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Reviews
Listening (2014)
Terrifying script.
Terrifyingly bad that is. The premise of the movie has potential, but the "science" portrayed is a little silly and illogical, even so within the logic of the movie. But hey, I was trained by a Buddhist monk to muster massive amounts of suspense of disbelief, even if the movie doesn't make sense according to it's own rules.
But no amount of meditation is going to cover up the huge problems with the script and editing. It's all over the place. Scenes are disjointed, and dialogue is as well. Sometimes dialogue is completely nonsensical, as are are some cuts and scenes. (The dialogue is so weird at times that two sentences uttered one after another did not have any coherence whatsoever)
Some scenes don't need to be there, and some scenes that aren't there should be there to make things flow better, or show a better development of motives and story. In other words; the movie takes too long showing us things that don't matter, and happily jumps over major plot developments, which are explained in a singe, short sentence or can be easily deduced, but it would have been much better to actually see those scenes instead of the ones that do nothing.
At other times scenes just seem to make sudden, weird turns. Characters switch motivation or emotions for seemingly little or no reason at all.
There are also massive plot holes. There is a glaring one that makes the entire movie pointless, but there are many. It starts out OK-ish, but gets worse as the movie progresses.
I had a couple of laugh out loud moments because the movie is unintentionally hilarious at times, especially in the second half of the movie.
The camera work is decent at times. They throw in some annoying lens flare effect in some scenes, as well as use different color filters for every scene. I tried to figure out if the lens flare and use of colors had any significance, but much like the editing and dialogue I couldn't make sense of it.
The sound is OK, music is generic, and so are the effects.
I had to force myself to finish this one. Two things kept me going; more potential unintentional hilarity, and the far fetched hope that the movie might ultimately make an interesting moral or philosophical point. Despite what some reviewers claim, it doesn't, it's just a jumbled mess.
The Lobster (2015)
The Michael Bay of "art" movies; unoriginal, superficial and boring.
I like slow movies, I like (not exclusively) movies that are different, and I have enjoyed movies that were wacky just for the sake of it.
But this movie is just pointless. Just like a Michael Bay movie is a series of disjointed superficial action scenes, just there to show CGI and huge explosions, this movie is a series of disjointed "artsy" scenes, just to show the audience superficial weirdness, not even for the sake of it.
There is no depth to anything.
I see many people compare this movie to Wes Anderson's movies (as well as various other directors of similar genre). The problem is that these directors use certain framing, lighting, slow motion etc, and certain narrative techniques for a reason. They are there to tell you something, they set up some emotional connection, they tell you about a character, they set a mood important for the story, etc. etc.
Without going into spoilers, there is no point to many things in the movie. You can easily just leave many scenes, techniques and characters out, or rearrange them, it wouldn't make any difference, because they have no meaning. They are just randomly there to be weird character "A", and absurd situation "4". While other things are just cheap setups for cliché payoffs without any connection to the story or each other.
The more I think about this movie, the more superficial and flat it becomes. Some people call the movie pretentious, but it isn't even that. There is nothing there for it to be pretentious about.
I"m forced to give it some stars because the movie doesn't even do us the decency of being bad. The actors know how to act, the camera man knows how to operate the camera, and the man in the cutting room knows how to cut, the locations are well chosen, and the director directed. It's a well made piece of nothing.