wolfgangvonposakilla Reviews

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Avatar without the avatars.

[7/10 · 23 April 2024]

I'm not going to spend much time on the obvious. The film is a monumental achievement in CGI technology and the stunning, vibrant, almost plausible alien world is incredibly inviting. More than worth the watch for those 2 aspects alone.

However the film is a sequel. Which usually spells 2 things: 1) The novelty value is gone and the film has to scramble to compensate for said loss - Something Avatar :TWoW doesn't fully achieve - and 2) Either a film remains a standalone production or it immediately gets turned into a franchise with a whole bunch of sequels. They rarely stop at number 2. Which means only the first film has a good satisfying ending. All subsequent iterations end on setups for yet another sequel. Which is the case here too.

As far as action the action goes it's a lot less 'impact full' and 'grand' then in the first film. Instead of large scale combat we get Jake sully and co duking it out with the crew of a commercial whaling ship.

Furher major and minor gripes with the film: The whole middle hour is highly predictable teen drama, there's way too much focus on the child characters in general, they talk like 21st century human hypebeasts, Sigourney Weaver - a 75 year old woman - voices a teen and it pulled me out of the film every single time she spoke and the character of spider made me cringe a lot.

Also the language consistency is a mess. In the first film some of the Na'vi had learned to speak broken English and conversed with Jake and others in such manner. In the Sequel the film makes a point of showing us Jake now speaks fluent Na'vi and thus obviously converses with his tribe in their own language instead of sticking to English. So whenever there's no human characters around English is supposed to represent Na'vi. Yet Neytiri and another Na'vi still speak with a heavy accent whereas Jake speaks fluently making it appear as if he's the native speaker and everybody else is adapting.

Now on to my titular main issue with the film. After finishing up I realized something nobody else seemed to have noticed. The film kind of moved beyond it's own core concept: namely that of the avatars. The first film was about humans piloting a genetically engineered human/Na'vi hybrid. In the second film, save for a few brief scenes involving the left behind scientist crew from the first film (i.e. Norm and co), there are no more true avatars. All the human/Na'vi hybrids are now full hybrids that have their human mind melded with the avatar body, same as how Jake ended up.

And before you say who cares? This writer's decision actually influences the story in a highly noticeable way. There's no real central and critical human characters around anymore (save for spider). In the first film around half the screen time was dedicated to the human story lines and we had some better and lesser known actors to elevate the film: Sigourney Weaver, Michelle rodriguez, Stephen Lang and obviously Sam worthington himself. They brought the human element to the film, recognizable characters to associate with and share their human emotions.

In this film it's about 90% blue people with some human extras thrown in as canon fodder. It turns the second film a little too much into a CGI-fest for me and also raises some weird notions about it's message. Is the film trying to make me hate my own species? Am I supposed to root when blue space aliens kill a lot of people? With there being less nuance and subtlety then the first film (which was about as subtle as a megaphone and pamphlet wielding militant) you'd almost start to think James Cameron really really hates people.

So an unbalanced film with lots of diminishing returns. It's about a 6 in general entertainment value but it gets a bonus for it's technical achievements. 7/10.

Tenet (2020)

Nolan does it again!

[5/10 · 25 February 2024]

Which to a lot of people means he created another masterpiece. To me it just means he created another over-hyped convoluted and frankly quite boring mess of a film.

This is the sort of film people will claim: "You need to view it at least 3 times to fully understand it!" and if you're critical of the film you'll likely be countered by a quick "Guess you just don't get it, this is a film for smart people".

The latter claim comes from people who can't actually argue the supposed "genius" of the fiction they worship and are just being reductive to avoid being exposed.

And as for the former, even though I'm of plain average intelligence, I've noticed that whenever people claim you need to watch a film 2-3 times just to understand it ... I usually get it in one. Makes me wonder if I'm more clever than I give myself credit for or those people are just kind of dumb and easily impressed.

Either way having to watch a film 3 times does NOT make it a good film. Films aren't supposed to be puzzles. And it would be an absolute chore to watch this film 3 times in a row.

Which brings me back to my opening claim. This is a very typical Nolan production. There's obnoxious music running perpetually throughout the film. The kind of generic techno-thriller suspense music that south park rightfully made fun off that one episode. Also present is Nolan's very shaky camera work, to give everything a more intense feeling. Which I don't like but same as the music here it permeates throughout the entire film. Every scene is so hastily edited and the camera almost never just rests it almost felt like the film was sped up somehow. Yet the movie definitely didn't feel short. On the contrary. The combination of it's 150 minutes run time with the frantic cinematography made it a very tiring experience to sit through. The acting is quite poor on the protagonist's behalf and other side characters. It's really only Elizabeth Debicki who puts in a solid effort. Most of the action was never truly impressive either. And somebody needs to tell Nolan modern combat does not consist of 2 opposing blobs of soldiers running at each other through open terrain like some medieval skirmish.

Now the movie has some good points too. Some very nice vistas, the rewind gimmick was visually interesting and the concept itself novel to time travel fiction as far as I know. Some action sequences did actually impress.

I'm not a Nolan hater. I liked Memento, the dark knight and the Prestige. But since interstellar he's been going downhill (Have yet to see Oppenheimer at time of writing). Most of his recent films are mediocre action films masquerading as science fiction. The science fiction is of the nonsense kind covered up with some mumbo jumbo science-babble to make you go: ".......sure whatever, let's just roll with it". Sci-fi gimmicks to setup an action film with a twist.

Purely rating on entertainment value I'd rate this one pretty low, 3-4/10. I'll bump it up to a 5 on accord of the good points mention above.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

???

[3/10 · 3 February 2024]

So here's my guess:

The British Film Institute's has a recurring poll (sight and sound) returning every decade. About a 1000 critics and directors name their 'Best film of all time'. Naturally this devolves into a 'snob-off': a competition between cinema snobs, arty-farty hipsters and elitist pseudo-intellectuals in who can name with the most obscure pretentious work of cinema.

Enter 'The man with a movie camera' (TMWaMC). A film you've never heard about whether you're into film in general, deeper into cinema history or even quite into underground productions. This one is for the film students only.

But then, the aforementioned partakers of the poll ranked it respectively 8th and 9th 'Best film of all time' in the 2012 and 2022 polls. So now, all of a sudden every wannabe film-critic,-lover or -expert is now obligated to watch the film and follow suit with the dogma: praise it to high heaven.

So now TMWaMC is sitting here at IMdb with an 8.3 rating and 28K votes. If documentaries were allowed in the top 250 it would rank somewhere in the middle. Which boggles the mind.

So what exactly are we talking about here? TMWaMC is neither film nor documentary in the common sense. The film claims in an opening inter-title it has no script or actors but obviously multiple scenes throughout were clearly staged. This isn't a naturalistic 'fly on the wall' type of people-watching documentary. Frankly it isn't much of a documentary at all: there's no analysis, no inquiry, no ascertainment or conclusion and no insightful information being shared with the audience. It's a documentary in name only: it documents ... things, as in it's a random compilation of (heavily propagandized) footage of a Russian city under the soviet regime.

"It's a revolutionary exercise in cinematography, a groundbreaking exploration of the medium!" - say the critics. Boy if you take their word for it you'd believe director Dziga vertov invented cinema itself.

Straight from Wikipedia: "Man with a Movie Camera is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov INVENTED, EMPLOYED or DEVELOPED, such as multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals"

Wow! What a guy! He like literally invented every single camera technique ever! Weird how I never heard about him though ...

If you click on every one of those aforementioned techniques and do some very basic research you'll quickly find that Vertov didn't invent most of them at all. Fast motion (Time-lapse) is credited to Eadweard Muybridge in photography (1872) and to Georges Méliès in feature film (1897). Early Match cuts were done by Buster Keaton in film by 1924. Jump cuts credited again to Georges Méliès (1908). Splitscreen to Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley (1913). Close-ups to George Albert Smith (1898). Stop motion origins go back to 1849.

So what did Vertov invent? Well, the only thing that he MIGHT take credit for (could find explicit confirmation) is the dutch angle. The lamest most pointless of all camera techniques. You hold the camera crooked. How very 'gansta'. So every technique that Vertov "invented" was done years or even decades before as experiments, in shorts and in full length features intended for the general audience. So to refer back to the wikipedia quote: He didn't invent them nor contributed to any critical development. He really just employed them.

Knowing all this we are left with a product that has zero entertainment value as a conventional film, zero educational value as a documentary and zero legacy as technical novelty or innovation. This is basically nothing more than a upstart director's demo reel to impress a producer of his talents by using random footage to show off already existing camera techniques. There's nothing else in the film, not even music (in the original version) and what is there - the film techniques - is by today's standards utterly unimpressive and more importantly by 1920 standards really only moderately impressive

I don't rate documentaries on IMdb - there's too many variables involved - but if I did I wouldn't even know what to rate this. I wasn't bored but then I also watched it on 2x speed with one eye during dinner. The best thing I can say about this is that it was over fast.

Alphaville (1965)

Cinemasnobs better stock up on some surplus polish ...

[1/10 · 26 November 2023]

... you're gonna need it to make this t.u.r.d. Shine.

Had I known this was made by one of the leading french experimental directors I wouldn't have touched it with a light-year long pole. (see, unlike Godard I know that a light-year is a measurement of distance not time, nice one Mr. Director, and that in a "sci-fi" film). But I unfortunately obligated myself to watch this as part of going through a list of sci-fi classics, where it doesn't belong at all for 3 reasons.

First off: Sci-fi doesn't necessarily require futuristic technology and vistas. It does however when your film is supposedly set in the distant future on a distant planet. Alphaville was filmed in 1960s Paris and that is exactly as it appears in the film. No efforts were made whatsoever.

Second: More critical to sci-fi is the exploration of plausible (hard sci-fi) or less plausible (soft sci-fi) at the very least a cool solid scientific idea (science-fantasy), a technological or societal advance and it's effects on humanity. This isn't really present in Alphaville either, unless you count the linguistic and existential psycho-babble as a solid sci-fi concept. Nor are the premise or the ensuing events even remotely plausible.

And third: A good sci-fi film makes you wonder about the future. By introducing novel film technology and summoning things on screen never seen before a sci-fi film can become a futuristic creation in and of itself. A film that inspires new ideas and technology. Alphaville however was heavily outdated at release. By the late 50s cinema finally started to accept full technicolor as the norm (even though it existed since the late 30s). The noir genre and the archetypal 50s sci-fi B-film were past their peak. The 60s brought back the grand visual spectacle films from the silent era, but now in full technicolor and with audio dialogue (think Spartacus, Ben Hur, The time machine, The guns of navarone ...). Done were the days of drap, gray and slow dialogue films i.e. The archetypal 'talkie' film. Or so it was at least in Hollywood. Deliberately going back to tired and trite old genres, mixing them and calling it a neo-noir retro sci-fi film is lazy and unimaginative. And that from a supposed experimental avant-garde director. There is nothing fresh, new or interesting about this film start to finish.

In conclusion: the only science fiction in Alphaville exist in the form of pure pretense. The film tells you it's science fiction but does nothing to show it or prove it.

So okay, the film isn't sci-fi, so let's move on beyond that notion and ask the only 2 important questions that really matter with any film ...

... is it any good?

Multiple reviewers call this a spoof, a spoof of a whole bunch of things. The only thing I see this being a spoof of is amateurism, a spoof of delusional art-house student films. Minus the spoof part: this 'is' an art-house student film for all intents and purposes. Complete with random flashing images, voice-over monologues, pedestrian filler scenes and editing from hell.

... is it any fun?

Well it's about as fun as listening for 100 minutes to a dying lung cancer patient using a voice box to read poetry alternating every 2 words with some heavy breathing. That's not even a joke that is literally half the movie.

So with all that said I think we're beyond the need to analyze or discuss the films feeble attempts at anything resembling a plot, acting or dialogue. So let me wrap this up by saying this: I've sat through my fair share of rough and difficult movies, a lot of them ultimately offering something in return, however minor, for my invested efforts of endurance. Alphaville isn't one of them. It will take 100 minutes of your time and offer nothing but pretentious gobbledygook in return.

If you're like me and looking to go through all the classic science-fiction films, skip it! Don't feel compelled to ad this one to your list just because it has the sci-fi tag stamped on it and comes with an inflated rating courtesy of the "you just don't get it"-crowd.

Just another shining t.u.r.d. Considered a genius masterpiece by the coprophilic cinema snobs.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Number 4

[1/10 · 8 November 2023]

This is number 4. The fourth film ever I've given a 1 star here on IMBb out of about a thousand rated. The previous one was Midsommar and if you've seen both you'll probably understand why.

Like Midsommar this is a non-story about non-human characters exercising non-human behaviour.

The result: sheer boredom. Another one of those films where you get bored, then you grow numb as it drags on and then, the simmering frustration reaches it's boiling point as you start questioning who the hell made this and why and you just get angry. Another one of those movies deliberately designed to waste your time and p!ss you off. When it's over you just feel insulted.

Many have praised the deliberate awkward and robotic conversations,the weirdness, the creepy music and atmosphere, designed to make you feel anxious and unnerved all the way through.

And there lies the problem. The weirdness is pedestrian. Often laughable. The film isn't actually creepy either. The only thing creepy about it is the manipulative music perpetually forced throughout the film. Viewers who thought this was tense and creepy probably think Tim Burton films are scary.

The movie pretty much sabotages itself. When the characters and the plot of a movie don't feel real then it's audience tends to disengage and stops caring about any of it. Therefore: no real emotional impact.

At the end of the day this is another exercise in style over substance. An ode to pretentious nonsense. Food for the "you just don't get it" - crowd.

No no, we get it, cause it's not as intelligent as you think it is, we just think it's stupid.

Midsommar (2019)

Braindead schlep for braindead people.

[1/10 · 7 October 2023]

Midsommar gets the honor - after rating about a 1000 movies here on IMDb - of being my 3rd 1/10 ever. It gets to join the illustrious company of 'Spring Breakers' (another exercise in pretentiousness and futility), and 'Evil toons'(a 90s cardboard exploitation film)

-The cinematography has it's moments.

-Florence Pugh acts adequately.

-The first 20 minutes felt promising.

And that's where the praise stops.

This film is meticulously handcrafted with surgical precision to do it's utmost best to insult the intelligence of the viewer. It's one of those films where first you get bored, then you grow numb as it drags on and then, the simmering frustration reaches it's boiling point, something snaps inside and you find yourself cursing up a storm at you're screen.

"Why am I watching this? Who made this? For who? And what is wrong with that person?" are some of the thing that will go through your mind as you sit through 150 minutes of pretentious drivel. Unless you're of a pretentious nature yourself, or worse a critical reviewer. In that case this film must taste like caviar and champagne.

It's not just regular boring where after the film is done you shrug and move on. It's the sort of excruciating soul sucking boredom where afterwards you're inclined to call your lawyer to see if there some way to sue the director for the mental abuse inflicted.

As stated above: Florence acts her way through the film adequately. She's also the only one acting. You can take that quite literally. This is a film that has only one actress and the credits are a lie.

I refuse to recognize whatever the rest of the cast was doing as acting. Those were not human beings on my screen. Those were weird uncanny AI generated pseudo-characters posing as humans. The last time I've seen characters react so bizarre, so disjointed, so non-human, so non-sequitur to whatever is happening on screen was in a Monty Python sketch. An then it was funny.

Here I didn't laugh because it was funny. I laughed because of vicarious embarrassment for anybody involved in the making of this travesty.

John Wick (2014)

That's it?!

[4/10 · 11 August 2023]

Y'all have got to stop worshiping mediocrity.

I only became aware of the hype around the John Wick franchise a few years ago. Literally had a friend saying to me: "I'm so jealous of you that you still get to watch them unspoiled yet, wish I could forget them and rediscover them.". With praise like that you expect some life-altering audiovisual experience that you'll carry with you for the rest of your life. In the time it took me to get around watching the film I finally started to notice the similar excessive praise around the internet. So I was looking forward to it.

So then I watched it. Yikes. What a sobering disappointment. Also yawn. Actually got bored halfway through the movie. Went to go do something else for 20 minutes just to get a break and watched the second half with another tab open to distract me from the boredom.

How are people impressed with this? I would have thought this was cool if I saw it in the early 2000s. When a bunch of action flicks in the same vein were coming out and it was a fresh new thing. And only because back then I was still an immature teenager.

Now however, I found it generic, uninspired, immature, repetitive and ultimately boring. It ticked of every cliché from' the big book of action movie clichés'. I wont even bother to list them, you'll know 'em when you see 'em.

It's got the obligatory brain dead Hollywood morals written by toddlers. They killed his dog, well, wasn't even really his dog since he got it for about a day or 2. And stole his car. Surely this is substantial cause - nay! Scratch that - it's simply straight up justice for him to go kill about a hundred people in retaliation. Right? Hurrah for the noble hero. Who's incidentally a hitman by the way, clear beacon of moral justice. But who cares right? It's just Russian henchmen that he kills, they're not really people. They can't possibly have families and friends. Or taken on a security gig just to make ends meet.

But let's move on because the above feels like trying to deep sea dive in a puddle.

'The' reason these films get praised is apparently the tight choreography. There's choreography all right: John Wick has an aimbot and a wallhack installed. Plus also some kind off rear view mirror cheat that makes him able to sense people sneaking up from behind. Sometimes a lucky henchman can actually get the drop on Johnny boy but that's okay: the henchmen are all playing on storm trooper difficulty. If he was a barn and presenting them his broad side he still wouldn't have to worry about getting shot.

The result is a succession of action scenes where John steadily, confidently and without emotion walks through buildings as he double taps bad guys left and right mere split seconds apart.

From all the praise these films were getting my expectations and hopes were that John Wick was maybe going to be a new type of action film, one that tries to portray action in a realistic fashion.

Nope it's just more of the same tiresome cringe. Hero guy with gun kills all the bad guys with guns. Pew Pew. This is basically a modern stylized version of what Rambo (coincidentally another John) did in the eighties. Like then it impressed teenagers and immature manchildren but made everybody else roll their eyes in cringe.

I'm removing the sequels off of my watch list after this.

Fire and Ice (1983)

Worth saving from obscurity.

[7/10 · 4 July 2023]

By no means a masterpiece, but it doesn't have the pretense to be one either. Less for Bakshi fans, more for Frazetta lovers. I watched the movie twice now, first time as a teenager, second time as an adult and surprisingly I appreciated the experience more the second time around.

As a teenager I thought the film had something going for it but was ultimately kind of a mediocre Conan clone. But now I realized,every facet is actually crafted quite well.

The high end rotoscoping on top of atmospheric painted backgrounds creates something very unique. Feature length Rotoscoped movies are already kinda rare, back then and now still. You got 'Waltz with Bashir, 'A scanner darkly' and the series 'Undone' as some of the few modern examples. And you got a handful of rotoscoped movies from the 70ties and 80ties, mostly from Bakshi himself. Some Don Bluth films incorporated rotoscoping and beyond that it's all ancient forgotten animation films, animated shorts and oddities.

So, this film representing the peak of the animation technique makes is worth being remembered on that merit alone.

But there's more.

-The scenery and creatures speak to the imagination. A very dark mature look. The Neanderthals are a blast to watch them scramble around on screen.

-The combat is visceral and impactful. Good old pre-2000s combat that still had some realness and rawness to it. Not the Airbrushed CGI over-choreographed ballet that passes for combat these days (think everything superhero).

-The music is bombastic feelgood cheesy epicness.

The voice acting is actually quite decent, and there some great lines (I SPIT ON PEACE!).

And then there's the story, the film's aspect that gets the most flak. The story has a very straightforward good vs. Evil setup. But the fire vs. Ice angle was actually pretty novel (Bakshi did it first mister G. R. R. Martin).

For the remainder of the film the dialogue and plot is minimal. And you know what? It's works to the film's benefit. No pretension here, what you see is what you get. Why do people criticize the story in a film about barbarians fighting Cavemen? I mean the 2015 Mad max flick had barely any story or dialogue and was a movie about cars revving and mutants shooting at each other but the film got universally praised and people defended it saying "it tells a visual story". Why don't the same rules apply to Fire and Ice?

Lastly, in an 80ties sword and sorcery flick, a genre that is full on gratuitous, exploitative and worships testosterone, it's quite surprising to see that the female protagonist is more than a damsel in distress. She saves herself and fends of her opponents multiple times. Yes she's also gratuitous eye candy but she's not just there to hang on the male protagonist's arm.

Quite underrated, doesn't deserve it's obscure status, definitely worth a view.

Finding Dory (2016)

Jumps the shark.

[5/10 · 20 June 2023]

Hah ... yes I went there.

But seriously Finding Dory oozes sequel syndrome. It desperately wants to be bigger and better, funnier and intenser but ends up being a disjointed bland soulless pastiche of the original.

It's also a completely unnecessary rehash and if Pixar wasn't in the habit of milking sequels no-one would've ever asked or cared for a sequel.

The animation genre, by nature of it's medium, is inherently never fully realistic. And most animation films also don't really try to be all that realistic. But the good ones aim for something plausible, something grounded, something that colors neatly within the lines of attainable suspension of disbelief. And when the setting or story premise isn't those things then at least the events that transpire and the characters actions within are.

Finding Dory however is one long succession of fish getting launched in the air, bumping off things, hopping fish tanks and fountains, taking rides in bird-flown pails, piloting strollers and ultimately driving a truck on the freeway.

See the first movie had this fun ingenious subplot where little Nemo and his group of unique quirky aquarium buddies plotted their prison escape while father Marlin and his tag along sidekick Dory had a varied riveting road trip adventure. It was fun, tense and exciting. Realistic? No. But done subtle enough to not really care.

But like I said in my title: Finding Dory jumps the shark. It makes the typical sequel mistake of trying to outdo the original but ends up overdoing it. It constantly tries to be high octane but doesn't know how to pace itself and becomes a hyperactive frenetic mess that quickly grows tiresome.

This time around Nemo and Marlin are barely there let alone important. It's all Dory and Dory is a perfect example why side characters should remain side characters. She's plain annoying, too happy go lucky, too random, too gimmick-y.

Most of the action happens in a single spot, namely a marine rehabilitation center. At the same time the setting limits the possibilities for story telling and events that can happen, while also forcing the writers to keep coming up with new contrived ways for the fish to get around.

Point in case: the entire movie (and by extension the events of the first one) rest on the premise that Dory as a baby fish got sucked out of her aquarium because the holes in the grating of the filtration system were too big ... You'd think that the designers of a fish tank that is to house 100s of little fish would consider this and put in some finer grating or lower the current.

The pipes play another role as they were the method of communication through which baby Dory learned to speak "Whale" with her then yet unseen friend Destiny. At some point Dory get thrown into Destiny's tank by one of the human staff members together with a bunch of dead fish clearly intended as food for said Destiny ...

... who turns out to be a whale SHARK ... Which is not a whale ... Nor a pescatarian/carnivore ... Nor do they vocalize whale songs. It's an incredibly stupid decision on the creators part that immediately creates multiple massive plot holes. Which could have been avoided with some very basic research. It's almost like they deliberately tried to screw up on that one because when most people think whale they don't think whale shark. No idea how they got to that one.

Another flagrant thing is how literally everyone Dory meets is instantly ready to help her out, risk their lives in the process, even when they're species that eat fish.

In comparison the first film had a fun segment with 3 vegetarian sharks who wanted to change the negative image of sharks. Though it didn't make much sense, at least there was an explanation why these sharks didn't instantly want to eat Marlin and Dory. And then the sharks still struggled not to do so anyway while other predatory fish such as the barracuda and the angler fish didn't have such qualms.

In the sequel multiple species that eat fish (the seals, the otters, the bird) are all instantly down to help our fish protagonists without anything to gain for themselves.

I haven't seen many newer Pixar movies, or sequels this last decade but recently I've been wanting to catch up.

I hope Finding Dory isn't the norm or that doesn't bode very well.

Steins;Gate (2011–2015)

Never trust a weeb.

[4/10 · 14 April 2023]

Wherever you look, this anime gets praised to high heavens and is considered a staple of the 'Greatest of all time'-anime canon the community has conceded on.

I strongly disagree but I perfectly understand why: it's pure weeb 'haute couture'.

More than a decade ago I tried to get through this series. Back when I was quite the weeb teenager myself. Even then I couldn't stand it and gave up after only a handful of episodes. Now as a 30-something adult I've completed the series and boy, what a struggle that was, took me weeks.

I wont beat around the bush and write whole paragraphs going into detail about the intricacies of the story, the characters and the developments. That's unnecessary when the main issues are painfully obvious and in your face.

The characters are obnoxious. All of them. They're all anime stereotypes - but worse - it's done deliberately in a meta-comedy style where the series is kind of trying to make fun of anime clichés and itself. Which gives the creators the perfect excuse to make the characters - you've guessed - it into anime stereotypes. Main character Okarin for example pretends to play a mad evil scientist complete with sardonic laugh. However, the few male characters there are (this is low-key a harem anime) are nowhere near the levels of hair-pulling cringe you'll get from the female cast. They're all designed as high pitched or shy soft-spoken kawaii waifus to have weebs drool over them. Central to the plot is Mayuri, a dimwitted infantile girl. She's a hollow shell of a character and really just there as a plot device. Together with the rest of the characters they go through experiences ripped straight from a high school romance anime.

Next: the story. It's dull, a slow meandering build-up that consumes half the series' episodes to finally hit you with a unearned out of the blue plot twist midway the series. The plot twist was supposed to shock the audience but it rather gave me relief. One of the annoying characters dies off and it finally seemed like we would get some momentum and that the story would turn away from silly anime vignettes towards something more serious. I was wrong on both accounts.

After said big event, the anime turns into a time-travel cliché: you know where the hero keeps looping through time to fix a grave error, but time itself as if it's a 'magical sentient entity', keeps course-correcting so the event is inevitable anyway.

"time is a river, you can't change it's course by trowing in a pebble" - type of nonsense. Ever heard of the butterfly-effect?

This is a good Segway into the pseudo-science. The series doesn't even make the slightest effort into suspending you're disbelief. Influencing time as to make it follow a preferred course is as simple as sending a text-message. Sometimes there's side effects when it fits the plot, other times there aren't when it doesn't. It's all very arbitrary. This anime has 'Magical time-travel'- rules. Not the plausible ones.

I can muster the suspension of disbelief necessary to believe that a bunch of teenager accidentally discover how to send small amounts of digital data back in time. But not when they "invent" a device to send back a person's full personality and memory-set. Not when said device is an eff-ing pair of headphones, that they hobbled together in an afternoon, with some spare parts bought from the hardware store around the corner.

A group of teenagers having more knowledge than the entire body of the scientific world combined. Able to make a device - that can read and digitize you entire cerebral being and send it back in time - out of a pair of headphones. Get out'a here!

Now back to the story. The more serious tone and urgency of the second half doesn't prevent the anime from indulging in weeb culture and delivering fan service. There's an entire episode, pretty late into the series, dedicated to Okarin going on a date. So don't expect much of a focused streamlined ending. It's a bunch more contrived plot twists, convoluted storylines, deus ex machinas with some anime fluff sprinkled throughout and then it's over.

Apparently this is one of those anime franchise where there's a complicated watch order. You need to stop halfway through episode 23, watch a special, then all of Steins Gate 0 and then it's supposed to be better and make more sense.

Yeah you can eff right off with your watch order. Steins gate 0 came out 7 years later mind you. It's up to the producers of a series to envision things the right way and release them in a proper order from the start. It's why I always watch things in order of release and not in inner-series chronology. If that makes it suck, not my fault or problem. There's already more then enough prequels, spin-offs, midquels and expanded universe bullcrap in the entertainment industry as it is. Keep it simple and make something great, then you won't need to fluff it up over the coming decade.

In conclusion. The reason why steins gate was so well received by the anime community is because it's an artificially flavored buffet that caters perfectly to their taste: a healthy dose of harem casting, high school romance and waifu-baiting, a sprinkle of yaoi (boy-love) and gender-confusion and everything royally doused in a thick sauce of self-referencing anime culture.

I like anime as a medium. I think it's cool Japanese producers don't reduce animation to something either exclusively for kids, or comedy when it's made for adults. In Japan they'll use the medium of animation for whatever they please: Drama, action, sci-fi, horror, political thriller, ... And I have definitely enjoyed anime in the past, some of it is amongst my favorite fiction ever ghost in the shell, jin-roh, samurai champloo, ... . But I despise weeb culture. And unless you're a weeb yourself you shouldn't take any recommendations on what anime to watch next from a weeb. It's bound to be cringe. And on that note I'll circle back around and finish how I started:

Never trust a weeb.

Violet Evergarden (2018)

Niche anime with little on offer for the average (anime)viewer.

[4/10 · 19 August 2020]

In a post-war setting, in a parallel world that closely resembles the real-life 19th century, a female ex-soldier (Violet Evergarden) joins a novelty company that writes letters in peoples stead.

Sounds ... a bit mundane, no? But hey it's anime right? They'll probably twist it into something bizarre and exhilarating. Well no. The series is exactly as it sounds. Our main character travels each episode to a far off place to meet a one off character and set his/her words on paper. Uh-huh. So it's an emotion focused anime but in a grating immature way. This isn't a moody brooding masterpiece like Jin-roh or some of Satoshi Kon's movies. So the anime fails to achieve what it set out to do, make you care.

Beyond the admittedly beautiful art-style and visuals, there's very little on offer here. Barely a story, lame comedy, some short forgettable action scenes, lot's of typical anime cringe and the usual bag of stereotypes and tropes.

But above all there's 2 big issues with Violet Evergarden.

First, the premise is unrealistic. In the anime's world very few people can read or write. That on it's own isn't something implausible (In our reality there remained large groups of illiterate people well into the 20th century). What's highly unlikely is that common paupers would pay serious coin, that they likely don't even have to begin with, for something as trivial as a letter. In one episode for example Violet and a colleague travel by train to a remote village simply to write some family's birthday party invitations intended for the towns people. That's hard to buy, too hard. As if common farmers would send for a professional from half a country away just to get a basic message to their fellow townspeople who live a few minute or miles away. Right.

Second big issue: Violet Evergarden herself. See Violet isn't just some regular girl/ex-soldier. No, she's you're stereotypical anime little girl super soldier, a trope done to death in a plethora of anime. Why? How? Nobody knows. It's never explained what she is, how, when, why and by whom she was made. What's sure is that she an anomalous element in an otherwise so familiar looking world. Nothing (Save for the implausible letter-writing element) in the world of Violet evergarden is of an unrealistic, supernatural or fantastical nature. They've got weapons, clothes, tools, machinery and a society pretty much like we had in the 19th century. The only element out of place here is Violet: She outruns bullets, takes down multiple guys twice her size, carries a grown man with her teeth after losing both arms and makes impossible leaps (Yup, it's anime rules: the strongest character is either a teen with a robot or a tiny girl). But because there's no explanation whatsoever violet feels double out of place, like she walked in from another anime. It's really all one big ploy to have a character that acts more machine than human. You see, the flimsy narrative thread throughout the series is that Violet, not knowing or understanding common human feelings, wants to do exactly that so she can understand her dead ex-commander's last words: That he loved her. It's all so very contrived it almost hurts.

So in conclusion. With so little on offer and failing in what is-, adding these 2 big issues, I can't give this anime more than a 4. It's a disjointed snooze-fest. Don't waste your time.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

For the cinema snobs only.

[3/10 · 20 July 2020]

I'm working my way through IMDb's top 250 in chronological order. So far it's been worth the effort finally experiencing all those often referenced Classics, movies that prove they are timeless if they can still get a high user rating from the modern internet crowd, reading up on them on Wikipedia afterwards and learning a thing or two about the production, the actors and the history of cinema in general. Some alright but forgettable movies, some pretty decent ones and some that have really surprised me and made an impression.

There have only been two real stinkers so far: The mindbogglingly atrocious ' The Passion of Joan of Arc' (don't watch if you don't want to tear out your hair in frustration) and now this movie right here: Bicycle thieves.

So, a short synopsis: A family man, Antonio, on the brink of poverty, living in post-war Italy needs a bicycle for a well-paying job. His wife pawns their bed sheets, 3 new ones and 3 old ones, 6 in total to be exact netting them 7500 lira allowing them to buy the bike for 6100. His job is to glue advertising posters on billboards. First day on the job his bike gets stolen....and then the movie dissolves into one boring stretched out scene after the other culminating into utter pointlessness by the end of the movie.

Anybody who ever got his bike stolen knows you're likely never going to see it again. Instead of looking for realistic solutions Antonio decides to run around town. first he and a bunch of half-wits go looking for it on the market the next morning, where vendors chop up, repaint and resell bikes in bulk. Unsurprisingly they don't find the bike yet this ordeal goes on and on with the characters repeating the same sentences several times. Later on as by some miracle Antonio spots the teen who stole his bike talking to an old man. After a failed chase Antonio with son Bruno in tow follow the old man to some sort of charity church, hassling him for information on the bike-stealing teenager. Again this scene goes on and on and many of the same lines get repeated over and over again. Finally the duo get what they want, an address, yet Antonio decides to waste his time first with a fortune teller. Afterwards they run into the kid, and you've guessed it, the scene devolves into a long drawn out repetitive shouting contest between Antonio, the teen, his mother, a cop and all the random locals who pick the teen's side. Eventually Antonio is forced to give up and walk away empty-handed.

There are some additional scenes in between the ones mentioned above that are supposed to develop Antonio and his relation with Bruno but they're poorly written and I couldn't care less by then.

Now instead of all the above silliness, what if Antonio... simply bought a new bike? I mean if they come at a price less than that of 6 bed sheets I'm sure he could pawn of a few more things to buy a new one. Maybe he could ask for an advance on his wage? Ask the advertising company to buy him a bike and take the cost out of his wage? Does he really even need the bike? You can hang up a lot of posters in a day on foot, couldn't he have struck a temporary deal with the company to hang up posters on foot for a smaller wage, just until he can buy another bicycle. By the way, all that time spent chasing the thief he didn't show up for work, does he still have a job to go back to or is he already fired?

This is not a movie that allows for asking too many question, lest the whole plot gets derailed.

At any rate, the movie ends with a very predictable conclusion. Antonio decides to steal a random bicycle himself in turn. BET NO ONE SAW THAT COMING! What occurs then is so unintentionally comical it destroys any semblance of realism or authentic emotion. And this is supposed to be a neorealist film mind you. So what happens, Antonio picks as his target an unattended bicycle in an empty street. Ok, smart choice. Except the moment he touches the bike, as by magic a guy pops out and shouts THIEF! In mere moments half the city is chasing him. Funny how that goes, because when Antonio's bike was first stolen and later when he chased the teen on his bike, both times through a crowd, Antonio was also shouting THIEF! Yet not a single soul acted out to help him. The contrast between these scenes is so extreme, it makes the whole plot feel forced, arbitrary and even bizarre.

After getting chastised for a while by the mob that caught him Antonio is let go and walk off clearly distressed. And.that's.it. That's literally the ending.

In my opinion this as a movie that should have been forgotten. It doesn't belong in the top 250 let alone at the 100th place. I think broad strokes of people today can still enjoy the classics of Chaplin, Keaton, Hitchcock, Capra, Wilder, Kubrick, Welles, Kurosawa and so forth. This movie however is only here because it's been carried al those years by the snobs, the elitists and the "critics".

Gomorrah (2014–2021)

Jumps the shark almost instantly.

[1 December 2018]

The series has quite a powerful start: raw realism, brutal action, some good tension and it's all well acted and produced with a fairly high production quality. Unfortunately it turns into a cliche-ridden joke shortly after. The series goes from 0 to 100 on the murdero-meter fast, characters drop left and right often before their character was built even a little, some of them I barely got their name. later on even the main characters start getting axed. Not to make for some impactful surprise deaths that have a critical influence on the story, but rather because it seems that the writers can't come up with anything else to write about than liquidations and revenge killings. There's betrayal after betrayal, only for them to make amends so they can betray each other once more. Enemies become friends because of a mutual enemy only to betray each other, and for one of them to ally with said mutual ex-enemy. repeat. Instead of love triangles like in romcoms you have frenemy-triangles.

Not everybody is a great actor or well casted either. Most notably Don Pietro himself. He looks more like the rich lawyer type who financially advises the Don than a Don himself and the actor over-acts when portraying him. Unrelated, some scenes miss the mark completely. In an early scene for example Don Pietro asks main character Ciro to drink his piss to prove his loyalty. Excuse me what? What kind of self-respecting mob boss would demand such a thing from his respected lieutenants? What kind of lieutenant would except? If anything this would only make the lieutenant feel like a used dog and turn him against his boss and a good boss would realize this and never demand such a dumb thing.

So in a nutshell this show is half done-to-death mafia cliches and half over-the-top missing-the-mark unrealistic events. And it has little to nothing in common with the film to boot.

Disenchantment (2018–2023)

A victim of unfair comparisons, weak/mediocre nonetheless.

[5 October 2018]

So it seems like everyone and their mother expected Matt Groening and co to pull off a hat-trick and add a third golden animation series to his resume. It's hard to find a review that doesn't mention or compare it to his earlier work (And inevitably I will do so too). But people are being unfair, illogical and overestimating the current comedy prowess of the veteran crew around Matt.

It makes no sense to compare Disenchantment to the golden age of the Simpsons, which lies more than 2 full decades in the past now. Nor to compare it to Futurama, which has been off the air for years now and that includes the revival, which was mostly build out of archived leftovers from the initial run hence why the revival was still top notch material.

If you want to compare Disenchantment to something compare it to the last few Simpons seasons. Last one I saw was season 24 and that was already an atrocity so I can only imagine what depths they should have reached by now. Point here is: what was anybody still expecting here? that Matt and co would reinvent themselves after they've been unable to do so for years?

Another major point in why a comparison is approaching disenchantment the wrong way is because it's clearly trying to be something different. There's a serialized narrative, a longer format, some mystery to the plot, a new painting-like art style (for backgrounds) and little segments here and there that seem to have a different purpose than straight up comedy, something that supports the idea that Disenchantment might not be intended or at least envisioned as a purely comedic effort.

And herein lies the fatal flaw that impairs Disenchantment. It plays it way too safe. It doesn't fully embrace the new direction and misses on potential opportunities. disenchantment could have been crafted as a full blown adventure series, with a hefty dose of classic Simpsons comedy injected. There's a rule in comedy: the less grounded in reality your fictional creation is the harder you'll have to try to be funny. It's why series like family guy have to go way over the top while things like veep and curb your enthusiasm can keep it simple and still be funny. The idea is that making your comedy series more real creates potential to have impactful emotions beyond just those derivated from comedy. More grounded comedy series can instill for example fear, tension, sadness, melancholy etc. So in my opinion they should have shifted Disenchantment along the comedic spectrum in the opposite direction from where it is has gone now. Could have been something Avatar:TLA alike but with maturer comedy but now it's just Futurama in middle-earth.

Which leaves us with only the comedic aspect as a potential selling point. And by now you've guessed it: it's simply not funny enough. Like another reviewer stated: Disenchantment seems to be content with being just amiable instead of being genuinely funny. I made it to the sixth episode. By then it came clear that there wasn't much novelty to disenchantment in general, they weren't really committed to the concept of serialization and this sixth episode was particularly unfunny.

I'll give you an example of a joke from one of the first scenes of said episode (though it might not translate very well by just typing it out): The 3 main characters Bean, Luci and Elfo are playing a drunken game of guessing who the other is impersonating.

When it's Elfo's turn he simply says: I'm Elfo. Luci reacts: Hmmm, I know this one, (keeps thinking aloud for a few lines), I wanna say Schmelfo? Elfo replies: No! It's me, Elfo!

........sigh.

This sort of comedy level feels like watching one of those many third-rate short-lived stoner comedies on adult swim nobody's heard of or watches. Or like going to an amateur improv comedy night. Rest of the episode was on par, so that was my limit.

In general it's fairly watchable, it doesn't deserve the 1 star rating from people who expected to relive the Simpsons/Futurama golden age and are just rate-bombing in frustration. It get's a 7.3 currently and that seems about right. 7.3 Counts as mediocre on IMdb but in my book average is still 5 logically so it gets a 5. Barely recommendable.

Okkupert (2015–2020)

Lack of scope doesn't do the premise justice.

[2 May 2018]

(review based on first 2 episodes)

And that premise is already a stretch. But enough has been said about this in other reviews so I'll focus on one of the major failings of the series not really addressed so far. Lack of scope, grandeur, epicness: the things you expect when you hear the words occupation and invasion are entirely absent, at least as far as the first 2 episodes are concerned.

The series is told from the perspectives of just a handful of characters. The prime minister, his bodyguard and some random journalist, each complemented by a small crew of support characters - family and colleagues. This narrow storytelling approach makes the turn of events very contrived straight off the bat. The bodyguard not only witnesses the kidnapping of the prime minister in episode 1 but is also the one who saves him mere moments later while seemingly being the only one on duty and able to react to the kidnapping. Not a single other vehicle, law enforcement or otherwise, was seen during the entire chase. Guess what happens in episode 2, he saves the Russian ambassador from assassination and is subsequently chosen as interrogator for the would be assassin. What a lucky guy! Another lucky guy is the journalist who's very skilled at being in the right place at the right time. He also gets all the exclusive interviews and news-scoops. The way the series presents both of these characters makes it appear so as if they were literally the only people in their profession in all of Norway.

Because there's too few characters there's no layers to the series, no intricate web of different perspective through a multitude of characters for us, the audience, to experience the invasion in all it's facets.

So none of what the series has presented so far invokes the feeling of an invasion, an occupation. Combined with the absence of any kind of strong visual imagery - tanks rolling in, lines of marching soldiers, airstrikes and skirmishes - this series gives a very underwhelming first impression.

Beyond that, it's decently filmed and edited. And the actors seem to be doing a proper job but this might be an illusion due to me not understanding Norse and missing out on all the nuance.

Overall a moderately decent but unambitious political thriller/drama series.