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seanfoulkes
Reviews
A Craftsman's Legacy (2013)
Fairly solid concept, but extremely lacking in writing/production value.
After watching a few episodes on PBS, I probably won't bother anymore.
The concept consists of the show's singular personality spending episodes interviewing people whom consider themselves (or who he considers to be..?) craftsmen of niche or dying handmade objects and such. As someone who falls asleep to How It's Made and enjoys just about any behind- the-scenes formulaic shows about engineering, design, and construction: this show just isn't good enough to warrant any more attention.
Virtually all elements of production are extremely low-budget and poorly deployed. From lackluster and sloppy camera-work, uninteresting visual construction, terrible camera quality, poor writing, awkward conversations with no feeling of purpose; this show is in dire need of a producer who actually knows how to produce content for television.
Almost all of the shows flaws are not due to the fact that it has a small budget; they are simply evidence of inexperienced people making a television show.
Maybe it will get picked up by someone who can switch some staff around and up the budget, but until that happens, there is FAR better identical content made by self-producing individuals on youtube.
Feel free to give it a shot, but don't feel bad if it doesn't keep you interested very long. I feel like I'm walking around to peoples houses with a socially awkward family member who is showing you things he finds interesting.
Much Ado About Nothing (2012)
Ironically balanced mediocrity?
I think this film serves as a lesson to everyone invested in its existence.
While the polarized reviews range from idolizing to dismissive, only one aspect of this bizarre and grating example of film stands out as a highlight: Joss Whedon's 'Much Ado About Nothing' is saturated in the contemporary.
...I had initially planned to work through a bunch of philosophical crap in an effort to understand and contextualize how pitiful this film is, yet I find myself nevertheless fascinated that it exists. Let's see if we can figure out what's really going on here.
Joss Whedon is a 3rd generation media creator. His Grandfather wrote for TV. His father wrote for TV. He wrote for TV, and now film. This is not a rags to riches story. His entire life, it's safe to say, he was groomed for success. His wikipedia biography reads like a real-estate pamphlet. The commercially-valuable pedigree and track record is impressive, and its corners are neatly tucked in.
Let's consider the background to the creation of this film (previous creative output):
Buffy The Vampire Slayer - a demographic-successful series that was targeted at socially- undeveloped adolescent males -- a perfect sponge for conventional underdog sci-fi/fantasy television
Angel - even broader, more successful stab at the demographic - no regrets for that pun
Firefly/Serenity - same exact thing
The Avengers - A budget-appropriate melding of his conventional (read:generic) character interplay with the Marvel universe and it's accoutrement: This movie was successful to a broad audience BECAUSE of Whedon's conventionality. The Avengers is every bit as much a conventional TV entertainment spectacle as could be produced for today's $16 3D IMAX Hollywood business model. The avengers is good, but the fact that it is structurally a film has little to do with it's success.
So now that we have clarified the commercial creativity embodied in the fan-followed Joss Whedon, and we look at his black and white "I shot this at my really nice house in 12 days with my buddies who also are in all my movies" re-interpretation of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, we realize that this film has little to nothing to do with it's actual content.
No, this film is a painful example of how this new hyper-commoditized Hollywood/television industrial complex currently views film as an art form. Joss Whedon is telling us that, for all the trust and love and support his fans have inserted underneath his feet to propel him to this level of success, that he honestly views the profitless, artistic, humanitarian aspects of film as worth nothing more than two weeks with a digital camera making a black and white recording of people reciting Shakespeare with almost no conscious intention of what that actually entails, at the house of a rich Hollywood white man.
That's what this movie should have been titled.
"Here's a neat thing I did with my money at my house, and I'm pretty sure it's art."
This film deserves five stars because I think people should really watch it and personally absorb the utter and complete lack of soul that results when you try to create something you really have no understanding of. Joss Whedon has a supreme understanding of commercial ingestion of narrative, but he has absolutely NO understanding of art.
If you are a person that loves Joss Whedon's work, it's not because you love good stories, its just simply because you love watching television. There's really nothing more complex than that. He's really good at his day job. That's why Much Ado About Nothing is so bizarrely vapid of any character or purpose. That's why it seems to be a paradox. That's why people don't understand why "such a celebrated writer" could produce something that seems so.... bad.
Thanks for the wake-up call, Joss. I was getting really complacent and accepting of all this ultra- expensive garbage that Hollywood has been force-feeding the consumer audience for the last decade, and your little hobby of a Shakespeare film is a really effective way to remind us that Hollywood's days of romantic and higher artistic intentions have been successfully erased by the desire for profit. This isn't an anti-capitalist rant, and we all know that Hollywood began as a business, but the exploring is now over, and it's now just a product.
5 of 10 stars.
Marc Maron: Thinky Pain (2013)
HOW are there barely any reviews?
I just finished watching this on Netflix. A few months ago a roommate added HBO GO to the "options" in the living room, and after catching up with the last few years of surprisingly good HBO programming (Boardwalk Empire, Trailer Park Boys, and True Detective).
And then one day I saw a comedy series menu thumbnail with the name MARON in it. It was his HBO series that details a fictionalized version of his real life late-stage comedy success as a pod-cast recorder in his garage, bumbling through this all-too-relatable existential single male Gen-x crisis (even at age 27, I somehow relate to most of it), played out as though direction for the show came directly from his stream of consciousness.
I returned to Netflix after a few weeks of not watching much/any TV, I saw this new stand-up special and, never having seen anything else he's done (still haven't gotten around to his pod-cast for some reason), pressed play.
Ninety-some minutes later I feel like I'm an idiot for not following this guy for years. His deprecating everyman persona that he's seems to have just decided "fuck it, i'm just going to make fun of myself by talking about myself as if i were alone and in the giggly stage before teenagers fall asleep." Couple that with the guilt of relating to his descriptions of the baggage of his broken-yet-average upbringing, and you would be hard-pressed to find a modern philosopher that can paraphrase so many abstract bits of your own life in the natural and endearing way that Marc Maron serves it up.
If you loved Calvin and Hobbes as a kid, never became a team captain, tried a drug more than once, and more importantly over-analyzed a chapter in your past, than you will most likely feel the same way as I now do about him.
To summarize: I thought This live show was straight up hilarious, and multiple levels more complex and resolved than most other working comedians today. I think he does an as good, if not better job at relating to his audience than Louis C.K.
Transcendence (2014)
Smart science fiction swiftly neutered and molded into another bland CGI blockbuster.
"2001:A Space Odyssey" or "Children of Men" this ain't.
The core science fiction theme is actually quite earnest:
If you develop artificial intelligence in the same fashion as the human brain, then logically its survival instinct and will-to-power would manifest itself as soon as you give it more processing power than the human brain. It will continue advance as rapidly as it can to affirm it's sentience, and inevitably threaten flawed beings (humanity). Basically, what happens if you supercharge a human brain, and switch the flawed emotional desires for fulfillment with an insatiable hunger for more knowledge and power?
Seems like the stuff of a great technology-meets-human-condition scenario right? Well in theory, yes. In practice, this film is only half worked-out to and ends up stuffing simplified versions of it's grand and cerebral philosophy down the audience's throat like a Michael Bay plot.
The first half of the movie (read: the half without all the CGI-driven storyline) is quite good. Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany, and Rebecca Hall are all "scientists" (the movie doesn't go too far into authentic details and consistently makes use of techno buzz-words for most of the journey) working on high budget/controversial artificial intelligence research and, of course, in the near future when this powerful technology is on the horizon, there are equally committed extremist groups that are against development of technology such as this. Depp is shot in an attempted assassination after a lecture he gives. Suffering from a mortal wound, his wife (Hall) decides to "upload" Depp's personality into his own "supercomputer" that currently houses a simple "artificial intelligence". I'm putting things in quotations that the audience is supposed to suspend their disbelief over. Virtually none of these tech-related plot mechanisms are explained logically. He might as well develop wings after drinking a potion, because this is the level at which the film requires you to submit.
Long story short Depp becomes an out of control artificial intelligent machine, yadda yadda, takes over the internet, creates "nanotechnology" that can replicate people/things, and that pretty much allowed the CGI artists to do whatever they wanted.
The main plot points are foreshadowed relentlessly in as early on as the first few minutes of the film. The amount of "you're playing with fire" conversations are off the charts, and combined with the CGI leaves virtually nothing to the imagination.
Ultimately, I decided to give it a 6/10. I don't write many reviews, but I feel like this one needs to be clarified in it's mediocrity because i was truly interested and excited for this film, and looked past the slick trailer and saturated blockbuster aesthetic on the merit of it's story. It turns out I should have stuck with my gut. Its maybe worth going to once, probably not spending money on IMAX or 3D or whatever other options are out there.
Actually, scratch that. This is a Redbox movie. A pretty good Redbox movie, but the film fails to become self aware of it's direction and falls under the heavy hand of over-the-top special effects that end up just dragging a thin plot around for two hours.
Meh.
Not angry I saw it, but not recommending it either.
Ecstasy (2011)
Sweet Jesus what a pathetic example of film.
This movie falls so far from it's intended objectives that I almost wonder if it isn't some sort of multi-layered social joke that the director is playing on his audience. The entire film from start to finish feels as if a naive & innocent thirteen year old boy wrote and directed this embarrassing excuse for a motion picture film to impress his older brother who does drugs. Other than the stylishly ripped-off poster design, there is... LITERALLY.... nothing about this film that doesn't make you constantly cringe out of embarrassment for all involved.
The first batch of reviews that give this movie a 10/10 MUST BE FAKE. There is no way that a person coherent enough to read and write English could possibly view this film as a "Must see film," or "Great Cast, Great Story," or my personal favorite: "The Definitive Film about Ecstasy and Clubbing Culture."
Netflix now has this film, and, just like everyone else, was drawn to it out of love for Trainspotting. After quickly looking up the IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes ratings for the film (IMDB=4.7/10, and Rotten Tomatoes has it hovering around a 14%/100) I knew I probably wouldn't get my mind blown, but I wasn't expecting a film this truly awful.
From the first scene which desperately tries to capitalize on the visual aesthetic of Trainspotting, the entire movie becomes an inconsistent mess of AWFUL acting, childish dialogue, flat and borderline nonexistent narrative, and of course there's the music. This film, adapted from one of the best counter-culture authors of the 20th century, had ALL THE WORK DONE FOR IT. All they had to do was properly rip off Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, apply it to this novel, and they would have at least an AVERAGE film. The entire premise revolves around emotionally exposing the 90's underground rave/club culture, and the entire soundtrack consists of, from what I can tell, the same four bars of the most generic "club beat" I've ever heard, and it only plays in the background of these small scale pathetic "rave" sequences where it becomes obvious that the scene consists of less than 20 extras generically moving in a basement while some cheap strobe lights try to mask the films budget and attempt to make it look like a pulsing, sweating, out-of- mind ecstasy club.
So my advice to you is, watch it, but only if you have a morbid curiosity to see in real-time what it feels like to watch the careers of probably everyone involved get quickly erased out of history. I can't imagine trusting director, cinematographer (if you can call him that), or ANY of the actors or writers to coherently create a low-expectation soap opera episode, much less another film. I suppose I'm glad that it was made, so people know for certain how terrible all parties involved are at their respective craft.
Embarrassing. I just spent ten minutes writing this to save you the pain of this film destroying what little expectations you might have from it.