Change Your Image
jon-1679
Reviews
Stay Close (2021)
I need sympathy for watching it....
So the previous Harlan Coban series I watched was The Stranger, which was average but had potential so I decided to exercise my apparently poor judgement and watch Stay Close! I had to apologize to myself for wasting my own time.
How bad is this? Hard to put into words but let's look at just three ridiculous situations....
1) The main character flees a murder scene and runs away to start a new life where no-one will ever find her.....in the same small seaside town.
2) A lawyer is chased by two assassins and fears for his life yet fails to mention it when the police visit him an hour later.....
3) Ray the professional photographer prints off images from his digital camera in a dark room.......
Don't even get me started on the woke aspect!!
Expedition Bigfoot (2019)
So bad, it's actually good.
Thousands of sightings of Bigfoot every year, but no-one ever seems to have their camera with them..... It's hard to take this TV show seriously, so take my advice and don't. Just watch this for a weekly giggle. It's like watching a car crash in slow motion. Expedition leader Brice, who spends all his time at base camp drinking lattes, sends in two clumsy oafs and a respected scientist to 'find' a Bigfoot. For the two oafs, every broken branch is viewed as irrefutable proof, whilst the scientist spends all her time looking through infra red binoculars desperately hunting for her lost reputation. But it's so watchable...... Has me laughing each week....... Unsurprisingly they don't find a Bigfoot.....
The Legend of Tarzan (2016)
It would have worked well as a cartoon...
Imagine Lion King, Frozen or Shrek with live actors working against blue screen and you've basically got The Legend of Tarzan. You can get away with cliché dialogue, two dimensional characters and unrealistic stunts in a cartoon, because...... well, because it's a cartoon and the audience knows it's not real from the start. An animated film gives the director a certain amount of creative license so that he/she may stretch the boundaries of what is physically possible without us all shouting 'Hey that's ridiculous'. However, try to recreate that stuff with real actors and it just falls flat. It's simply not believable and we don't feel empathy for the characters. This film falls between the two genres and so has to go down as a four at most.
Vegas Rat Rods (2014)
The car's no longer the star...
Started out as a really interesting show about the artistic automotive design philosophy at Steve Darnell's Welderup yard down in Las Vegas. However, as is always the case with these type of shows you need some 'fluffing' to give it a wider appeal or it just ends up as a boring documentary about welders. Therefore, Series 1 was 70% focused on the actual builds with the remaining 30% of airtime dedicated to the personalities at Welderup, which was a reasonable mix in my view. Sadly, Series 2 has flipped that ratio around, so we now have the show based around the personalities and the actual build is lost. This is a classic mistake that we've seen so many times and will be the show's downfall in the long run. People started watching it because it was real-life and inspiring. Now it's just a soap opera. Vegas Rat Rods should be about the cars. Once a production team lose sight of a show's core values they're in trouble. Pity... *** UPDATED 26th May 2017 *** OK, so it looks as though someone down at the production team agreed with the above comments. With Series 3 they've put the actual vehicle build back into the spotlight as it should be. Much improved and a vast improvement.
Once (2007)
Maybe I am missing something here?
I was really looking forward to this film. I mean, with such good reviews and such a high score out of ten then how could it be anything but good? How wrong I was. This film is rubbish, and I mean rubbish. Glen Hansard is playing the lead in this film, the same guy who wrote nearly all the songs played, and it is clearly some sort of ego trip or mad publicity stunt to try and get people to buy his music.
Let's face it, it is just the same 12 songs one after the other, often repeated, wrapped around a pretty lame story about boy meets girl.
This is not a musical as the songs do not fit together to form part of the story. So, when they start singing together it is nice, but do we really need to go through the entire song from start to finish? When they go into the recording studio, we know that they are going to record tracks, but they make us listen to them in their entirety. And so it goes on. Is this necessary? Of course not. They are just trying to promote this guy's music and make money by selling the soundtrack in my opinion.
Where do all these high scores come from? 8.2 out of 10!! Complete Joke.
Nice marketing trick, decent music, really bad film.
The Pianist (2002)
Mixed emotions...
I have to say that I was left with very mixed emotions after watching this film. On the one hand, we have a supremely talented pianist, forced to endure what the vast majority of us will never have the misfortune to experience, surviving all the horrors of the Nazi regime; and on the other hand we have a man who is prepared to let his family go off to die while he runs away, leave his fellow Jews to fight with the Germans (while he runs away again) and allows everyone else to risk their lives in order to help him.
This man did nothing heroic to help himself, and certainly nothing heroic to help anyone else. His indifference to everyone apart from himself was almost unbearable. The only tears we ever saw were for himself towards the very end. No tears for his family, his friends, his people. The only emotion he ever showed was for Dorota, and let's not forget that her character was actually made up for this film, she was never in the book of his life. When you have to invent characters to try and help an audience to sympathise with someone then it speaks volumes.
Now, war does terrible things to people, so who am I to judge this man, but surely there are better stories from better people to tell than this one. Does this story justify a film being made, just because he was a good piano player? Is this a man that we can all look up to? I just don't get it.
I was left feeling that this man was something of a coward who only cared for himself. What exactly were they were trying to say with this film?
La vita è bella (1997)
As close to perfect as any film can come!
Whilst I can understand why some people may feel offended by the way the holocaust is portrayed in this film, I feel that they miss the point completely. This is no Schindler's List, it is a story about one man's unending ability to maintain an uplifting and positive outlook on life no matter what. Guido does everything in his power to shield his son from the true horror of what is happening around them, so therefore we (the audience) do not see the full horrors of the Nazi camp either. We see life through Guido's eyes. We see life through his son's eyes. Life is Beautiful no matter what - and that is the point. This is not a factual representation of the atrocities of war, it is a film about hope, about love, about one man's dedication to his family above all else. The fact that it uses the holocaust as a backdrop is not really important, although I can understand why some people see it differently. If you have children, you will understand it straight away. It is without doubt one of the best films I have ever seen.