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Love Fraud (2020)
Amazing
Fantastic documentary recommended to me by a friend. Both of us are filmmakers. He loved everything about this series - the shooting style, the editing and especially the collage-style graphics which some people here seem to hate. I just don't get it because I completely agree with my friend - this series is brilliant.
I think most people who say it's too slow are Americans, and are used to extremely fast-paced productions. That isn't always a good thing, and thankfully, the rest of the world hasn't lost the ability to watch other types of content yet. I love slower-paced films where you don't feel like you're being hypnotised by a stream of fast-moving images or bombarded with new information and cheap emotional tricks every minute. In this case, you really get the feeling that the filmmakers respect both the characters and their audience. And when I read about the painstaking process of the making of "Love Fraud", I feel nothing but respect and admiration for the women who created it.
As someone who is very interested in personality disorders and stories of all kinds of fraudsters, this was fascinating to watch. Highly recommended.
Wendy (2020)
Wasted opportunity
My favourite part was the very beginning, until the title. Beautiful cinematography, it looked very promising, but then the film quickly went downhill from there. It's a sad example of what happens when instead of making the viewer feel something, you just tell them about that something. It doesn't work and feels very contrived. And as if the overly descriptive voice-over wasn't enough, there is also never-ending music to tell you exactly what you should be feeling in every scene. There is nothing left to discover by yourself. Instead of going on an adventure, if feels like reading an essay about lost childhood written by a boring, sentimental middle-aged person. "Beasts of the Southern Wild" felt fresh and bursting with life, and this feels like the exact opposite, although I can see an attempt to create something similar visually. I kept watching until the end, although to be honest I wanted to stop after the first quarter.
Stargirl (2020)
An awkward, badly made film
I'm a big fan of Grace, and I watched the film because of her. I also think Karan might have a good future career. So, I even found and read the book on which the film is based. The book was ok, although I don't understand its popularity - there are much, much better books for children and teens, that have more substance, more depth and less cliches. Perhaps young teens who haven't been exposed to any better literature enjoy it, and that's fine.
But no matter how much I wanted Grace's debut to be a success, I can't lie to myself or others - it's a really, really badly made film. Being a filmmaker myself, it almost makes me angry that someone actually got paid for directing and producing it. I mean, for someone who has all these resources to produce a result like this is mind-boggling. If I hadn't read the book, I don't think I'd even fully understand what was going on.
It's like they completely disregarded all of the emotional impact of the events in the book, all of the buildup, and just skimmed though a series of events for the sake of putting them on screen. Aside from her meticulously designed colorful outfits, you get zero sense of how quirky Stargirl is (the most important trait of her character), how involved the guys are in the talk show that they're hosting, and basically anything else that's supposed to matter. It's like they weren't even trying to create an emotional connection to any of the characters, because not one of them is even remotely interesting.
Another huge problem with the film is the sound design. I'm not sure why it is like it is, but it's bad. It's flat, the actor's lines are mumbled, and there are very little atmosphere sounds. This makes for very awkward viewing.
Lastly, I doubt that young people will like the film, except for maybe very young teens or children (but even they probably won't have the patience to watch it till the end because it's so emotionally flat). This is because no teens are the way they are portrayed in the film. It feels like a really old person's vague idea of how teenagers talk and behave. There's one place in particular that made me snort loudly, it was when Leo asked Archie "is she magic?" It was so completely random and silly, mostly because, like I mentioned before, there was zero sense of Stargirl's quirkiness or the profound impact she'd made on everyone. It's not completely unrealistic that a 16 year-old guy would as a question like this, but there should be a really, really good reason for it and a serious buildup to the moment where he asks it. Here, it was like: wait, what?
Lastly, for anyone who's looking for a film on a similar topic, I suggest to skip Stargirl and watch "Bridge to Terabithia" (2007) instead. Very similar story, but a much, much more engaging film that will be enjoyed by children and adults alike.
The Man from Earth: Holocene (2017)
Angry with myself for watching this
I only gave three stars because of David Lee Smith. I can't forgive myself for ignoring all the negative reviews and deciding to give this a shot anyway. To the fans of the original film: don't watch this. Seriously, just don't. Watch the original one more time instead.
It's very hard to believe Holocene was created by the same people. The script, the casting - everything is so much worse. Acting by the four kids is just painful to watch, not to mention that all four characters seem to be clinical sociopaths with zero bad feelings about doing things that any sane, civilized human being would feel extremely uneasy partaking in. And what the what was there, at the very end? I won't include any spoilers, but... seriously?
I can't say I expected it to be a masterpiece like the original film, but I didn't expect it to be so bad. Please drop the idea of another film or a TV series.
Chasing UFOs (2012)
It just makes you sad
I love the National Geographic magazine. In the world where quality matters less and less, it's still surprisingly professional and inspiring.
However, seeing shows like this on their TV channel makes me think that one day - sooner rather than later - it too will join the cheap entertainment(?) media. How such an idiotic production ended up on National Geographic channel is beyond me. It seems to go against all the values that I thought the National Geographic society had. But I rarely watch TV and mostly read the magazine, so maybe this show isn't an exception. Maybe it's a direction in which the channel is headed. In that case, I have nothing more to say.
Lisbon Story (1994)
100 minutes of nice images and music - but that's all
Yes, Lisbon is enchanting and yes, Madredeus is the balm for your ears, but including both into a film doesn't make it good. It also needs things like good actors and a good script. The actors in "Lisbon story" are doing just that - acting (not "living" the roles), and this keeps you from getting emotionally involved in what's happening.
It looks like Wenders chose the easiest path and expressed his ideas by simply letting Friedrich and Phillip tell everything in their monologues at the end of the film. I usually follow the "show, don't tell" rule. The language of cinema is not the same as the language of people, and in "Lisbon story" Wender seems to be able to speak the cinema language just as Mr. Winter is able to speak Portuguese: not much, but enough to survive.