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Reviews
Star Wars: The Bad Batch: The Cavalry Has Arrived (2024)
Good but not great.
Overall, I am okay with the ending but this could have been much better. There were quite a few interesting possibilities that were set up throughout the season that had zero payoff: who was Clone X, Asajj Ventress, Rex and his group of clones. I was glad Crosshair made an amazing shot, but characters losing a hand in Star Wars is the definition of hackneyed. What really annoys me, though, is that in the Disney Star Wars universe, characters like Reva and Sabine Wren survive being stabbed with lightsabers, but Tech is gone from a fall. Maybe Filoni is setting up a future Clone show. Idk. I am probably the only person who does not want Omega to show up in a live action show. It can only do damage because Disney is terrible at live action Star Wars.
Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)
So bad it's amazing
This movie is so bad that I was torn between giving it a 1 or a 10. Lovers of B-movies and camp will know what I mean. Ultimately I settled for the low end because there are moments of extreme boredom interspersed with the wonderful terrible-ness that is Birdemic.
My husband and I watched this when we were home with the flu. We decided to have a B-movie double-feature. This was the second movie we watched and we absolutely saved the best (or worst?) for last. This movie is so bad that I won't bother using adjectives to describe it. No adjective could adequately capture it. The first half, more than 40 minutes, is spent following an awkward, budding romance between two people who are living lives of ludicrously good luck. He's in software and scores a million dollar deal. The company he works for is bought for a billion dollars, making him wealthy through stock options. His entrepreneurial effort is immediately successful. She's a model who scores a cover deal with Victoria's Secret. Natalie, the main actress, does the best she can with the script, and she's pretty and likable. I can't remember her love interest's name because his acting is so distractingly atrocious that I completely missed it and now I can't be bothered to look it up.
By coincidence, Nathalie's bestie is dating her new boyfriend's bestie. What are the odds? After a mind-numbingly boring romance arc that should have been a montage, everyone gets attached by mutant, flu-infected birds.
This movie's cuts are so bad that you will literally laugh out loud. I've seen YouTube videos with better editing. The sound is all over the place and the sound editing is maddeningly bad. Some scenes just have no sound at moments or end with silence, as if the filmmaker didn't know how to end the scene. The acting is worse than listening to very bored high school freshmen read math from a book.
People in this movie experience and witness horrific violence and terror. Children see their parents killed by psycho birds. People find strangers and even friends who have been mutilated and killed. Think they're traumatized? Nah. Killer birds outside? Cool, let's have an outdoor picnic. The birds will remind you of the UFOs in an Ed Wood movie. One character is a former marine who is able to kill multiple birds with a rifle with never ending ammo. Anyone who knows anything by about hunting birds can tell you how laughably dumb that is. There's a reason birdshot exists.
Hilariously, this movie has a message about climate change that is so awkwardly inserted it made me think of the HR videos I've had to watch reenacting the most contrived instances of inappropriate workplace behavior one might experience or witness. You know, stuff that makes after-school specials look like The Godfather.
Towards the end, a man who lives off the grid appears wearing the most amazing wig I've ever seen. It can only have been there to symbolize the quality of this movie.
Ahsoka: Part One: Master and Apprentice (2023)
Not an impressive start
I'm going to reserve judgment on the story and what appear to be continuity errors. I'll wait for future episodes before I come to a final opinion on that because I've read several reviews and I'm not quite sure of the chronology of events at the start of the series, compared to Rebels and The Mandalorians. My biggest criticism is the dialogue. I don't know if it's the acting or the directing, but the dialogue is awful-choppy and unnatural. It sounds like they're reading from a script. I'm also not sold on the casting compared to the previous animated series' depiction of the characters. I understand that people change and mature based on their experiences, but the characters in this show lack the spunk of their animated counterparts.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
Points for the theme of friendship
Beyond the message of the importance of friends and family, this is the most ridiculous movie I have seen in a while. Admittedly I am not a comic book fan, but I enjoyed the Marvel movies starting with the first Iron Man. This movie is absurd. The animal experimentation that forms Rocket's backstory was interesting, disturbing, and should cause people to think about the morality of such things. However, the rest of the movie is stupid beyond words. It's amazing that the species responsible for Michelangelo and Beethoven has now degraded to the point that detritus like this is considered entertainment.
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
Ruined by a droid
This movie was better than I expected. It's exciting and the characters of Han, Chewie, and Beckett are a great team. I loved Rio Durant and Val-I wish they had been given bigger roles, Jon Favreau is a great voice actor and Thandie Newton is always amazing. I would have given the movie 8 stars but for the insufferable L3 droid. I hated everything about that droid-it's voice, manner of speaking, and especially the way it moved (too humanlike for a droid). Whoever came up with the character should never touch another Star Wars project. I normally like Paul Bethany, but his performance is terrible in this movie. Even Emilia Clarke is better and I have always found her to be mediocre at best. Parts of the story are a bit too convenient for an empire that spans an entire galaxy, but that has been true of SW from the beginning.
The Big Bang Theory: The Wheaton Recurrence (2010)
Leonard is the worst
Leonard sometimes makes this show unwatchable. He manages to be whiny, nagging, and submissive all at the same time, which is no small feat. His passive aggressive treatment of Penny throughout the series is played for laughs, but it's actually quite creepy and mentally abusive. He's not the nice nerdy guy he's portrayed to be. He views Penny as a coveted object more than a person-a pretty shiny thing he wants to possess even though they have absolutely nothing in common. Leonard is incredibly shallow. As I watch this series, I have to conclude that the writers don't put any thought into the messages they are sending through their characters.
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Unpopular opinion: worst of the prequels
The story is very disjointed. Anakin turns to the dark side and starts killing children on a dime. The actor playing Palpatine is ridiculously hammy-like B movie bad acting. Just awful. Even The Phantom Menace is better than this garbage. The fight scenes are okay.
The Big Bang Theory (2007)
Great at first and then really nosedives
The first four seasons are great. Then they added Bernadette and Amy and the show became Friends. Bernadette was cool at first when she was smart, sweet, and a little ditzy. Then they turned her into a bitch on wheels with a huge Napoleon complex. Amy started as a female version of Sheldon, then suddenly becomes interested in sex and other "normal" girl stuff. It's annoying that the show has her constantly being frustrated by Sheldon while she's the one who changed and flipped the script of their relationship. Leonard is a wimp-typical nerd who somehow snagged the prom queen and will do anything to keep her. I don't think the writers knew what to do with Raj so they just made him ridiculous. Biggest complaint: continuity errors. It's like the writers don't think the audience is smart enough to remember past storylines and then notice when subsequent episodes contradict prior episodes. Just sloppy, lazy, and mediocre.
The Big Bang Theory: The Meemaw Materialization (2016)
Continuity issues again
The storyline with Meemaw is ok, but the Raj/Howard/Bernadette storyline shows how little writers on sitcoms care about continuity. Bernadette says she had doubts about her relationship with Howard, but he says he had no doubts. There was an entire episode wherein Howard questions whether Bernadette is the right girl for him. Katee Sackhoff and George Takei even made guest appearances in that episode. This sort of continuity error happens a lot in this show.
The Conjuring (2013)
Inconsistency
Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope so because I otherwise like this movie. However, there appears to be an inconsistency. At the beginning of the movie, the Warrens tell the nurses (who have the Annabelle doll) that ghosts don't possess people because they don't have that power; demonic entities possess people. But it seems the witch at the Perron house has possessed Carolyn. The witch was once alive, so this would be her ghost that possesses Carolyn. Unless the explanation is that the Warrens were wrong about ghosts not possessing people.
Young Sheldon: Snoopin' Around and the Wonder Twins of Atheism (2021)
Mary is such a dud
The more I watch this show, the more I dislike Mary. I suppose her portrayal does fit the character they created in BBT. Perhaps i find her more annoying on YS because she's a main character rather than a guest appearance.
Seeking Sister Wife (2018)
Creepy AF
I remember when TLC stood for "The Learning Channel." Now it airs this sort of detritus.
Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021)
Very disappointing
This is not about Elisa Lam. It's about the weirdos who never knew her, are obsessed with her case, who think doing some internet "research" makes them righteous super-detectives. They're actually just obsessed conspiracy theorists consumed by confirmation bias. The "sleuths" are just a modern day pitchfork mob who decided some dude from Mexico must have killed her because he's into death metal and also happened to stay at the Cecil once. Simultaneously they believe the detectives and medical examiners are in cahoots in a conspiracy to cover up the murder, ostensibly to protect the death metal guy or someone else. It's absurd. They can't see how Ms. Lam's bipolar disorder could possibly contribute to her death? Really? I guess none of them has bipolar disorder or knows anyone who suffers from it. Elisa Lam's tragic story deserved much better treatment than this.
Us (2019)
Don't waste your time
This movie tries so hard to be scary and fails miserably. It is so corny that if someone had told me it was parody, I would believe it. The soundtrack is ridiculous, derivative, and does not fit the movie. The story makes no sense. I read another review that posited the only point of this movie is to make people go on and speculate about what it all meant. I can't imagine anyone wasting their time like that. This movie is not worth the energy or time it would take to do that. I would have been better off taking a 114 minute nap.