for show.

CONCLUSION

So overall the effect is to create a trance that puts one's mind on spin, ready to receive the embedded commands from the off-planet intruders, or makes the mind resist so much that one doesn't know whether to keep watching or run away screaming.

It's unfortunate, because the concept of the movie is good and the story introduces linguistic concepts that could have been explored more deeply.

But at least if you watch The Arrival then the horrible series Another Life will suddenly seem like a work of art.

Another Life (2019–2021)

A highly promising cultural commentary which unfortunately fails.

[5/10 · 4 August 2019]

The best science fiction not only creates interesting worlds and plays with futuristic ideas but also reflects our own society back to us. Such classics as Orwell's "1984" and the Wachowski brothers' "The Matrix" are outstanding pieces of work not only because they succeed on their own merits but also because they show us who we are in a new and interesting way. Great science fiction has the ability to step outside our world and examine it from a new perspective--so that we feel like we are examining an interesting fictional world when in actuality we are looking at ourselves from an unexpected new point of view.

"Another Life" attempts to follow in that tradition and portrays an almost brilliant reflection of our own culture. The setting is a fully realized feminist society in which all the important roles are held by women while men work underneath them in supportive roles. These men are cautious, and even passive, rarely speaking a word out of line, never taking a lead unless it is firmly within their prescribed role. The lead female character, with the masculine name "Niko", is a superwoman who is firmly in charge of her household and career who is tapped by her employer to captain a spaceship with the mission to make contact with an alien race. She is the ultimate feminist character, strong yet understanding, decisive yet attentive to the feelings of others. In the meantime, her perfectly compatible mild-mannered husband stays behind to take care of their daughter, who complains that Mommy did things differently. He works as a barely respected translator attempting to make contact with the aliens and it is because of his failure to do so that Niko has to come to the rescue and captain the space flight.

The crew on the ship that Niko commands is comprised of twenty-somethings who are an insightful representation of some aspects of some of the millenials in our own society. Unlike the crew of almost every ship that we've seen on the screen, in which the crew are always at their assigned posts and consistently following protocol, this crew spends most of their time sitting in a lounge complaining. They do their jobs when required and pushed, like high school students who write an important paper the night before it is due. For them, their feelings are more important than their responsibilities and Niko spends more time making sure that their feelings are heard than getting them to do any work. One wishes that they could have smart phones to keep them happy, but technology does come to the rescue in the form of the ship's main computer that appears in its gentle, sensitive holographic form to take care of all their needs, except when the ship has technical problems, of course. Then the crew is actually forced to do something, but even then they are so impulsive and intent on doing what they feel like doing that they have no problem going off mission or endangering their lives and the ship.

The two strongest characters on the crew are iconic. Ian, the previous commander of the crew that Niko replaces, represents an old-school toxic male who is more concerned about his own ego than the safety of the ship and the mission at hand. Michelle, a sexually aggressive, unlikable woman, represents a darker side of female nature with her defiance of Niko and her passionate allegiance to Ian whom she previously had a sexual relationship with. She likes to criticize older people and loudly and aggressively make her point of view known and even, in one of the best lines of the show, tells the mild-mannered, good-looking political representative on the crew that he is one of the "least sexy sexy guys" she's ever met.

So the show does a good job of putting these interesting characters on the stage. But at this point the writers fall prey to one of the weaknesses that we see on modern screens, the idea that once a show is cast, nothing more need be done. The playing pieces are on the board, they seem to think, and now all that one has to do is randomly move them around. This is where the writing begins to fail, as beyond their initial identities, there is almost nothing interesting about the characters. The plot doesn't make up for this ennui either, as the writers advance the story by having the characters make silly decisions and by copying scenes from well-known sci-fi movies of the past, especially "Alien". The result is akin to watching a neighbour's three-year-olds make up simple stories while playing with action figures. No matter how interesting the figures are, they don't in and of themselves make a good story.

It's unfortunate. All the elements were in place for an insightful commentary on our society and the actors did an excellent job of competently portraying the exact type of blandness in their characters that the writers intended. If only the writers had moved beyond their uncanny ability to set the stage and actually taken the time to craft an interesting story, the show might have been worth watching for more than a small number of episodes

María Magdalena (2018–2019)

Interesting but has noticeable historical inaccuracies

[6/10 · 3 August 2019]

This is a good story, with excellent actors and scenery. Visually it rivals some of the classic Biblical epics. After an engaging start it slows down and is hard to keep interest.

There are a number of historical inaccuracies though. In one of the early episodes, villagers are celebrating Easter and Pentecost before the death and resurrection of Jesus. (The whole reason the Easter holiday exists is to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus). To get such a simple thing wrong makes one wonder how many other inaccuracies there are.

For example, the marriage customs and the harsh treatment of Jewsish women in the show seem like it would belong more to another middle Eastern religion that wasn't born until a number of centuries later. This did not seem correct for the Jewish tradition. So I went and read about the treatment of Jewish women which in reality turns out to be much more respectful. So this is another major error in the show as it drives much of the plot.

Even the portrayal of Jesus, while well-acted and interestingly conceived, has inaccuracies. There are a number of times when he deviates from the teachings of the Bible to teach modern New Age and Liberal philosophies. These are seamlessly tied together with Biblical re-enactments so it is hard to distinguish what is Biblical and what is made up if you did not grow up with thorough Biblical teachings.

With these errors it also makes you wonder how accurate the portrayal of the Roman empire itself is.

What is incredibly good though is the portrayal of the twelve disciples. They have their own lives, families, problems, and doubts. They literally come to life and make you think again about many of the things that you assumed about them. There are also a number of other strong characters in the narrative such as Herod, Herodias, Lazarus, and Barrabas. Mary Magdalene herself is written as an intriguing and engaging character.

But because of the inaccuracies I had to start seeing this show as taking place in a fantasy world such as that of The Lord of the Rings instead of as historical fiction. In other words, the show only makes sense if you realize that very little of it is history at all. This makes one lose interest in the show as what is the point of watching something that has so many errors. For a story set in a historical context, you would think that they would have made a better effort to get simple facts correct.

Shaft (2019)

Written by kids for kids

[3/10 · 28 June 2019]

Reminds me of the things we used to laugh at in grade school. Only Samuel Jackson makes it worth watching, although they've adolescentized his character. Too bad the movie wasn't written by adults, because it's a good concept that could have made a decent movie.

Girls from Ipanema (2019–2020)

They ruined it in the last episode

[9/10 · 23 April 2019]

This show really charmed me. The visual appearance has a magic to it that goes beyond the beautiful people and the elegance of Old Rio. The music is captivating. The story arises organically from the characters who you actually begin to care about.

But they ruined the whole thing in episode 7. They traded in the charm of the original six episodes for hackneyed plot devices and in-your-face editing. The characters start to be moved around like game pieces instead of the story being derived from them. The ending is horribly cliche.

I don't know why companies choose to ruin good shows so badly, but the first six episodes are well worth the watch.

Colony (2016–2018)

Brilliant show ruined by shaky cam

[5/10 · 10 April 2019]

Colony is brilliant in so many ways, but they ruin it with constant shaky cam. It almost never stops. It's worse in slow scenes when people are just talking quietly. So watching this show is like trying to read a book on a bus that is bouncing over a cobblestone street. 10 stars for the show, -5 stars for the shaky cam.

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

A spectacular failure!

[2/10 · 7 March 2017]

This movie fails on so many counts. Almost whatever you think of, it fails on that.

Ironically it could have been a really good movie and that is what makes it so disappointing. It has all the elements in place. And it has some interesting concepts: an intergalactic war, an ally in the fight against the invaders, and attempts to crack the language of the aliens. But they really blew it.

Much of the movie reminds me of those cheap cartoons with the angular drawing and boring scripts that they used to show after school on TV. If you picture the movie looking like one of these animations then suddenly it makes more sense. The key must be to have drastically lowered expectations.

Many of the younger actors are very photogenic and it makes you wonder if they were chosen for their looks instead of their acting ability. And could they make the AI more boring? If that represents evolution beyond the biological then it's pretty pathetic evolution.

This is not a movie that you will want to watch in one sitting. If you do then you'll probably have to throw up afterwards. Watch it in a few sittings on Netflix for slices of mindless diversion.

Collateral Beauty (2016)

Like an After-School Special

[3/10 · 13 January 2017]

Fantastic acting, especially Will Smith. Some compelling scenes.

But it reminded me to much of the movies they used to show at Church. The whole point of this type of didactic movie is to share a message of some sort. The message is more important than the movie, and as a result the movie often suffers artistically. But strangely, I'm not even sure what the message of "Collateral Beauty" was.

Like a Church movie or an after-school special, there was just too much in-your-face stuff. Constant super-close-ups of the actors' faces while they're having deep conversations, the lingering of the camera for up to five seconds beyond reasonable, to the point where you almost feel like a stalker, and symbolism that is shoved down your throat. Characters that we don't care about that much because they seem, well, too manufactured. Lines that contain some interesting thoughts but because they come out of nowhere have the same impact as a pithy saying on a fridge.

I like the idea of collateral beauty. If we look hard enough there may even be some of it in this movie. But as it was I walked away with an unsettled feeling in my stomach, even though I skipped the popcorn.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Written by robots

[3/10 · 18 December 2016]

Could be that I'm old-fashioned, but I prefer characters that have some PERSONALITY. Like Han Solo. If you want a female lead then give her a strong character, like Princess Leah or Ripley (in Alien). The characters in this movie were interchangeable and robotic, there was nothing unique about them. They were as flat as the characters that kids create when playing with Star Wars action figures.

Also I prefer a plot that is THREADED and not just episodic. Use foreshadowing and let events rise from the characters. Having events occur without leading up to them properly is just boring.

I literally fell asleep during this movie. And I wasn't even tired.