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Reviews
Fleabag (2016)
Pompous and Dumb
I tried to give this a go based on high reviews and friend recommendations. I just didn't understand it though. All I could see was a person raised in wealth finding small things to use as reasons to be an all around unpleasant and gross person. But I think that's the schtick. Most people like that for some reason. But I can't say I'm in that pool of people. Maybe if I came from an upper class family I'd like it more. The character just seemed entitled and spoiled combined with being boring. Sex isn't interesting. It's fun and great, but I didn't really get what was so snappy about the dialog or that she likes being degraded. That's just some folks thing, not a huge deal. It's like telling me to watch a show because someone likes a loving relationship, just boring. Who cares what your sexual preferences are? Not me. Do whatever floats your boat. But I guess that isn't as snappy or smart or whatever it is this show is going for.
Fallout (2024)
Either I'm old and bored or If Sucks
I'm old now. This show made me realize I'm just flat out old. I don't get what it is people like. I didn't laugh, I didn't like the cgi gore, I didn't like the characters, I hated them actually, , but I guess the sets and costumes were cool, in a weird seaquest way. But I just felt so lost on everything else. For me it's a mismatch between humor and I guess action? Or horror? I don't know what the show is going for. After the first fight scene with The Ghoul i actually turned it off because it was so so slow. Even in the middle of the fight scene they'd stop and have characters explain things. What's up with that? Why not just have a damn action scene. I eventually started back up to finish it out. But I just can't stand these characters. Is it supposed to be funny? I am pretty sure it is, but what is funny I'm not sure. Vault girl's naivety? Is that the joke? Is that what I'm laughing at? Her being a moron? Or is it the horror and death? Is that the joke? Or is it the actual jokes which were lame? I blame myself. I think I'm just old and this is not meant for me. It's boring but flashy. Slow but frenetic. The action is awkward and has too many jokes or attempts at jokes interstiched into it with weird explanations about the plot stuck in. Actually I'm fine. This show just is just lame. The more I think on it the more I realize it's the show, not me. Save your time and find something coherent or actually funny. If your a huge nerd that plays online games, I bet you'll love her and I bet you'll love all the "jokes".
The 4 stars is mainly for the costumes and some of the sets. The rest is worse than mediocre.
Freud's Last Session (2023)
Hopkins is Good, That's It
I did enjoy watching Anthony Hopkins in the role and he as usual became the part. But it just dragged in with a lot of strange cuts to his daughter and her life, which was very awkward given the conversation happening. I would have preferred an older style of film making where the content of their conversation was the movie. Instead it seemed to be mostly about Freud, his daughter, and their relationship. I only made it about 50 mins in before I had to just stop it because I was so bored with the constant switch to her storyline. I think also having Freud keep having bouts of pain distracted from the dialog and story. Not needed and made CS Lewis' character seem somewhat parasitic to me, using his pain and discomfort to make points.
Not worth the time or effort and a confused script that is as incredibly shallow and barely interesting on the philosophical side and confused in the constant cuts to a character not involved in the dialog.
Civil War (2024)
It's boring, misguided, and confused
This movie wanted to be so much but never gets anywhere. Some shots and situations are so contrived I had to exert energy not to laugh so I didn't spoil the mood for the filmmaker. But, in my mind I was just completely puzzled by many choices made in the writing of the characters and the overall arch of the movie. I guess the best way to describe the movie is it is both misguided in messaging and extremely boring in getting around to its point. The dialog is more of the same awkward talk I saw in Devs, where characters no longer seem like part of a story but contrivances there to explain the story. And without including spoilers, the most iconic shot (or what I'm sure is supposed to be) of the film is incredible silly. Someone else did laugh at that one and I gave them a pass. You can't expect the audience to suspend disbelief to the point of laughter while trying to be so epically serious. There also seems to be a certain message or idea presented about war journalists that may be true of some, but is certainly not true of all. But I don't think Garland didn't acknowledge this using the name of the main character. I'm just not sure he integrated that dichotomy of that identity into the script well.
I am in the minority of actually not liking the sound editing. He's pattern of taking the hardest and realist shots and using bad music or utter silence to somehow alter the mood bothered me. It felt like I could sense the artist's touch too much. The silence at parts became unbearably loud in a way that was not good or interesting and certainly didn't add to the scenes, quite the opposite. Shots of long silence broken by loud bangs of poor sound edits for bullets or explosions (too heavy on the bass like most movies) also got tired after a couple times.
I frankly think it's a good thing he's stepping away for a while to focus on writing. Directing seems like its stretching his writing thin from what it used to be. I don't know, I wish this had been good, but he has plenty of other great work to be proud of and for people to check out.
Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000)
Great Early Seasons
I loved this show when it came out in high school. The show is just incredibly funny and had all this novel humor for the time. It was Seinfeld turned up to 11.
But then time passed, and the show became a Simpsons. The plots and situations just got so contrived and dumb the punch line felt boring. The show does a great job of taking several events and having them intersect in some spectacularly funny way for a huge laugh at the end. But under the weight of always producing that it just fell victim to itself. Again, it's very similar to the simpsons in that passed about season 8 or 9 it just falls off hard.
It did not help that most Americans slowly devolved into a bunch of Larry Davids over the last decade, which is why I think my 72 yo step mom now loves the show. It was great in its time but now I think it is outright stupid and I sneer at anyone who tried to talk to me about it like some magnificent jerk.
Sicario (2015)
Looks Incredible But Weak Script
The movie is gorgeous. It's a Roger Deakins so that's not too surprising. A fantastic score and the cast is almost entirely incredible in their roles. Where it all kinda falls apart is the script and Emily Blunt. Her character didn't make a lot of sense and I think the idea was she was the moral center? Except she isn't. And worse her character has lots of weird lines that I don't think a veteran agent like her would say or ask. She just kinda broods the whole movie and that is such a common pattern I can't stand it anymore, just looking mad or uncertain but never doing an anything about it. It was also strange that the character never seemed integrated in the humor or missions. That was entirely implausible to me. She never laughs, never makes any friends, and so it seemed contrived to set her apart. But that makes her decision in the end even more nonsensical. She has nothing invested in these people or their mission. Quite the opposite. Get she makes a certain choice that goes against all this. It was just kinda baffling to me, but I'm a combat vet and am all too familiar with gallows humor and how these units bond. Her character was like an alien observing everyone else, not an agent who saw most her team killed in the first 10 minutes of the film.
It's good but the script and that character in particular could have been much improved and fleshed out. Brooding moralists aren't interesting characters.
3 Body Problem (2024)
Could have been so good
There is so much in this story that could have been so very cool and interesting and so fresh to watch. But it completely falls flat in dialogue and attempting to push characters that are comically too cool for school while being pretty, oh and they are cosmologists and physicists and whatever else at the same time. It's just silly. I would laugh and finally found myself just skipping almost any scene with the Auggie character by the end, because it didn't matter to the plot usually and the actress just was not right for this role and couldn't hold up to it. Terrible casting and writing for her character overall.
Eventually I realized you can largely just play the scenes with the Chinese actors and get the actual plot and move the story along and anything else is fluff. Pure fluff that involves people saying "what's going on?" Seven times or "I didn't ask for this!". I mean the level of selfishness even after these people know an entire alien population is coming to take over the world was truly western. It made me cringe for my culture. Just people whining or talking about nonsense until we cut back to the Chinese characters and finally things move along. I was pulling my friggin hair out by the right episode. Not all westerners are like this and especially not scientists. Who wrote this?
Anyway, I think the book is very good and far more interesting that this confused and poorly written mess. Enough with the brooding and petulance at a big unfair world, could I please have characters that act like adults? People who step up when called on and not ones that recede to a childlike state of petulance while gasping "what's going on!".
3 Body Problem: Countdown (2024)
Pass if you're math or physics
Disappointed overall. Reminded me a lot of Dark but with an attempt to intermingle God and games and aliens and a whole cast that seems nothing like the people in the actual fields of study. Just hard to watch and predictable. And the dialogue is awful. Just awful.
Good production value. Though that kind of hurt it because it's too clean looking and some of the actresses had so much work done it was incredibly hard to look at them and not feel like they had face smoothing tech applied.
It also suffers from this contemporary writing style of shows that I hate where no scene gives a coherent whole and the episode ends with a question thereby ensuring you binge to find out the answer, because the last thing the writers want anymore is for you to actually think about what you saw. Every episode does not need to be a dramatic cliffhanger. I am over that GoT crap and will be incredibly happy when it finally dies. You know what show didn't do that and is timeless, The Sopranos. Just make a well written show with things for me to ponder, don't feed me tidbits the whole episode and end on a dramatic note and expect that to hook me because I'm an entertainment addict or something.
Be smarter and stop using this tired and boring pattern for scripts.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
Not the books, but ok-ish
This is not Dune the book. And so I find myself a bit torn. I think as a standalone movie, it's a fun theater experience and I'd absolutely recommend people go see it in a theater if you can. Making something like riding a sandworm look cool is not easy and they do it. I had a huge smile across my face during that scene. Lots of fun. The sets are beautiful, same for the costumes. The cinematography looks great and the FX are some of the best to date.
First issue with the film is that if you don't watch it in a theater, it's rather boring and most the defects begin to stand out. Bad acting all around, and a complete hollowing of characters to the point of caricatures and nonsense. What made the book so good was people having good reasons for doing what they did, on all sides. That is not a nuance you will find in this version.
If you consider this movie wrt the book it adapted, it's awful. It's not Dune. There are significant thematic changes that were made and some of the best characters are not even in the movie (how could you not write in Alia!?) or severely diminished (Gurney is not integral to the plot, he's just there).
It doesn't address any motivations about why things happened and so most of the second and third parts of book 1 are just absent in the material. Very strange choice. No explanation about why the emperor betrayed the atreides, nothing about the Harkonnen soldiers and how they are made, nothing about Gurney and why having him train fremen is such a threat, Alia is a fetus and absent which was the biggest sin of the film, and why does Paul still have his vision at the end?
And I don't think this is a case of there was too much so they had to make choices. Denis added stories and events that flat out aren't in the book. He chose to make it the way he did and map the issues in the book to current issues in America and the world which is typical of our times but not at all what made the book so great. And for that, it's kind of a let down. More than that, it's bad on a second rewatch at the house. Flat out bad. Boring and flat characters with a silly and rushed plot bound to a beautiful score and character cinematography.
Ted Lasso (2020)
I don't get it
I finished the first season. Reminded me of like modern family or something. Kinda bland and with lots of little jokes meant to make you chuckle but nothing really funny. I expected more because it had such high ratings and I'd heard it was not what you'd expect. I would disagree and say it's exactly what I expected. Maybe that's why I never found myself laughing. I'm also pretty doubtful of the type of person the comedy sells. Some dude from Kansas probably won't be nearly as chill with all these situations so I just found the whole thing to feel like a fairy tale with no magic. I will say everyone is good in their roles though! Solid acting just boring writing.
I think what happened is this show came out during the pandemic, and people just liked the friendly vibe and blew the show wayyyyy out of proportion. It's awesome to sort the reviews by date and see what happens.
True Detective: Night Country: Part 6 (2024)
Pointless and lazy script
Now effort and confused script. At the last minute they decided to pull back from the super natural and instead explain everything. Except they didn't bother to wrap up why one of the scientists had a vision of her before the cleaners showed up. That's just left unresolved. Also, how in the hell do like 12 people round up a bunch of others and not leave ANY but of evidence behind?
The questions are pointless because it's a mess of a script. I don't blame Issa Lopez either. I think they tried to mash her script into TD and this is what we got. A confused waste of everyone's time. The performances are all fine I guess. My main gripe is the the script and overall direction of this. Well and the cinematography was a let down. Way too much CGI in scenes that don't need it. Which reminds me, CGI snow is very very crude looking. Please stop using it.
Phantom Thread (2017)
It's just boring and the payoff is silly
It looks pretty. It sounds pretty. But it's dreadfully boring. I've had to do 3 viewings to make it through this because I kept falling asleep. I love just about everyone PTA has done, except Magnolia and this movie. Both are meandering narratives that seem to promise a big payoff, but which both collapse under too much pretension. Everyone gives great performances, and the film does look beautiful. It's the script that is just too boring for me to enjoy, and when I finally made it through to the end, I was not just disappointed in the end but repulsed by it. Maybe that was the goal though. Either way, it's a pretentious movie with very little to offer in the way of entertainment or at the other end of the spectrum, thoughtful dialogue and interesting topics derived from the script.
The Great Gatsby (2013)
It's just cgi
Sets and cinematography and costumes and all that go out the window when a computer animates and renders it all. Such is this movie. It's just a big noisy video game cut-scene filled with Toby McGuire's doofy smile and non-stop eye high contrast shots that are about 10% practical effect and 90% bits on a computer that no one let any effort into and so we get very little art out.
Now take that mess and layer on top a soundtrack that has nothing to do with the period and you've truly created a turd sandwich. But, all of that could be forgiven. I could look passed it all if the script at least was true in the themes to the book, and yet it fails. There's nothing. About the mess tied back to Tom and Daisy. If anything Daisy is presented in an entirely incorrect light. She's not a good person just like Tom is not a good person. Because they break things up for fun and hide behind their wealth. It's astounding this large theme and one of the last points of the book to tie what Nick has witness together with how everyone behaved. It's just not there.
Unforgivable to butcher a classic and also butcher the actual theme of that art.
True Detective: Night Country: Part 4 (2024)
Goes Nowhere
Another week and the plot just doesn't move. It is obvious that this was another show which was merged with the True Detective property in order to maximize brand exposure. There's lots of vague references to another world, some very poorly placed spook shots that don't succeed, and even some physical comedy to try and patch over some useless dialogue in a scene that didn't seem to matter in the end overall. It's a mess of a show. Because it was another show that was forced into the True Detective brand.
There's none of the weirdness and mysticism that Twin Peaks had, and there's none of that gritty feel from True Detective. It's just a mess. It's a script written about supernatural events that was then shoe-horned into the True Detective universe by inserting vague references in the dialogue and the recycling of symbols from season 1, because a marketing executive didn't want to do their job and preferred to piggy back off something that had already kinda worked before and people were familiar with.
Lazy writing overall that just meanders, like my review. My partner and I are debating even finishing the season at this point. Maybe somehow they will tie this all up? Somehow.
Masters of the Air (2024)
It just doesn't look right
I guess I'm in the minority that this doesn't look good. The shots of flight are odd looking to me. Maybe it's because I've played too many games but the rendering is not good, or it just looks so fake to me that it removes me from the movie. I watched some restored footage of wwII with some of it specifically being bomber footage. It felt unpleasant and gave me vertigo. Nothing like that with this series. It's all designed to feel "cool" and loon sleek and it think that's why it feels off. You should feel anxious in the sky with these guys not be amazed by the views and wowed by the lens flare.
American Nightmare (2024)
It's Incredible and Infuriating
I cannot say enough for how good this documentary is. It's paced very well, even a bit too fast because I have so many questions after watching this.
How is there not an investigation into the Vallejo PD and FBI agents assigned to this? Something is way off with these people's brains and they have no business trying to solve crimes. Though detective mustard (his real name) sure is intent on inventing them and pinning them on victims.
It's even more scary given that at every turn these two people are telling the truth despite an inept FBI and local PD, and they claim there are still 2 other people out there!!! What the ****!!! What is going on in Vallejo. Why are they so desperate to not look into this? It's insane. It doesn't make sense. It's a disgrace.
I will say Jessica Jones did the music and did a fantastic job.
Be advised, the second episode is very rough viewing. But, her story should be told and the way she was treated should be known. I'm a man, I admit I was pretty borderline sick at parts of it, but I'm just sitting here watching. She lived that. No one should be treated that way and I really hope this documentary does something to fix some of what happened because I wanted to claw my brain out listening to some of these detectives and how they treated her.
True Detective: Night Country: Part 2 (2024)
When are they going to get to the detective story!
This season is just awful. I can see the writing on the wall. Whoever wrote this either had zero interest in writing a detective story or just had no supervision. There's just so much baggage with each episode. At least last night there was about 10 minutes of actual relevant story and detective work. But, the rest was more the same of the first episode. Just a bunch of scenes of dysfunctional people and departments. The whole story of the cop and his mail order bride and the deal with his son, it's just too stupid and boring. Why have this in there? Same goes for the subplot with Jodie foster'"daughter" in the show. That story feels like absolutely pandas material too and annoys me.
It's bad and I don't expect it to get better. Hopefully my wife loses interest so we can stop watching because i am starting to actual hate the show. It's such a slog.
True Detective: Night Country: Part 1 (2024)
Rough Start
Some of the first shots for the whole show were done with CGI in a winter landscape. Immediately it took me out of the episode because I laughed at some of the animation for the caribou. The remainder of the episode was mostly about a dysfunctional police station and not much detective work or build up. There's some cringey dialog but that comes with the True Detective territory, but I was getting season 2 vibes and it didn't improve as the episode went on. Most the characters seem like barely functioning adults which makes it harder to follow along because I'm too busy trying to understand why the writer would even make the character so foolish. An example, there's a human tongue found at a highly suspicious crime scene and an officer seems unworried by it.
I have a bad feeling it's going to get far too wrapped up in these characters and not tell a story. The first episode takes an eternity to move the plot. The drunk tank scene is an example of just poor editing and writing. Worthless scene. Annoying. And far too long.
I'll keep it up, maybe they will speed things up it not dump so much drama on us going forward, but I think that's just the vibe of the season. Buckets of personal drama for the characters and a whole lot less detective action.
Napoleon (2023)
A character named Napoleon but not Napoleon
The title says it all. You can do a dramatization of an historical figure if you'd like. But to completely remove all attributes about that figure while leaving the bare essentials to say "well, it's human" is just lazy. I read an interview with Ridley before the movie and knew things were bad. He apparently read one book "before getting tired and having his researcher look into things". Which is fine, but don't expect people to not call you on being over the hill and burned out when you take an epic written by another great film maker, bad mouth it, then strip it down anyway and use the structure and pop this out. Napoleon and Kubrick must be rolling in their grave. Also Ridley is a knighted Englishman so how he would not have a biased and negative view of this figure is something I've wondered as well. Clearly he hated Napoleon otherwise we wouldn't be sunbhexted to some of these utterly useless and boring scenes of Napoleon basically just breathing (he's usually fumbling or being awkward because Ridley seems to have a pathology to depict him this way).
Also in the interview I read in the NYT, Phoenix came to him about 10 days before shooting and admitted he could not play this character as written. And is shows. Because the character is not real. It's a fantasy dreamed up by someone that doesn't like Napoleon. He's a tyrant but incompetent. He's a brilliant tactician and general but does insane things in battle that make no sense. He has massive amount of support and love from the people and troops yet he has no charisma and is almost autistic. No wonder Phoenix could not figure the character out, he never could have.
It's a bad movie that seems entirely derivative of the current times in which we live in which we are not supposed to believe in a single individual being capable of changing the course of history. Good or bad, this does happen. And you can't just stand there and breath, you have to act and be the person the time calls for. Napoleon did that. Ridley doesn't want to acknowledge it.
Dune (2021)
If you read the book, not so good
The film has some very present shots. I enjoy that and don't want to pretend I didn't enjoy the movie.
But the amount of CGI just takes me out of the movie when I see it. I think this is more to do with viewing it on an OLED tv where CGI literally looks like a cartoon because of the detail.
Now my main gripe. The Barron in this movie is not at all the baron from the book. This baron is just a stock evil character. Very boring and predictable. The baron in the book is a far more complex and interesting character. One who is riddled with doubt, anxiety, and thus cruel to balance these feelings out and overcome his own doubts. Part of why the books are so good is this perspective we get into his and others minds to see these things and it makes them deeply interesting characters.
The movie simply does not have this and made no attempt. It's mostly visual pleasure, and even then limited between CGI shots.
Also, the worms aren't big enough in comparison to how large they are in the book (the size of a space frigate or larger).
Oppenheimer (2023)
Typically bad science movie
I've spent a lot of time reading about the history of science from this period and this movie was a huge let down. It's a romance wrapped in a nerd plot. Very little attention is given to the vast array of characters and thinkers that went into this effort and instead we are presented the myth of Oppenheimer as an on steroid. I've read Stan Ulam's book, Godels personal writings and many other scientists from this period. None of them give a picture even remotely close to what is drawn here. Oppenheimer was not that big a deal. I'm sorry but he just wasn't thought of as all that much by most these people. He came from an exceptionally wealthy family, and though he was a very intelligent child, many thinkers seem to have the opinion his family connections were more important than his mind. Feynman has some funny stories of Oppenheimer being not only wrong but cruel and willfully ignorant and almost sabotaging a whole conference due to his fixation on a bad proof.
Anyway, it's just a romance story. There's nothing here beyond feeling intense from big sounds bad sweeping images. But, your mind will take nothing from this ultimately except mythology.
Fuk sing go jiu (1985)
The Marx Brothers of Kung-fu
The title tried to say it all. It is certainly a comedy as much as it is action movie. The quick lines and play with words feels very much like you are watching Chico and Groucho split across 5 characters. Whether it's vying for women, ordering at a restaurant, or trying to work together as con-artists the whole interaction is comedic gold. I'd even say the humor goes to the point of hilarity as it at times enters into an almost PG-13-X realm.
The action scenes with Sami Hung and he's fight sequences are always a lot of fun to watch. Such a unique style and profile along with such incredible agility and speed is mesmerizing to watch. It's just bizarre to see a man built like that move that way. Amazing.
Chan is incredible and has a very tight and fast paced final battle that alone is worthy of the whole filme.
This is just super fun and the entire cast nails their parts. I will be watching this regularly.
Fargo: The Tragedy of the Commons (2023)
Derivative of the Movie but Boring
Made it through the second episode before I bailed. It's just too predictable and the actors don't do a very good job, but I'm from that area and might be a bit sensitive to it.
Jon hamm was good in the bit I saw. But, everyone else was wooden and almost laughable stereotypes. The last scene that made me give up had to do with supposedly being suspenseful but the whole time the character they've written is so annoying and despicable that you the viewer have no suspense. You know they won't kill this person when it seems the point of the show is to lean into some rather sad current stereotypes.
Also, way too much lens flair and wash out from the sun in shots.
Catherine the Great (2019)
It's a Soap Opera
Went into this excited to see some of this incredible history told. Maybe they'd even have some fun and even show her pursuit of Euler as a crown jewel to the empires movement into the enlightenment.
This is not that story. The script is just bad. Largely revolves around sex and who is sleeping with who and that's about it. I was stunned by the end of the 2nd episode how bad this was. Costumes look great. The casting was fine (strangely Miren was the worst casting choice of them all just because she's far too old for this role), but this script is unbearable.
This could have been so much better and I'm really disappointed in it overall.
I'm Still Here (2010)
So Good People Still Believe It
I can't recommend this movie enough. I remember when it came out, sitting and watching this and hoping from hysterical laughter to incredibly sad, confused, and a whole range of other emotions. The whole thing is put on with what is maybe one of the best, sustained performances of all time. It was so good that I'd say half the people to this day still think this was a real stunt. But, for me it was the final scene when I originally watched it that really clues you in on this being scripted. I remember it made me realize how easy it was to get people to believe in "reality" tv or movies. Despite being clearly scripted, people can't shake that idea this is "real" (but it said it was!) and are so wrapped up on having a spectacle to laugh at and feel better about themselves that they stop paying attention and miss all the hints that are obvious that this is all scripted. You can see the same with any "reality" show, and I think that's likely what they were going for with the film.
Anyway, it rules and I'd list it on my top 20 of all time (which I admit is dumb but I'm dumb so it's fine).