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Reviews
Johnny Suede (1991)
Not a "comedy" and ultimately not good
There is this continuous misuse of the word "comedy" as a substitute for quirky, off-beat, different, strange, weird, etc. This is the case here.
The film is not funny. It is not a comedy in any way. Comedy means inducing laughter. There are very few laughs here, not because this film tries some jokes that fail to hit the mark - the film doesn't try because it's not a comedy.
The film is a light-hearted take on a wannabe rock star - his financial problems, love life, band issues and music career.
It attempts to be light-hearted but it is actually sad and depressing. Abject poverty, terrible, dirty apartments, hopeless music career, you name it.
The story itself isn't that interesting and the film is not really fun to watch.
It's really low-budget, apparently $500k, but I think they spent it all on celluloid and actor salaries, because it looks like it was filmed on a $5k budget.
The music is good, but it's not enough to save this dud of a film.
Ex Machina (2014)
This is an okay to good movie but some of the criticisms are insane.
This movie was a little slow-paced to my liking, but it was still enjoyable. It passed the "enjoyable" test for me although I wouldn't consider it a great film.
There are some legitimate criticisms for this film. There's no reason to expose the human tester to the robot as part of a blind test. Blind is blind. You wouldn't show the bottle to the wine taster before you do a blind test. We use blind tests in so many things. It's not even a complicated protocol. Even the Pepsi challenge does it, but this film pretends like we're past that now. How do you prove if a robot is humanlike to a human who already knows it's a robot? The robot has to convince the human, but how can it in that state? It's not just a handicap, but you have to question a human who says "Yeah, I was completely convinced" even when seeing wires and cables.
So Nathan sits around all day in semi-retirement, I accept, but how is he the sole developer on this project?
I'm not going to pretend the readers here are stupid, but for the sake of simplicity, let's simplify things. In the tech world there are two kinds of innovations, one is "it's a simple idea, but I thought of it first" like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. and then there are complicated ideas that even if you thought of it first, it's difficult to do. Intel, Android, Windows, H.265, etc.
The first of the bunch is how we get apps created by a loner in his dorm. The second is the work of many, many multi-billion dollar corps, governments, the military, universities, etc.
A human can create a 140-character app like Twitter, or a Polaroid sharing site all by himself. He cannot create a life-like robot, hardware and software. Here we see a sole person working on the robot. No one else comes to the island. He doesn't contact anyone in the outside world. He seems to be doing all the work, interviews, upgrades, including physically handling and assembling the robots.
This film could've added one scene where he gets the next gen bots from a chopper, one scene where he has a conference with developers, just one, to show us that it's not a billionaire who created life literally all by himself. As a result of this, the film feels claustrophobic.
There's also strange things about this film when it comes to dialogue. There's something off. It seems like a non-technical person trying to talk technical/geek or a socially awkward geek with anxiety disorder trying to talk normal to a girl in a second language. I don't know how to put it but no one talks like that. Geeks don't talk like that. Techies don't. Socially awkward people don't. Average tech- ignorant people don't. It just feels completely unnatural.
My friend joked that the dialogue was written by AI and I believed him. I waited until the end to see if it was mentioned before the credits. I searched the internet. Nopes. It's just strange dialogue. I see this sometimes when foreign-language speakers write English language films, you get fluent native-speakers say strange things that don't make sense. The writer here is a native speaker, but maybe he tried to write the dialogue in geek, which explains its awkwardness, except geek is not a language, dialect, accent or a way of speaking, it's just the topics that are different.
There are things that didn't make sense. Caleb starts to doubt if he's a robot or not. But he eats and drinks - robots don't put dead animals and plants into their circuitry. He must remember that he gets thirsty, he urinates and defecates, he smells if he doesn't take a shower. I would check for bodily functions before I start cutting myself and punching mirrors. If you can take a dump, you're probably not a robot.
These are legitimate criticisms. But what is not legitimate is saying this movie set women back 500 years. Really? Because of this movie women cannot vote anymore? Did women lose property rights in the UK because of this film?
Get over yourselves, people.